The troops remained under arms during the night, exposed to heavy and incessant torrents of rain. In the morning Lieutenant-General Whitelocke summoned the governor to surrender; the Spaniards, however, made an attack upon the piquets, in which the EIGHTY-EIGHTH, which had relieved the rifle corps, lost about twenty men killed and wounded. The assault of the town was now determined upon, and the morning of the 5th fixed for carrying it into execution. For this service the EIGHTY-EIGHTH regiment was divided into wings, the right being commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Duff, and the left by Major Vandeleur, who were directed to enter the town separately by two different streets, and, having gained the banks of the river on the opposite side of the city, to possess themselves of the houses and form on the flat roofs; but what further steps they were to take, or what they were to do after so forming, was not stated. At half-past six o’clock on the morning of the 5th of July the attack commenced: the right wing of the EIGHTY-EIGHTH, formed in sections, advanced at a rapid pace through several streets unmolested, and indeed without encountering, or even seeing, a single human being. A death-like silence reigned throughout the town, or was interrupted only by the measured tread of those who were most at a loss to comprehend the meaning of the apparent solitude and desertion that surrounded them. At length a few detached shots seemed to give a prearranged signal, at which the entire population of a vast town was to burst from its concealment, and in an instant the flat roofs of the houses swarmed with a mass of musqueteers, who poured a deadly, and almost unerring, fire upon the British soldiers. Under any circumstances the combat between men exposed in an open street, and adversaries ensconced behind the parapets of the houses on each side, must have been an unequal one; but the British troops were for some time absolutely defenceless in the midst of their enemies, having been positively ordered to advance with unloaded arms.[2]