Lord Fitzroy Somerset, afterward Lord Raglan; and the Prince. of Orange-all volunteers without Wellington's knowledge! At seven o'clock a curious silence fell suddenly on the battered city and the engirdling trenches. Not a light gleamed from the frowning parapets, not a murmur arose from the blackened trenches. Suddenly a shout broke out on the right of the English attack; it ran, a wave of stormy sound, along the line of the trenches. The men who were to attack the great breach leaped into the open. In a moment the space between the hostile lines was covered with the stormers, and the gloomy, half-seen face of the great fortress broke into a tempest of fire. Nothing could be finer than the vehement courage of the assault, unless it were the cool and steady fortitude of the defense. Swift as was the upward rush of the stormers, the race of the 5th, 77th, and 94th regiments was almost swifter. Scorning to wait for the ladders, they leaped into the great ditch, outpaced even the fornlorn hope, and pushed vehemently up the great breach, while their red ranks were torn by shell and shot. The fire, too, ran through the tangle of broken stones over which they climbed; the hand-grenades and powder-bags by which it was strewn exploded. The men were walking on fire! Yet the attack could not be denied. The Frenchmen-shooting, stabbing, yellingwere driven behind their intrenchments. There the fire of the houses commanding the breach came to their help, and they made a gallant stand. "None would go back on either side, and yet the British could not get forward, and men and officers falling in heaps choked up the passage, which from minute to minute was raked with grape from two guns flanking the top of the breach at the distance of a few yards. Thus striving, and trampling alike upon the dead and the wounded, these brave men maintained the combat." It was the attack on the smaller breach which really carried Ciudad Rodrigo; and George Napier, who led it, has left a graphic narrative of the exciting experiences of that dreadful night. The light division was to attack, and Craufurd, with whom Napier was a favorite, gave him command of the storming party. He was to ask for one hundred volunteers from each of the three Brit ish regiments the 43d, 52d, and the rifle corps-in the division. Napier halted these regiments just as they had forded the bitterly cold river on their way to the trenches. "Soldiers," he said, "I want one hundred men from each regiment to form the storming party which is to lead the light division to-night. Those who will go with me come forward!" Instantly there was a rush forward of the whole division, and Napier had to take his three hundred men out of a tumult of nearly one thousand five hundred candidates. He formed them into three companies, under Captains Ferguson, Jones, and Mitchell. Gurwood, of the 52d, led the forlorn hope, consisting of twenty-five men and two sergeants. Wellington himself came to the trench and showed Napier and Colborne, through the gloom of the early night, the exact position of the breach. A staff-officer, looking on, said, "Your men are not loaded. Why don't you make them load?" Napier replied, "If we don't do the business with the bayonet we shall not do it. at all. I shall not load." "Let him alone," said Wellington; "let him go his own way." Picton had adopted the same grim policy with the third division. As each regiment passed him, filing into the trenches, his injunction was, "No powder! We'll do the thing with the could iron." A party of Portuguese carrying bags filled with grass were to run with the storming party and throw the bags into the ditch, as the leap was too deep for the men. But the Portuguese hesitated, the tumult of the attack on the great breach suddenly broke on the night, and the forlorn hope went running up, leaped into the ditch a depth of eleven feet, and clambered up the steep slope beyond, while Napier with his stormers came with a run behind them. In the dark for a moment the breach was lost, but found again, and up the steep quarry of broken stone the attack swept. About two-thirds of the way up Napier's arm was smashed by a grape-shot, and he fell. His men, checked for a moment, lifted their muskets to the gap above them, whence the French were firing vehemently, and forgetting their pieces were unloaded, snapped them. "Push on with the bayonet, men!" shouted Napier, as he lay bleeding. The officers leaped to the front, the men with a stern shout followed; they were crushed to a front of not more than three or four. They had to climb without firing a shot in reply up to the muzzles of the French muskets. But nothing could stop the men of the light division. A 24pounder was placed across the narrow gap in the ramparts; the stormers leaped over it, and the 43d and 52d, coming up in sections abreast, followed. The 43d wheeled to the right toward the great breach, the 52d to the left, sweeping the ramparts as they went. Meanwhile the other two attacks had broken into the town; but at the great breach the dreadful fight still raged, until the 43d, coming swiftly along the ramparts, and brushing all opposition aside, took the defense in the rear. The British there had, as a matter of fact, at that exact moment pierced the French defense. The two guns that scourged the breach had wrought deadly havoc among the stormers, and a sergeant and two privates of the 88thIrishmen all, and whose names deserve to be preserved-Brazel, Kelly, and Swan-laid down their firelocks that they might climb more lightly, and, armed only with their bayonets, forced themselves through the embrasure among the French gunners. They were furiously attacked, and Swan's arm was hewed off by a saber stroke; but they stopped the service of the gun, slew five or six of the French gunners, and held the post until the men of the 5th, climbing behind them, broke into the battery. So Ciudad Rodrigo was won, and its governor surrendered his sword to the youthful lieutenant leading the forlorn hope of the light division, who, with smoke-blackened face, torn uniform, and staggering from a dreadful wound, still kept at the head of his men. 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." The victory not only freed Spain from its invaders; it restored the spirit of the allies. The close of the armistice was followed by a union of Austria with the forces of Prussia and the Czar; and in October a final overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig forced the French army to fall back in rout across the Rhine. The war now hurried to its close. Though held at bay for a while by the sieges of San Sebastian and Pampeluna, as well as by an obstinate Jefense of the Pyrenees, Wellington succeeded in the very month of the triumph at Leipzig in winning a victory on the Bidassoa which enabled him to enter France. He was soon followed by the allies. On the last day of 1813 their forces crossed the Rhine; and a third of France passed, without opposition, into their hands. For two months more Napoleon maintained a wonderful struggle with a handful of raw conscripts against their overwhelming numbers; while in the south, Soult, forced from his intrenched camp near Bayonne and defeated at Orthes, fell back before Wellington on Toulouse. Here their two armies met in April in a stubborn and indecisive engagement. But though neither leader knew it, the war was even then at an end. The struggle of Napoleon himself had ended at the close of March with the surrender of Paris; and the submission of the capital was at once followed by the abdication of the emperor and the return of the Bourbons. CHAPTER XXVII AN EPISODE OF THE WAR OF 1812 THE "SHANNON" AND THE "CHESAPEAKE". BROKE AND LAW"DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP!"-WASHINGTON - BALTIMORE- NEW ORLEANS-PEACE OF GHENT RENCE Ο N June 18, 1812, the United States, with magnificent audacity, declared war against Great Britain. England at that moment had six hundred and twenty-one efficient cruisers at sea, one hundred and two being line-of-battle ships. Our navy consisted of eight frigates and twelve corvettes. It is true that England was at war at the same moment with half the civilized world; but what reasonable chance had the tiny naval power of the United States against the mighty fleets of England, commanded by men trained in the school of Nelson, and rich with the traditions of the Nile and Trafalgar? As a matter of fact, in the war which followed our commerce was swept out of existence. But we were of the same fighting stock as the English; to the Viking blood, indeed, we added Yankee ingenuity and resource, making a very formidable combination; and up to the June morning when the "Shannon" was waiting outside Boston Harbor for the "Chesapeake," the naval honors of the war belonged to us. We had no fleet, and the campaign was one of single ship against single ship; but in these combats we had scored more successes in twelve months than French seamen had gained in twelve years. The |