This reasoning appears sound, yet the fact is one which belongs, not to the rules but the secrets of the art, and they are only in the keeping of great captains. That the breaches were impregnable has indeed been denied by the English engineers. Colonel Jones affirms that the centre breach had not the slightest interior retrenchment, and that the sword-blades in the Trinidad, might have been overturned by the rush of a dense mass of troops. This opinion is quite at variance with that of the officers and men engaged; it is certain also that all the breaches were protected by the sword-blades, and if the centre breach was not retrenched, it was rendered very difficult of approach by the deep holes digged in front, and it was more powerfully swept by flank fire than the others were. It is also a mistake to suppose that no dense rush was made at the great breach. Engineers intent upon their own art sometimes calculate on men as they do on blocks of stone or timber, nevertheless where the bullet strikes the man will fall. The sword-blades were fitted into ponderous beams, and these last, chained together, were let deep into the ground; how then was it possible for men to drag, or push them from their places, when behind them stood resolute men, whose fire swept the foremost ranks away? This fire could not be returned by the soldiers engaged in removing the obstacles, nor by those in rear, because, from the slope of the breach, they could only see their own comrades of the front ranks; and then the dead bodies, and the struggling wounded men, and still more the spiked planks, rendered a simultaneous exertion impossible. The breaches were impregnable! And why was all this striving in blood against insurmountable difficulties? Why were men sent thus to slaughter, when the application of a just science would have rendered the operation comparatively easy? Because the English ministers, so ready to plunge into war, were quite ignorant of its exigencies; because the English people are warlike without being military, and under the pretence of maintaining a liberty which they do not possess, oppose in peace all useful martial establishments. Expatiating in their schools and colleges, upon Roman discipline and Roman valour, they are heedless of Roman institutions; they desire like that ancient republic, to be free at home and conquerors abroad, but start at perfecting their military system, as a thing incompatible with a constitution, which they yet suffer to be violated by every minister who trembles at the exposure of corruption. In the beginning of each war, England has to seek in blood for the knowledge necessary to insure success, and like the fiend’s progress toward Eden, her conquering course is through chaos followed by death!