(1) Burgos would not have been a strong fortress against an army provided with a proper battering-train, such as that which dealt with Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz. But Wellington--by his own fault as it turned out in the end--had practically no such train at all: three 18-pound heavy guns were an absurd provision for the siege of a place of even third-rate strength. If Wellington had realized on September 20 that the siege was to last till October 21, he might have had almost as many guns as he pleased. But the strength of Burgos was underrated at the first; and by the time that it was realized, Wellington considered (wrongly, as it turned out) that it was too late to get the necessary ordnance from the distant places where it lay. (2) Encouraged by the experience of Badajoz and Almaraz, Wellington and his staff considered that an imperfect fortification like the Castle of Burgos might be dealt with by escalade without artillery preparation. The Hornwork of San Miguel was taken on this irregular system; but the attempts against the _enceintes_ of the Castle failed. Burgoyne is probably right in maintaining that the repeated failures were largely due to the general’s reluctance to put in large masses of men at once, owing to his wish to spare the lives in units already worked down to a low strength by long campaigning. The principle ‘if we fail we can’t lose many men’ was ruinous. On October 18 the place _must_ have fallen if 3,000 instead of 600 men had been told off for the assault. (3) Notwithstanding the lack of artillery, Burgos might have been taken if Wellington had owned a large and efficient body of engineers. But (as at Badajoz, where he had made bitter complaints on this subject[61]) the provision of trained men was ludicrously small--there were just five officers of Royal Engineers[62] with the army, and eight ‘Royal Military Artificers’. The volunteers from the Line, both officers and men, used as auxiliaries, were not up to the work required of them. It was a misfortune that none of the divisions before Burgos had experience of siege-work, like that which the Light, 3rd, and 4th Divisions (all left at Madrid) had been through.