In the eleven days of the siege Wellington lost one thousand three hundred men and officers, out of whom six hundred and fifty men and sixty officers were struck down on the slopes of the breaches. Two notable soldiers died in the attack--Craufurd, the famous leader of the light division, as he brought his men up to the lesser breach; and Mackinnon, who commanded a brigade of the third division, at the great breach. Mackinnon was a gallant Highlander, a soldier of great promise, beloved by his men. His “children,” as he called them, followed him up the great breach till the bursting of a French mine destroyed all the leading files, including their general. Craufurd was buried in the lesser breach itself, and Mackinnon in the great breach--fitting graves for soldiers so gallant. Alison says that with the rush of the English stormers up the breaches of Ciudad Rodrigo “began the fall of the French empire.” That siege, so fierce and brilliant, was, as a matter of fact, the first of that swift-following succession of strokes which drove the French in ruin out of Spain, and it coincided in point of time with the turn of the tide against Napoleon in Russia. But, as already noted, the climax of the war occurred at Vittoria. Wellington, overtaking the French at that place, inflicted on them a defeat which drove in utter rout one hundred and twenty thousand veteran troops from Spain. There is no more brilliant chapter in military history; and, at its close, to quote Napier’s clarion-like sentences, “the English general, emerging from the chaos of the Peninsular struggle, stood on the summit of the Pyrenees a recognized conqueror. From those lofty pinnacles the clangor of his trumpets pealed clear and loud, and the splendor of his genius appeared as a flaming beacon to warring nations.”