Meantime Lieutenant Jones of the engineers with an officer and nine men of the first royals, gained the top of the great breach; and men were rushing up to follow them, when the enemy sprung a mine in one place, and in another drew the supports from under a false bridge, thus blowing up some of the assailants, and precipitating others upon the spikes which had been fixed below. The men who were at the foot of the breach were then panic-stricken; they, as well as the French, remembered that in such situations the victory is not to the brave or the strong, if superior skill is opposed to courage and strength: they ran back, ... it was impossible to rally them, and they suffered much. The intention was, that another column should pass in the rear of the first, between it and the sea to the second breach, and storm it; but the discomfiture of the first party prevented this, and none of these reached their destination. The whole was over before morning had fairly opened, and in the course of an hour, 45 officers and above 800 men were killed, wounded, or missing.
The river prevented any immediate communication, so that at the batteries it was thought that hardly anything more than a false alarm had taken place, till, as day dawned, they discovered through their glasses the bodies of officers and men in the breach, and under the demi-bastion and retaining wall. Presently one or two of the enemy appeared on the breach, and a serjeant came down among the wounded, raising some, and speaking to others. The firing which had been continued occasionally on the breach was then stopped; more of the French appeared; a kind of parley took place between them and the men at the head of the trenches; and half an hour’s truce was agreed on for the purpose of removing the wounded and the dead; but so jealous were the French that they would not allow the dead who were nearest them to be approached; some of the wounded they carried into the town, and others were borne by their soldiers into the British lines. While the troops were yet under arms, not knowing whether another attack might be ordered, a British officer saw one of his Portugueze soldiers start off, and reproved him for so doing, when after awhile the man returned; but the Portugueze replied, scarcely able to command his voice or restrain his tears as he spake, that he had only been burying his comrade, ... and in fact it appeared that with no other implement than his bayonet and his hand, he had given his poor friend and countryman a soldier’s burial in the sand. The officers who fell in this attack were buried together, each in a shell, in one grave, in a garden near the encampment.