Wellington, however, was strong in his own warlike genius and in the quality of the troops he commanded. He employed eighteen thousand men in the siege, and it may well be doubted whether--if we put the question of equipment aside--a more perfect fighting instrument than the force under his orders ever existed. The men were veterans, but the officers on the whole were young, so there was steadiness in the ranks and fire in the leading. Hill and Graham covered the siege, Picton and Barnard, Kempt and Colville led the assaults. The trenches were held by the third, fourth, and fifth divisions, and by the famous light division. Of the latter it has been said that the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Tenth Legion of Cæsar, the famous Spanish infantry of Alva, or the iron soldiers who followed Cortes to Mexico, did not exceed it in warlike quality. Wellington’s troops, too, had a personal grudge against Badajos, and had two defeats to avenge. Perhaps no siege in history, as a matter of fact, ever witnessed either more furious valor in the assault, or more of cool and skilled courage in the defense. The siege lasted exactly twenty days, and cost the besiegers five thousand men, or an average loss of two hundred and fifty per day. It was waged throughout in stormy weather, with the rivers steadily rising, and the tempests perpetually blowing; yet the thunder of the attack never paused for an instant. Wellington’s engineers attacked the city at the eastern end of the oval, where the Rivillas served it as a gigantic wet ditch; and the Picurina, a fortified hill, ringed by a ditch fourteen feet deep, a rampart sixteen feet high, and a zone of mines, acted as an outwork. Wellington, curiously enough, believed in night attacks, a sure proof of his faith in the quality of the men he commanded; and on the eighth night of the siege, at nine o’clock, five hundred men of the third division were suddenly flung on the Picurina. The fort broke into a ring of flame, by the light of which the dark figures of the stormers were seen leaping with fierce hardihood into the ditch and struggling madly up the ramparts, or tearing furiously at the palisades. But the defenses were strong, and the assailants fell literally in scores. Napier tells how “the axmen of the light division, compassing the fort like prowling wolves,” discovered the gate at the rear, and so broke into the fort. The engineer officer who led the attack declares that “the place would never have been taken had it not been for the coolness of these men” in absolutely walking round the fort to its rear, discovering the gate, and hewing it down under a tempest of bullets. The assault lasted an hour, and in that period, out of the five hundred men who attacked, no less than three hundred, with nineteen officers, were killed or wounded! Three men out of every five in the attacking force, that is, were disabled, and yet they won!