Mohammed II. then proclaimed to his army as if to excite every fiercest passion in the breast of his men, that the entire city was devoted to spoil, and the inhabitants to slavery or death. "The city and public buildings are mine; but I abandon to you the captives and the booty, the precious metals and beautiful women; be rich and happy. The provinces of my Empire are numerous, the intrepid soldier who first mounts the walls of Constantinople shall be governor of the most delightful and opulent of them all, and such will be my gratitude that he will obtain more wealth and honor than he can dream of." Mohammed thus fired all the cruel passions of the undisciplined hosts of his vanguard. Neither pen nor tongue can fly fast enough to describe the wild impetuosity of their attack as they precipitated themselves upon the reverse side of the moat, one hundred feet wide and six thousand paces long. The stone, the earth, the wood these carried were not sufficient to fill this mighty trench. The cannon and the sharpshooters behind the ramparts still existing, strewed thousands of Turks on the back of the exterior ditch. The smoke of the Greek artillery rolled back upon the combatants, so that the gunners and archers of Constantine could take aim only by the noise against the hosts of their invisible assailants. In vain the bullets and the grape shot filled the trenches with the Turks: these masses of men, pushed forward by their mere impetus, rushed headlong into the water and formed with the dead and dying a causeway of human bodies about the gateway of St. Romanus, which supplied a bridge for the battalions that pressed behind. After this sacrifice of the "Scum of the Army," thus put to death to secure victory, the three columns of the regular army, comprising two hundred and sixty thousand men, advanced in profound silence to the assault. The force of the fire of the nine thousand brave defenders was already exhausted by this desperate struggle of two hours. To protect them was this ditch now nearly filled up with earth and men and crumbling walls. The purple mantle of Constantine, as he appeared momentarily on the summits of the shattered walls, served as a target for the Tartars, and an inspiration to the Spartans and Italians inside. Strong yet in their broken walls, in their towers and in their artillery, in their despair they repulsed the mad rushes of these torrents of men as with wild cries, under cover of clouds of arrows and with glistening scimitars they charged again and again along the whole line on port and continent. For three terrible hours the carnage continued, and fifty thousand Ottomans rolled into the ditches or into the sea. The huge balls of Constantine tearing into these solid columns piled the ground with dead; stones, rocks, beams and Greek fire, crushed, burned, and mutilated those who tried to scale those wrecks of towers.