At this time, the enemy shooting fast, and dangerously, the crisis appeared imminent, and Kempt sent the reserve headlong against the front; thus the fight was continued strongly, the carnage became terrible, and a battalion coming out from the town to the succour of the fort, was encountered and beaten by the party on the communication. The guns of Badajos, and of the castle now opened, the guard of the trenches replied with musketry, rockets were thrown up by the besieged, and the shrill sound of alarm bells, mixing with the shouts of the combatants, increased the tumult. Still the Picurina sent out streams of fire, by the light of which, dark figures were seen furiously struggling on the ramparts; for Powis first escaladed the place in front where the artillery had beaten down the pales, and the other assailants had thrown their ladders on the flanks in the manner of bridges, from the brink of the ditch to the slanting stakes, and all were fighting hand to hand with the enemy. Meanwhile the axe-men of the light division, compassing the fort like prowling wolves, discovered the gate, and hewing it down, broke in by the rear. Nevertheless the struggle continued. Powis, Holloway, Gips, and Oates, of the eighty-eighth, fell wounded on or beyond the rampart; Nixon of the fifty-second was shot two yards within the gate; Shaw, Rudd, and nearly all the other officers had fallen outside; and it was not until half the garrison were killed, that Gaspar Thiery, the commandant, and eighty-six men, surrendered, while some, not many, rushing out of the gate, endeavoured to cross the inundation and were drowned. The French governor hoped to have delayed the siege five or six days by the resistance of Picurina, and had the assault been a day later, this would have happened; for the loop-holed gallery in the counterscarp, and the mines, would then have been completed, and the body of the work was too well covered by the glacis to be quickly ruined by fire. His calculations were baffled by this heroic assault, which lasted an hour, and cost four officers and fifty men killed, fifteen officers and two hundred and fifty men wounded; and so vehement was the fight throughout, that the garrison either forgot, or had not time to roll over the shells and combustibles arranged on the ramparts. Phillipon did not conceal the danger accruing to Badajos from the loss of the Picurina, but he stimulated his soldiers’ courage, by calling to their recollection, how infinitely worse than death it was, to be the inmate of an English hulk! an appeal which must have been deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations, furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war, than the prison-ships of England.