At last, on the morning of August 27, the Williamite engineers declared the breach in the neighborhood of St. John’s Gate and the Black Battery on the south side of the town practicable. Some authorities say it was twelve yards wide, and others, including Thomas Davis, one of Ireland’s most accurate writers, six perches, which would make quite a difference. Five hundred British grenadiers, drawn from the right flank companies of the line regiments, as was then and for long afterward the custom, constituted the forlorn hope. Their immediate reserves were a battalion of the Blue Dutch Guards—the heroes of the Boyne—and the regiments of Douglas, Stuart, Meath, Lisburn, and Brandenburg. The whole army stood ready to support these picked troops. The signal, three cannon shots, was given from Cromwell’s Fort, where William witnessed the operation, at 3.30 P.M. Story tells us the day was torrid. The orders to the stormers were to seize the Irish counterscarp—the exterior slope of the ditch—and maintain it. The assault was delivered with great spirit, the grenadiers leaping out of their trenches, advancing at a run, firing their pieces and throwing their hand grenades among the Irish in the works. The attack was fierce and sudden—almost in the nature of a surprise—but the Irish met it boldly, for, says Chaplain Story, in his thrilling narrative of the event, “they had their guns all ready and discharged great and small shot on us as fast as ‘twas possible. Our men were not behind them in either, so that, in less than two minutes, the noise was so terrible that one would have thought the very skies ready to rent in sunder. This was seconded with dust, smoke, and all the terrors the art of man could invent to ruin and undo one another; and, to make it more uneasie, the day itself was so excessive hot to the bystanders, and much more, sure, in all respects to those upon action. Captain Carlile, of my Lord Drogheda’s regiment, ran on with his grenadiers to the counterscarp, and tho’ he received two wounds between that and the trenches, yet he went forward and commanded his men to throw in their grenades, but in the leaping into the dry ditch below the counterscarp an Irishman below shot him dead. Lieutenant Barton, however, encouraged the men and they got upon the counterscarp, and all the rest of the grenadiers were as ready as they.”