An assault on the castle breach might still have been tried, but the troops could not have formed between the top, and the retrenchments behind the breach, until Christoval was taken, and the guns from thence used to clear the interior of the castle; hence the siege was of necessity raised, because to take Christoval, required several days more, and Soult was now ready to advance. The stores were removed on the 10th, and the attack was turned into a blockade. OBSERVATIONS. 1º. The allies lost, during this unfortunate siege, nearly four hundred men and officers, and the whole of their proceedings were against rules. The working parties were too weak, the guns and stores too few, and the points of attack, chosen, not the best; the defences were untouched by counter-batteries, and the breaching batteries were at too great a distance for the bad guns employed; howitzers mounted on trucks were but a poor substitute for mortars, and the sap was not practised; lastly, the assaults were made before the glacis had been crowned, and a musketry fire established against the breach. 2º. That a siege so conducted should fail against such a brave and intelligent garrison is not strange; but it is most strange and culpable that a government, which had been so long engaged in war as the British, should have left the engineer department, with respect to organization and equipment, in such a state as to make it, in despite of the officers’ experience, bravery, and zeal, a very inefficient arm of war. The skill displayed belonged to particular persons, rather than to the corps at large; and the very tools with which they worked, especially those sent from the storekeeper’s department, were so shamefully bad that the work required could scarcely be performed; the captured French cutting-tools were eagerly sought for by the engineers as being infinitely better than the British; when the soldiers’ lives and the honour of England’s arms, were at stake, the English cutlery was found worse than the French. 3º. The neglect of rules, above noticed, was for the most part a matter of absolute necessity; yet censure might attach to the general, inasmuch as he could have previously sent to England for a battering train. But then the conduct of the Portuguese and British governments when lord Wellington was in the lines, left him so little hope of besieging any place on the frontier, that he was hourly in fear of being obliged to embark: moreover, the badness of the Portuguese guns was not known, and the space of time that elapsed between the fall of Badajos and this siege, was insufficient to procure artillery from England; neither would the Portuguese have furnished the means of carriage. It may however at all times be taken as a maxim, that the difficulties of war are so innumerable that no head was ever yet strong enough to fore-calculate them all. CHAPTER VI. [Sidenote: 1811. June.]