Impatient of delay, a heavy column now bounded up the great breach; but across the top glittered a range of sword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged on both sides, and firmly fixed in ponderous beams, which were chained together and set deep in the ruins; and for ten feet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks studded with sharp iron points, on which the feet of the foremost being set, the planks moved, and the unhappy soldiers, falling forward on the spikes, rolled down upon the ranks behind. Then the Frenchmen, exulting at the success of their stratagem, and leaping forward, plied their shot with terrible rapidity; for every man had several muskets, and each musket, in addition to its ordinary charge, contained a small cylinder of wood, stuck full of leaden slugs, which scattered like hail when they were discharged. At the 174beginning of this dreadful conflict, Colonel Andrew Barnard had, with prodigious efforts, separated his division from the other, and preserved some degree of military array; but now the tumult was such that no command could be heard distinctly, except by those close at hand; and the mutilated bodies, heaped on each other, and the wounded, struggling to avoid being trampled upon, broke the formations. Order was unattainable; yet officers of all stations, followed more or less numerously by the men, were seen to start out, as if struck by sudden madness, and rush into the breach. In one of these attempts, Colonel M’Leod, of our regiment, a young man, whose feeble body would have been quite unfit for war, had it not been sustained by an unconquerable spirit, was killed. Wherever his voice was heard, there his soldiers gathered; and with such a strong resolution did he lead them up the fatal ruins, that when one behind him in falling plunged a bayonet in his back, he complained not, and continuing his course, was shot dead within a yard of the sword-blades. Two hours spent in these vain efforts convinced the soldiers that the breach of the Trinidad was impregnable. Gathering in dark groups, and leaning on their muskets, they looked up with sullen desperation; while the enemy, stepping out on the ramparts, and aiming their shots by the light of the fire-balls which they threw over, asked, as their victims fell, ‘why they did not come into Badajos?’