The position of the besieged was deplorable.  Nearly a fourth of their number were in the hospitals; while the rest, exhausted with incessant toil, could find no place to snatch an hour of sleep; “and yet,” says an officer, “they still show ardor.”  “To-day,” he again says, on the twenty-fourth, “the fire of the place is so weak that it is more like funeral guns than a defence.”  On the front of the town only four cannon could fire at all.  The rest were either dismounted or silenced by the musketry from the trenches.  The masonry of the ramparts had been shaken by the concussion of their own guns; and now, in the Dauphin’s and King’s bastions, the English shot brought it down in masses.  The trenches had been pushed so close on the rising grounds at the right that a great part of the covered way was enfiladed, while a battery on a hill across the harbor swept the whole front with a flank fire.  Amherst had ordered the gunners to spare the houses of the town; but, according to French accounts, the order had little effect, for shot and shell fell everywhere.  “There is not a house in the place,” says the Diary just quoted, “that has not felt the effects of this formidable artillery.  From yesterday morning till seven o’clock this evening we reckon that a thousand or twelve hundred bombs, great and small, have been thrown into the town, accompanied all the time by the fire of forty pieces of cannon, served with an activity not often seen.  The hospital and the houses around it, which also serve as hospitals, are attacked with cannon and mortar.  The surgeon trembles as he amputates a limb amid cries of Gare la bombe! and leaves his patient in the midst of the operation, lest he should share his fate.  The sick and wounded, stretched on mattresses, utter cries of pain, which do not cease till a shot or the bursting of a shell ends them."[586] On the twenty-sixth the last cannon was silenced in front of the town, and the English batteries had made a breach which seemed practicable for assault.

[Footnote 586:  Early in the siege Drucour wrote to Amherst asking that the hospitals should be exempt from fire.  Amherst answered that shot and shell might fall on any part of so small a town, but promised to insure the sick and wounded from molestation if Drucour would send them either to the island at the mouth of the harbor, or to any of the ships, if anchored apart from the rest.  The offer was declined, for reasons not stated.  Drucour gives the correspondence in his Diary.]

On the day before, Drucour, with his chief officers and the engineer, Franquet, had made the tour of the covered way, and examined the state of the defences.  All but Franquet were for offering to capitulate.  Early on the next morning a council of war was held, at which were present Drucour, Franquet, Desgouttes, naval commander, Houlliere, commander of the regulars, and the several chiefs of battalions.  Franquet presented a memorial setting forth the state of the