How changed now was the aspect of the venerable Scylla, since that morning when the French batteries first opened on it! The massive Norman battlements and its beautiful hall had crumbled into rubbish, or sunk in ponderous masses beneath the heavy salvos: every window and loophole were beaten into hideous gaps, and yawning rents split the strong towers from rampart to foundation. The well was choked up by the falling stones; and want of water increased the miseries of sixty wounded men: whom, ultimately, we had to abandon to the care of the enemy. Every cannon was buried under the mighty piles of ruin beyond recovery—all, save one thirteen-inch mortar, which I ordered to be dragged to the summit of the breach; where it afterwards did good service. Many of the miserable wounded were destroyed under the falling walls, or buried, more or less, at a time when we could not spare a hand to extricate them: their cries were piteous, and their agonies frightful. The dead lay heaped up behind breastwork and banquette, and from the castle gutters the red blood was dropping on the sea-beaten rocks below; where the sea mews and cormorants flapped their wings and screamed over the sweltering corpses of the 101st. The artillerymen were almost annihilated, and their platforms were drenched in gore. Though exhausted by the toil they had endured, the brave little band of survivors manned the breach, and remained under arms during the whole of a most tempestuous night, with that quiet cheerfulness, mingled with stern determination, which are the principal characteristics of our unmatched soldiery in times of peril. Towards midnight, Santugo (whom, with Lascelles, I had left in charge of the breach) aroused me from a nap I was snatching, rolled up in my cloak and ensconced under the lee side of a parapet. "Signor, we have had an alert," said he; "a movement is taking place amongst the enemy: they will be in the breach in five minutes." I hurried to the mighty rent in our fortifications, and saw the long and perilous route which an escalade had to ascend—a steep and uncertain pathway, jagged with rocks and covered with a thousand cart-loads of loose stones, mortar, and rubbish: it looked like a waterfall as it vanished down the rocks into the gloom and obscurity below. The sky was intensely dark, and though the wind howled and the sea hissed and roared on the bluff headlands, the night seemed calm and still after the battle-din of the past day. A white mass, like a rolling cloud, was moving softly towards the breach, and Santugo was puzzled to account for the strange uniform; but I knew in a moment that it was an attack _en chemise_, and that the stormers were clad each in a white shirt: a garb sometimes adopted by the French when engaged in a night assault. Here our vigilance got the better of them.