Accustomed as he had been to receive reports from the Peninsula little calculated to give satisfaction, or to confirm his impression of the invincible qualities of those troops which he had personally ever led to certain victory, so extensive and alarming a reverse as that now made must have been as unexpected as it was disastrous; but with all the promptitude of a person born to command, instead of yielding to gloomy circumstances, he issued orders for a bold effort to counteract the tide of war, to recover the ground lost by Vitoria, and to awaken to energy, as he conceived, the dormant spirit of his soldiers. Marshal Soult was, therefore, specially despatched from Germany to assume the chief command of the beaten army, and, if possible, restore its fallen fortunes. Wellington foresaw the coming storm, and turned his immediate attention to the reduction of Pamplona and San Sebastian. From the strength of the former, and the excellent condition of its defences, the allied commander decided on a blockade; and it was accordingly closely invested by General Hill. Redoubts were thrown up within fifteen hundred yards of the place, armed with the cannon taken at Vitoria, and to the Spanish army under O’Donel the conduct of the blockade was entrusted. Graham, with his corps augmented to ten thousand men, was directed to besiege San Sebastian; and on the 11th of July he sat down before the place. San Sebastian is built on a peninsula, its western defences washed by the sea, and its eastern by the river Urumea, which at high water rises several feet above the base of the escarp wall. A bold and rocky height, called Monte Orgullo, rises at the extreme point of a narrow neck of land, and on its summit stands the citadel of La Mota. Eight hundred yards distant from the land-front, the convent of San Bartolemeo, with a redoubt and circular fieldwork, were garrisoned. These advanced posts were strongly fortified, and, as it was determined to breach the eastern wall and storm it afterwards at low water, when the receding tide should permit an advance by the left of the Urumea, it became necessary, as a preliminary step, to dislodge the enemy from the convent. On the 14th of July, the guns in battery opened a heavy fire on San Bartolemeo; and by the next day the walls of the building were injured considerably. Another battery, erected beyond the Urumea, fired with equal success upon the bastion; and on the 17th both works were carried by assault. Batteries, armed with thirty-two siege guns and howitzers, opened on the town wall from the sandhills; and on the 25th two breaches were effected, one of thirty yards extent, and the other of ten. A mine was also driven under the glacis, and at its explosion was the appointed signal for an assault upon the breaches.