When night interrupted the firing, there had been great carnage on both sides. We ourselves had lost many by death, and more were wounded. The wounded were carried at the time into the city by the friars and the women; but the dead still gave their last service with their cold bodies, for they were stoically thrown into the open breach, which was being stopped up with sacks of wool and earth.
During the night we did not rest for one single moment, and the dawn of the eleventh found us inspired by the same frenzy, our pieces already pointed against the enemy’s entrenchments, and already piercing with musket shots those who were coming to flank us, without hindering for a moment the work of stopping up the breach, which was widening, hour by hour its dreadful spaces. So we endured all the morning until the moment when they began the assault upon San José, now converted into a heap of ruins, and with most of its garrison dead. Centring the forces upon these two points, they fell upon the convent, and directed an audacious movement upon us; and it was with the object of making our breach practicable that they advanced by the Torrero road with two cannons protected by a column of infantry.
At that moment we thought ourselves lost. The feeble walls trembled, and the bricks were shattered into thousands of pieces. We ran up to the breach, which was widening every instant, where they poured upon us a horrible fire. Seeing that the redoubt was being shattered to pieces, they took courage to come to the very borders of the fosse itself. It was madness to try to fill that terrible space, and to show an uncovered place was to offer victims without number to the fury of the enemy. We protected ourselves as well as we could with sacks of wool and shovels of earth, and many stood as if petrified on the spot. The firing of the cannon ceased because it seemed necessary; there was a moment of indefinable panic; the guns fell from our hands; we saw ourselves routed, destroyed, annihilated by that rain of fire that seemed to fill the air. We forgot honor, the fatherland, the glory of death, the Virgin del Pilar,