French, sure of not being able to drive us from there by ordinary means, were working at their mines without ceasing.
My battalion was now one with that of the Estremadura, and indeed what was left of both was scarcely three companies. Augustine Montoria was captain, and I was promoted lieutenant on the second. We did not return to service in Las Tenerías. They sent us to guard San Francisco—a vast edifice which offered good positions for our guns against the French, who were established in the Convent of Jerusalem. Very short rations were now dealt out to us; and those of us who were counted among the officers ate in the same mess with the soldiers. Augustine kept his bread to give to Mariquilla.
After the fourth day, the French began mining towards the hospital and San Francisco, in order to take it; for they knew well that it would be impossible in any other way. In order to hinder them we countermined, intending to blow them up before they could blow us up. This toilsome labor in the bowels of the earth can be compared to nothing else in the world. We seemed to ourselves to have left off being men, and to be converted into another kind of creatures, into cold inhabitants of caverns, without feeling, far from the sun and the pure air and the lovely light of day. We built long galleries, working ceaselessly like the worm that builds his house in the darkness of earth, shaping it like his own body. Between the blows of our picks, we heard, like a muffled echo, the picks of the French. After having been beaten and destroyed on the surface, we expected momentarily to be exterminated in the dreadful night of those sepulchres.
The Convent of San Francisco had vast subterranean wine-cellars under its choir. The edifices which the French occupied farther down had these also, and it was unusual for a house not to have a deep cellar. In these many of our enemies perished, sometimes by the falling in of floors, sometimes wounded from afar by our balls, which penetrated into the