The stores and magazines having been destroyed, and the horses killed, the non-combatants and all the guns except nine six-pounders embarked. The regiments, too, would have followed, but Soult prepared for attack, and the army faced him, with backs to the sea. Soult’s attack was purely frontal, and designed to drive back the supposed demoralised British army on the town. A strong force of cavalry was on the extreme left, next to which was a heavy battery, and on the right three heavy columns descended the ridge, covered by clouds of skirmishers to force the division of Baird and Hope. The 50th again distinguished itself by a vigorous use of the bayonet, and the ensigns bearing the colours fell, to be carried then by the colour-sergeants; while Major Charles Napier, of whom we hear more, later, in Scinde, was wounded and taken prisoner. Baird, too, was severely wounded by a grapeshot, and the 42nd, being short of ammunition, were falling back, when Moore himself led them forward with the stirring appeal, “My brave Highlanders, you have still your bayonets. Remember Egypt;” and so doing fell from his horse with his shoulder shattered by a cannon ball. None the less, he watched the victorious advance of the 42nd into the shambles of Elvina village, which was the key of the fight, until it was necessary to carry him to the rear on a blanket supported by sashes, and soon he breathed his last, with the hope, amply fulfilled, that his country would do him justice. From the outset, he was despatched with almost certain failure in view. The wide dispersal of the Spanish armies, their notorious want of cohesion and experience, were alone serious dangers; but if there be added to this, a force too small for the purpose, a most indifferent commissariat, and an ill-supplied military chest, the task imposed on Moore was hopelessly impossible. Still, whatever the errors made in the plan of campaign and in the disastrous retreat, Corunna more than compensated for them, and Moore, the guiding spirit of it all, was laid to rest in one of the bastions of the citadel, “with his martial cloak around him,” after the embarkation which followed. On the night of, and morning after, the battle, and when the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers were the last to quit the shore, the French, with chivalric courtesy, kept the tricolour half-mast high, and fired the parting salute of cannon over the grave of Sir John Moore. But the well-known poetry, descriptive of the hero’s funeral, written by Wolfe, is not strictly accurate. There was no need for the “lanterns dimly burning,” as it was already daylight. The troops engaged were the Grenadier Guards, the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, 14th, 20th, 23rd, 26th, 28th, 32nd, 36th, 38th, 42nd, 43rd, 50th, 51st, 52nd, 59th, 71st, 81st, 91st, 92nd, and Rifle Brigade; but as if to give the crowning touch to the sufferings of the campaign, the fleet was scattered by a storm on the way home, and many ships were wrecked.