At nine o'clock in the morning the forcing began on the Paris road near a large building in front of the _tête-du-pont_, in the vicinity of Graniague, by the third division with its right on the river Garonne. The left brigade of the light division branched off to the right, to make a sham attack opposite the _tête-de-pont_, near les Minimes, and to keep up the link with the third division; while the first brigade edged off to the left to support the Spaniards now moving forwards in échelon on our left. While they were crossing a small rivulet, two of the enemy's cannon fired on them from the detached eminence of _la Borde de la Pugade_. As soon as the Spaniards had crossed the stream or ditch, they rapidly advanced and drove the French from their advanced post, behind which they formed in columns for the grand attack. At this time a sprinkling musketry was kept up to our right by the third division and our second brigade, while driving the enemy behind their _têtes-du-pont_. At eleven o'clock the Spaniards moved forward single-handed, to attack the heights of la Pugade, under a heavy fire of musketry and grape shot, which thinned their ranks and galled them sadly. The ground was fallow, of a gentle ascent, without hedges or trees, so that every shot told with a fatal precision. Notwithstanding this, they closed, and kept onwards. The French position was a blaze of flashing cannon, and sparkling musketry, and the iron balls were cutting through the fallow ground, tearing up the earth and bounding wantonly through the country. The fatal moment had arrived: the Spaniards could do no more: the shouting of the French army was daggers to their hearts, and thunder to their ears, and when within fifty yards of crowning all their hopes, down went the head of their column, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up. A deep hollow road ran parallel with the enemy's works, into which the affrighted column crowded. Terrible shelter! for at this time the enemy sprang over their entrenchments, and stood over their victims, pouring down the bullets on their devoted heads with fatal precision, so that two thousand of them fell a prey to the adversary, without destroying hardly any of their opponents; and, as if in anticipation of such a result, the enemy had constructed a battery of heavy calibre at the bridge of Montauban, which raked the road, and ploughed up the heaps of the living and the dead—the former crawling under the latter to screen themselves for a few short moments from the merciless effects of the enemy's projectiles. The rear of the Spaniards now closed up, and, stretching their necks over the brink of the fatal gulf, they turned about and fled like chaff before the wind, amid the volume and dense clouds of rolling smoke majestically floating in the air, as if to veil from the enemy the great extent of their triumph.