Those who were advancing from the South stopped almost instantly, dazzled and confused. The powerful searchlight of the Fort glared into their faces with bewildering suddenness, and the insistent racket of rifles and machine guns told them that their advance had been discovered. The doomed and blinded soldiers fell in scores, in hundreds, before a withering storm of bullets. Then, just as suddenly as it had been revealed, the flashlight was concealed; but only to glare forth again on the British supports that were hurried to the front. Thus, brilliant light and deepest darkness alternated in swift and bewildering succession, and through both alike the leaden messengers of death mowed down the advancing troops. Rank after rank reeled back upon their climbing comrades. On the South side, once more, the attack had failed, and failed at heavy cost. North, West, and East, the result had been the same--repulse, defeat. The night was now illumined with extraordinary brilliance. Star-shells, rising high into the air above the Fort, burst in quick and dazzling succession. The blinding glare lighted up the hill, the sea, and every field and building, revealing, too, the fleeing figures of the retreating force and the prostrate forms of hosts of dead and wounded. A hail of bullets from the Maxims persistently pursued the remnant of the fleeing soldiers, and swept the plateau and the hillside clear of living things. Pom, pom, pom! the murderous machines of wholesale destruction continued their deadly work until the men who worked them could find no living thing to put to death. Broken and beaten--many of them desperately and horribly wounded--the panting remnant of the attacking force heard, as, at last, they halted, a shrill shout of triumph from the jubilant defenders of the Fort. But the night's work was far from finished. The Fort must fall--cost what it might, the Fort must fall. If it could not be captured above ground in the staring light of star-shells, the attack must be made by burrowing in darkness through the hill itself. Preparations for this desperate and dangerous work had been already started, and much progress made. For twelve hours or more, during what appeared to be a suspension of hostilities, the sappers had worked in relays with furious and unremitting energy. While their comrades above ground were being repulsed, while the star-shells went up in a rapid succession, and the implacable searchlight swept the hill in all directions, the picks of the Engineers, yard by yard, were steadily hacking a way towards the very foundations of the Fort.