the broken wall and keep it on. Masses of men dashed against one another, and bayonets were fed with brutal anger upon the bodies of enemies. From the houses came incessant fire. We could see the French fall in heaps, pierced by lead and steel, at the very foot of the ruins they were seeking to conquer. New columns took the places of the first, and in those who came after, brutalities of vengeance were added to prodigies of valor.
On our side the number of those who fell was enormous. The dead were left by dozens upon the earth along that line which had been a wall, but was now no more than a shapeless mass of earth, bricks, and corpses. The natural, the human thing would have been to abandon such positions, and not try to hold them against such a combination of force and military skill. But there was nothing of the human or the natural here. Instead, the power of defence was extended infinitely, to limits not recognized by scientific calculation, beyond ordinary valor. The Aragonese nature stood forth, and it is one which does not know how to be conquered. The living took the places of the dead with a sublime aplomb. Death was an accident, a trivial detail, a thing of which no notice should be taken.
While this was going on, other columns equally powerful were trying to take the Casa de González, which I have before mentioned. But from the neighboring houses, and the towers of the wall, came such a terrible fire of rifles and cannons that they desisted from their attempt. Other attacks took place, with better results for them, at our right, toward the orchard of Camporeal and the batteries of Los Mártires. The immense force displayed by the besiegers along one line of short extent could not fail to produce results. From the house in the Calle de Pabostre, close to the Molino of the city, we were, as I have said, firing upon the besiegers, when behold the batteries of San José, formerly occupied in demolishing the wall, directed their cannons against that ancient edifice. We felt that the walls were trembling; the beams were cracking like the timbers of a