Long hours passed. The French questioned with the artillery to see if they were driving us out of the suburb; the walls were gradually being destroyed; the houses were being shaken down with the dreadful concussion; and the heroic people, few of whom had broken fast even with a bit of bread, were calling from the walls, saying that the enemy was coming. At last, against the right of the breach in the centre advanced strong columns sustained by others in the rear. We saw that the intention of the French was to possess themselves at all hazards of that line of crumbling bricks which some hundreds of madmen were defending, and to take it at any cost. Death-dealing masses were hurled forward, the living columns passing over the dead. Let it not be said to make our merit less that the French were not fighting under cover. Neither were we, for none of us could show his head above the broken wall and keep it on. Masses of men dashed against one another, and bayonets were fed with brutal anger upon the bodies of enemies. From the houses came incessant fire. We could see the French fall in heaps, pierced by lead and steel, at the very foot of the ruins they were seeking to conquer. New columns took the places of the first, and in those who came after, brutalities of vengeance were added to prodigies of valor. On our side the number of those who fell was enormous. The dead were left by dozens upon the earth along that line which had been a wall, but was now no more than a shapeless mass of earth, bricks, and corpses. The natural, the human thing would have been to abandon such positions, and not try to hold them against such a combination of force and military skill. But there was nothing of the human or the natural here. Instead, the power of defence was extended infinitely, to limits not recognized by scientific calculation, beyond ordinary valor. The Aragonese nature stood forth, and it is one which does not know how to be conquered. The living took the places of the dead with a sublime aplomb. Death was an accident, a trivial detail, a thing of which no notice should be taken.