In the middle of the day, the sixth division crossed the valley opposite the heights of Calvanet; and the interchanged cannon shots, and the forked musketry, rattled without intermission. At length, amid charges of cavalry and sanguinary fighting (for the enemy marched down the hill to meet them,) this division gained the French position, and took a redoubt, which, however, they could hardly maintain, owing to the great loss they had sustained in moving up the hill; for, while struggling with the enemy's infantry in front, their second line had been charged by the French horse[24]. During this part of the combat the fourth division was edging off by an oblique march to its left, to turn the enemy's right flank near the road of Montauban, which manœuvre greatly enhanced the victory on this hard-fought day. The French several times returned to the charge on the _plateau_, and made a most desperate attempt at four o'clock in the afternoon to retake the great redoubt in the centre, but without effect. Owing to this failure the French quietly evacuated the redoubts on the left of their position on the canal, on the heights of _Terre Cabade_, and their whole army retired behind the _têtes-du-pont_, and the faubourg of St. Etienne. On the following day the Duke of Dalmatia held the town hemmed in almost on every side; but, as there was not any firing, an officer and myself rode towards the road where the Spaniards had been repulsed. Its steep banks were at least twenty-five feet in depth, with two or three narrow pathways by which the Spaniards had descended in hopes of obtaining a little shelter. This spot was strewed with heaps of the slain, piled on the top of each other in strange confusion, many having tumbled over the precipitous banks, and remaining stuck on the twisted bayonets on whose points they had fallen. Death here appeared in every possible shape; some were jammed in the crowd, and propped up in an erect posture against the bank; others were standing on their heads, or sprawling with legs and arms spread out to their fullest extent. Almost the whole of the cadaverous dead were without caps, which in the _mêlée_ had been knocked off, and were intermixed with knapsacks, breast-plates, broken arms, bayonets, and swords. A mournful silence reigned around. No voice broke on the stillness that reigned over the lacerated remains of the swarthy Spaniards!