Blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo. (Sept. 1811.)

After the second siege of Badajos the contest in the Peninsula presented a new phase. French reinforcements were poured into Spain, forty thousand old soldiers entered by the northern line alone, and General Dorsenne took command of the Army of the North, which now contained seventeen thousand of Napoleon’s young guard. The king had a particular force about Madrid called the Army of the Centre; Soult commanded the Army of the South; Marmont the Army of Portugal, with which, by the emperor’s orders, he took post in the valley of the Tagus, leaving a division at Truxillo south of that river, establishing a bridge of communication at Almaraz, which he fortified on both sides strongly.

This disposition of the French armies was at once offensive and defensive. Portugal was menaced from the north by Dorsenne, who had Ciudad Rodrigo as an advanced place of arms; from the south by Soult, who had Badajos for an advanced place of arms; in the centre by Marmont, who could march on Abrantes, join Dorsenne, or unite with Soult. In defence the French were still more powerful. If Wellington assailed Dorsenne, the latter by retiring could concentrate a great force, while Marmont acted on the English right flank; and together they could present seventy thousand men in line. If he assailed Soult, as he had indeed designed before the failure of Badajos, Marmont could act on his left flank, and, united with Soult, could present sixty-five thousand fighting men. If he marched against Marmont by either bank of the Tagus, that marshal, reinforced with detachments from Dorsenne, Soult, and the king, could deliver battle with more than seventy thousand men.

The English general could not contend with such powerful armies beyond the mountains of Portugal, yet from political pressure he could not stand still, and there were defects in his adversaries’ breast-plate through which he hoped to pierce. He saw that Badajos and Rodrigo were isolated and difficult to provision; that each depended for succour on the junction of armies under generals of equal authority, ill disposed to act together, and whose communications were long and uneasy, furnishing pretences for non-coÖperation. Marmont had indeed a direct line of intercourse with Dorsenne across the Gredos mountains, by the fortified pass of BaÑos; but to reach Soult the Tagus was to be crossed at Almaraz, the defiles of Estremadura and the passes of the Morena to be threaded before a junction could be made in the plains of Badajos: wherefore, General Girard, having the remains of Mortier’s army, called the fifth corps, was employed as a moving column in Estremadura, to support Badajos and connect the army of Portugal with that of Soult.

In this state of affairs Wellington, who had received large reinforcements after the siege of Badajos, left General Hill, in August, with twelve thousand men of all arms to keep Girard in check, and in person marched to the north, under pretence of seeking healthy quarters for his sickly troops, really to blockade Ciudad Rodrigo, which an intercepted letter described as wanting provisions; it had however been previously supplied by BessiÈres before he quitted his command, and this effort was frustrated. The army was then placed near the sources of the Agueda and Coa, close to the line of communication between Marmont and Dorsenne, and preparations were made for a siege, in the notion that the last general’s force was weak: but that also was an error, and when discovered, a blockade was established. Almeida, whose renewed walls had been destroyed by Spencer when he marched to the south, was now repaired for a place of arms, the bridge over the Coa was restored, and with the utmost subtilty of combination and the most extensive arrangements the English general, while appearing only to blockade, secretly prepared for a siege. All his art was indeed required, for though the Anglo-Portuguese were at this time eighty thousand on paper, with ninety guns, twenty-two thousand men were in hospital; wherefore, Hill’s corps being deducted, less than forty-five thousand were on the watch to snatch a fortress which was in the keeping of eighty thousand.

In September Rodrigo called for succour, whereupon Marmont and Dorsenne advanced to its relief with sixty thousand men, six thousand being cavalry, and they had a hundred pieces of artillery. Wellington could not fight this great army beyond the Agueda, but would not retreat until he had seen all their force, lest a detachment should relieve the place to his dishonour. In this view he took the following positions.

Picton’s division, reinforced with three squadrons of German and British cavalry, was placed at the heights of Elbodon and Pastores, on the left of the Agueda, within three miles of Rodrigo. The light division with some squadrons of cavalry and six guns, were posted on the right of the Agueda, at the Vadillo, a river with a rugged channel falling into the Agueda three miles above Rodrigo: from this line an enemy coming from the eastern passes of the hills could be discerned. The sixth division and Anson’s brigade of cavalry, forming the left of the army, was under General Graham at Espeja, on the Lower Azava, with advanced posts at Carpio and Marialva, from whence to Rodrigo was eight miles over a plain. Julian Sanchez’s Partida watched the Lower Agueda, and the heads of columns were thus presented to the fortress on three points, namely, Vadillo, Pastores and Espeja. Two brigades of heavy cavalry on the Upper Azava, supported by Pack’s Portuguese, connected Graham with Elbodon; but he was very distant from Guinaldo, the pivot of operations, and to obviate the danger of a flank march in retreat the first and seventh divisions were posted in succession towards Guinaldo. The army was thus spread out on different roads, like the sticks of a fan, having their point of union on the Coa.

This disposition was faulty. Broad heights lining the left bank of the Agueda ended abruptly above the villages of Elbodon and Pastores, and were flanked in their whole length by woods and great plains, extending from Rodrigo to the Coa; they could not therefore be held against an enemy commanding those plains, and if the French pushed along them suddenly, beyond Guinaldo, the distant wings could be cut off. At Guinaldo however, three field redoubts had been constructed on high open ground, to impose upon the enemy and so gain time to assemble and feel his disposition for a battle, because a retreat beyond the Coa was to be avoided if possible.

On the 23rd the French encamped behind the hills northeast of Rodrigo, and a strong detachment, entering the plain, looked at the light division on the Vadillo and returned.

The 24th, six thousand cavalry and four divisions of infantry crossed the hills in two columns to introduce the convoy, while on the English side the fourth division occupied the position of Guinaldo, and the redoubts were completed. No other change was made, for it was thought the French would not advance further; but the 25th, soon after daybreak, fourteen squadrons of the imperial guards drove Graham’s outpost from Carpio across the Azava; the Lancers of Berg then crossed that river in pursuit, but were flanked by some infantry in a wood and beaten back by two squadrons of the 14th and 16th Dragoons, who re-occupied the post of Carpio. During this skirmish, fourteen battalions of infantry and thirty squadrons of cavalry, with twelve guns, under Montbrun, passing the Agueda at Rodrigo marched towards Guinaldo; the road divided there, one branch turning the Elbodon heights on the French right the other leading through Pastores and Elbodon, and as the point of divarication was covered by a gentle ridge, it was doubtful which branch would be taken. Soon that doubt vanished. The cavalry pouring along the right-hand road leading to Guinaldo, drove in the advanced posts, and without waiting for their infantry fell on.

Combat of Elbodon. (Sept. 1811.)

The action began disadvantageously for the allies. The left of the third division was turned, the 74th and 60th Regiments, being at Pastores, far on the right, were too distant to be called in, and Picton, having three other regiments at Elbodon, could take no immediate part in the fight. Wellington sent to Guinaldo for a brigade of the fourth division, and meanwhile directed General Colville to draw up the 77th and 5th British Regiments, the 21st Portuguese and two brigades of artillery of the same nation, on a hill over which the road to Guinaldo passed, supporting their flanks with Alten’s three squadrons. This position, convex towards the enemy, was covered, front and flanks, by deep ravines; but it was too extensive, and before Picton could come from Elbodon the crisis was over. Vainly the Portuguese guns sent their shot through Montbrun’s horsemen, they crossed the ravine in half squadrons, and with amazing vigour rode up the rough height on three sides; neither the loose fire of the infantry nor the artillery stopped them, but they were checked by the fine fighting of the cavalry, who charged the heads of the ascending masses, not once but twenty times, and always with a good will, maintaining the upper ground for an hour.

It was astonishing to see so few troopers resist that surging multitude even on such steep ground; but when Montbrun, obstinate to win, brought up his artillery, his horsemen, gaining ground in the centre, cut down some gunners and captured the Portuguese guns, and at the same time one German squadron, charging too far, got entangled in the ravines. The danger was then imminent, but suddenly the 5th Regiment, led by Major Ridge, a daring man, dashed bodily into the midst of the French cavalry and retook the artillery, which again opened, while the 77th, supported by the 21st Portuguese, vigorously repulsed the enemy on the left. These charges of infantry against a powerful cavalry, which had room to expand, could however only check the foe at particular points, and Montbrun pressed with fresh masses against the left of the allies, while other squadrons penetrated between their right and the village of Elbodon, from the inclosures and vineyards of which Picton was, with difficulty and some confusion, extricating his regiments. He could give no succour, the brigade of the fourth division was not in sight, the French infantry was rapidly approaching, and Wellington therefore directed both Picton and Colville to fall back and unite in the plain behind.

Colville, forming his battalions in two squares, descended at once from the hill, but Picton had a considerable distance to move, there was a great interval, and at that moment, the cavalry, fearing to be surrounded, galloped for refuge to the Portuguese regiment, which was farthest in retreat. Then the 5th and 77th, two weak battalions formed in one square, were quite exposed, and in an instant the whole of the French horsemen came thundering down upon them. But how vain, how fruitless to match the sword with the musket, to send the charging horseman against the steadfast veteran! The multitudinous squadrons, rending the skies with their shouts, closed upon the glowing squares like the falling edges of a burning crater, and were as instantly rejected, scorched and scattered abroad; then a rolling peal of musketry echoed through the hills, bayonets glittered at the edge of the smoke, and with firm and even step the British regiments came forth like the holy men from the Assyrian’s furnace.

Picton now effected his junction and the whole retired to Guinaldo, about six miles. The French would not renew the close attack, yet plied shot and shell until the entrenched camp was gained; there the fourth division presented a fresh front, Pack then came in from Campillo, the heavy cavalry from the Upper Azava, and as it was near dusk the action ceased. The 74th and 60th Regiments, posted at Pastores, were abandoned by this retreat, but they crossed the Agueda at a ford, and moving up the right bank reached Guinaldo in the night after a march of fifteen hours.

Graham had early received orders to fall back on the first division, yet to keep posts of observation on the Azava, while Sanchez’s infantry went behind the Coa; the guerilla chief himself passed with his cavalry to the French rear, and the seventh division was withdrawn behind the left wing, which was now in line with the centre, though still distant. The light division should have come by Robledo to Fuente Guinaldo; Craufurd received the order at three o’clock, heard the cannonade, and might have reached it before midnight; but fearing a march in darkness he merely retired a league from the Vadillo, which was immediately passed by fifteen hundred French; Guinaldo was thus maintained by only fourteen thousand men, two thousand six hundred being cavalry. Graham was ten miles distant; the light division, debarred of a direct route by the enemy, was sixteen miles distant; the fifth division, posted at Payo in the mountains, was twelve miles distant; and during the night and the following day, Marmont united sixty thousand men in front of Guinaldo. The English general was thus in great danger, yet he would not abandon the light division, which, intercepted by the French cavalry at Robledo, did not arrive until after three o’clock in the evening. Marmont’s fortune was fixed in that hour! He knew not how matters really stood. He detached a strong column by the valley of the Azava to menace the allies’ left, and made an ostentatious display of the Imperial Guards in the plain, instead of attacking an adversary who laughed to see him so employed, and soon changed the state of affairs.

In the night, by an able concentric movement, Wellington united his whole army on new ground between the Coa and the sources of the Agueda, twelve miles behind Guinaldo. Marmont, unconscious of his advantages, instead of troubling this difficult movement had also retired in the night, and was marching back when the scouts of his column in the valley of Azava reported that the allies were in retreat, and their divisions widely separated. Then discovering all the deceit of Guinaldo, and the escape of the light division, he prophetically exclaimed, alluding to Napoleon’s fortune, And Wellington, he also has a star. In this mood he would have continued his retreat, but it is said Dorsenne forced him to wheel round and pursue: Wellington was then however in a strong position behind the stream of the Villa Maior, where he could not be turned, and where it covered all the practicable roads leading to the bridges and fords of the Coa.

Combat of Aldeaponte. (Sept. 1811.)

The French moved by two roads against the right and centre. Checked on the first by the light division, on the second their horsemen drove the cavalry posts across the Villa Maior and took possession of Aldeaponte, where at twelve o’clock the head of their infantry attacked a brigade of the fourth division, posted on opposing heights, under General Pakenham. Wellington arriving at that moment directed a charge, and the French were driven back; they attempted to turn the brigade by a wood on their own left while their cavalry advanced to the foot of the hills, but the artillery sufficed to baffle the effort, and then the English general, taking the offensive, turned their left and seized the opposite hills: this finished the action and Aldeaponte was re-occupied. Wellington, who had been much exposed to fire, rode to another part, yet scarcely had he departed when the French from the other road joined those near Aldeaponte, and at five o’clock retook the village; Pakenham recovered it, but the enemy was very numerous, the country rugged, and so wooded he could not tell what was passing on the flanks: wherefore, knowing the chosen ground of battle was behind the Coa, he abandoned Aldeaponte for his original post.

In the night the allies retreated, and on the morning of the 28th occupied a new and strong position in a deep loop of the Coa, where it could only be attacked on a narrow front; but the French, who had brought only a few days’ provisions and could gather none in that country, retired the same day. Dorsenne marched to Salamanca, a strong division was posted at Alba de Tormes to communicate with Marmont, and the latter resumed his old position in the valley of the Tagus. The light division, reinforced by some cavalry, now resumed the nominal blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo, in concert with Julian Sanchez; the rest of the army was cantoned on both sides of the Coa and head-quarters were fixed at Freneda.

Only three hundred men and officers fell in these combats on the British side. The French lost more, because of the unreturned fire at Elbodon, and here a fine chivalric action on their side merits notice. In one of the cavalry fights, an officer in the act of striking at Felton Harvey of the 14th Dragoons, perceived that he had but one arm and with a rapid change brought down his sword to a salute and passed on!

Surprise of Arroyo de Molinos. (Oct. 1811.)

While Rodrigo was being blockaded, General Hill co-operated with the Spaniards in Estremadura against General Drouet, who first joined Girard, but after various movements returned to the Morena, leaving his colleague at Caceres between the Tagus and the Guadiana. From that place Hill drove him the 26th of October, and hoping to cut him off from the bridge of Merida, moved by a cross road next day. On the march he heard Girard had halted in Arroyo de Molinos, leaving a rear-guard on the Caceres road—thus showing he knew not of the cross-road movement and looked for pursuit only from Caceres. With a rapid decision and a forced march the English general moved in the night upon Alcuesca, just one league from Arroyo, which was in a plain, and close behind it rose a rocky sierra, crescent-shaped, and about two miles wide on the chord. From Alcuesca one road led direct to Arroyo, another entered it on the left, and three led from it, the most distant of the last being the Truxillo road, which rounded the extremity of the sierra; the nearest was the Merida road, and between them was that of Medellin. The weather was very stormy and wet, but no fires were permitted in the allies’ camp, and at two o’clock in the morning of the 28th the troops moved to a low ridge half a mile from Arroyo, under cover of which they formed three bodies—the infantry on the wings, the cavalry in the centre. The left column marched straight upon the village, the right towards the extreme point of the sierra, where the Truxillo road turned the horn of the crescent, the cavalry kept the centre.

One brigade of Girard’s division had marched at four o’clock by the road of Medellin, but Dombrouski’s brigade and the cavalry of Briche were still in the place, and the horses of the rear-guard, unbridled, were tied to trees. The infantry were gathering on the Medellin road outside the village, and Girard was in a house waiting for his horse, when two British officers galloped into the street and in an instant all was confusion; hastily the cavalry bridled their horses and the infantry ran to their alarm-posts, but a tempest raged, a thick mist rolled down the craggy mountain, a terrific shout was heard amidst the clatter of the elements, and with the driving storm the 71st and 92nd Regiments came charging down. The French rear-guard of horsemen, fighting and struggling hard, were driven to the end of the village, where the infantry, forming their squares, endeavoured to cover the main body of the cavalry; but then the 71st, lining the garden walls, opened a galling fire on the nearest square, the 92nd, filing out of the streets, formed upon the French right, and the 50th Regiment, following closely, secured the prisoners.

The rest of the column, headed by the Spanish cavalry, skirted outside the houses to intercept the line of retreat, and soon the guns opened on the squares, and the 13th Dragoons captured the French artillery, while the 9th Dragoons and German Hussars dispersed their cavalry. Girard, an intrepid officer, although wounded, still kept his infantry together, retreating by the Truxillo road; but the right column of the allies was in possession of that line, the cavalry and artillery were close upon his flank, and the left column followed fast; his men fell by fifties and his situation was desperate, yet he would not surrender, and giving the word to disperse endeavoured to scale the almost inaccessible rocks of the sierra. His pursuers, not less obstinate, immediately divided. The Spaniards ascended the hills at an easier point beyond his left; the 39th Regiment and Ashworth’s Portuguese turned the mountain by the Truxillo road; the 28th and 34th, led by General Howard, followed him step by step up the rocks, taking prisoners, but finally the pursuers, heavily loaded, were beaten in speed by men who had thrown away their arms and packs. Girard, Dombrouski, and Briche, escaped into the Guadalupe mountains, and then crossing the Guadiana at Orellana, on the 9th of November rejoined Drouet with six hundred men, the remains of three thousand: they were said to be the finest troops then in Spain, and their resolution in such an appalling situation was no mean proof of their excellence.

Thirteen hundred prisoners, including General Bron and the Prince of Aremberg, all the artillery, baggage, commissariat, and a contribution just raised, were taken. The allies had seventy killed and wounded, and one officer, Lieutenant Strenowitz, was taken. He was an Austrian, and distinguished for courage and successful enterprises, but he had abandoned the French to join Julian Sanchez, and was liable to death by the laws of war. Originally forced into the French service he was, in reality, no deserter, and General Hill applied frankly in his favour to Drouet, who was so good-tempered that, while smarting under this disaster, he released his prisoner.

This exploit set all the French corps in motion to revenge it; yet on the 28th of November Hill, by a forced march, again surprised three hundred infantry and some hussars under Captain Neveux, who however lost only forty men, escaping the British cavalry, said his generous antagonist, by “the intrepid and admirable manner in which he retreated.”

Defence of Tarifa. (Dec. 1811.)

Soult had long resolved to reduce the maritime town of Tarifa, but General Campbell, governor of Gibraltar, equally resolute to prevent him, threw in an English garrison, under Colonel Skerrett. The defences were ancient, the place being encircled with towers connected by an archery wall, irregular, without a ditch, and too thin to resist even field artillery. It was commanded also by heights within cannon-shot, but the English engineer Smith21 adapted the defence to the peculiarities of ground so skilfully as to fix the enemy’s attention entirely to one point, which offered facilities for an internal resistance, to begin when the weak ramparts should be broken.

Tarifa was cloven by a periodical torrent, entering at the east and passing out at the west. It was barred at the entrance by a tower with a portcullis, in front of which palisades were planted across its bed. The houses within the walls were strongly built on inclined planes, rising from each side of the torrent; and at the exit of the water were two massive structures, called the tower and castle of the Gusmans, both looking up the hollow formed by the inclined planes. From these structures, a sandy neck, prolonged by a causeway for eight hundred yards, joined the town to an island, whose perpendicular sides forbade entrance save by the causeway which ended on an unfinished entrenchment and battery.

On the neck of land were sand hills, the highest, called the Catalina, being scarped and crowned with a field-work holding a twelve-pounder. This hill masked the causeway towards the enemy, and with the tower of the Gusmans, which was armed with a ship eighteen-pounder, flanked the western front of the tower. This tower gun also shot clear over Tarifa to the slope where the French batteries were expected, and there were a ship of the line, a frigate, and some gun-boats, anchored to flank the approaches.

Smith deterred the enemy from attacking the western front by the flanking fire of a fortified convent beyond the walls, by the Catalina hill, and by the appearance of the shipping; but he deceitfully tempted an attack on the eastern front and the line of the torrent, whose bed rendered the inner depth of wall greater than the outer. There he loopholed the houses behind, opened communications to the rear, and barricaded the streets; so that the enemy, after forcing the breach, would have been confined between the houses on the inclined planes, exposed on each side to musketry from loopholes and windows, and in front to a fire from the Gusmans, which looked up the bed of the torrent; finally the garrison could have taken refuge in that castle and tower, which, high and massive, were fitted to cover the evacuation, and were provided with ladders for the troops to descend and retreat to the island under protection of the Catalina.

There was no want of guns. Besides those of the Catalina, there were in the island twelve pieces, comprising four twenty-four pounders and two ten-inch mortars; in the town were six field-pieces, with four cohorns on the east front; an eighteen-pounder was on the Gusmans, a howitzer on the portcullis tower, and two field-pieces were in reserve for sallies: yet most of the island ordnance was mounted after the investment, and the walls and towers of the town were too weak and narrow to sustain heavy guns; hence only three field-pieces and the cohorns did in fact reply to the enemy’s fire.

The garrison, including six hundred Spanish infantry and one hundred horse of that nation, amounted to two thousand five hundred men, of whom seven hundred were in the island, one hundred in the Catalina, two hundred in the convent, and fifteen hundred in the town.

On the 19th of December, General Laval, having eight thousand men, drove in the advanced posts, but was with a sharp skirmish designedly led towards the eastern front.

The 20th the place was invested, and the 21st some French troops having incautiously approached the western front, Captain Wren of the 11th, suddenly descended from the Catalina and carried them off. In the night the enemy approached close to the walls of that front, but in the morning Wren again fell on them; and at the same time a sally of discovery was made from the convent so vigorously that Lieutenant Welstead of the 82nd, entering one of the enemy’s camps captured a field-piece; he was unable to bring it off in face of the French reserves, yet the latter were drawn by the skirmish under the fire of the ships, of the island, and of the town, whereby they suffered severely and with difficulty recovered the captured piece.

In the night of the 22nd the anticipations of the British engineer were realized. The enemy broke ground five hundred yards from the eastern front, and worked assiduously until the 26th, under a destructive fire, replying principally with wall-pieces, which would have done much mischief if the garrison had not been copiously supplied with sand-bags.

On the 23rd the ships were driven off in a gale; on the 29th the French guns opened against the town and their howitzers against the island; the piece at the Gusmans was dismounted, yet quickly re-established; but the ramparts came down by flakes, and in a few hours opened a wide breach a little to the English right of the portcullis tower. Skerrett then proposed to abandon the place, and though strenuously opposed by Major King and the engineer Smith, he would have done so, if General Campbell, hearing of this intention, had not called away the transports. Tarifa was indeed open to assault and escalade. But behind the breach the depth to the street was fourteen feet, and Smith had covered the ground below with iron gratings, having every second bar turned up; the houses were also prepared and garrisoned, and the troops well disposed on the ramparts, each regiment having its own quarter. The breach was held by the 87th under Colonel Gough.22 On his left were some riflemen: on his right some Spaniards should have been, yet were not, and two companies of the 47th took their place.

In the night of the 29th the enemy fired salvos of grape, but the besieged cleared the foot of the breach between the discharges.

The 30th the breaching fire was renewed, and the wall, broken for sixty feet, offered an easy ascent; yet the besieged again removed the rubbish, and in the night were augmenting the defences, when, flooded by rain, the torrent brought down from the French camp a mass of planks, fascines, gabions, and dead bodies, which broke the palisades, bent the portcullis back, and with the surge of waters injured the defences behind: a new passage was thus opened in the wall, yet the damage was repaired before morning, and the troops confidently awaited the assault.

In the night the torrent subsided as quickly as it had risen, and at daylight a living stream of French grenadiers gliding swiftly down its bed, as if assured of victory, arrived without shout or tumult within a few yards of the walls; but then, instead of quitting the hollow to reach the breach, they dashed like the torrent of the night against the portcullis. The 87th, previously silent and observant, as if at a spectacle, now arose and with a shout and a crashing volley smote the head of the French column; the leading officer, covered with wounds, fell against the portcullis grate and gave up his sword through the bars to Colonel Gough: the French drummer, a gallant boy, while beating the charge dropped lifeless by his officer’s side, and the dead and wounded filled the hollow. The survivors breaking out right and left, and spreading along the slopes of ground under the ramparts, opened an irregular musketry, and at the same time men from the trenches leaped into pits digged in front and shot fast; but no diversion at other points was made and the storming column was dreadfully shattered. The ramparts streamed fire, and a field-piece sent a tempest of grape whistling through the French ranks in such a dreadful manner that, unable to endure the torment, they plunged once more into the hollow and regained their camp, while a shout of victory mingled with the sound of musical instruments passed round the wall of the town.

The allies had five officers wounded, and thirty-one men killed or hurt; the French dead covered the slopes in front of the rampart, and choked the bed of the river: ten wounded officers, of whom only one survived, were brought in by the breach, and Skerrett, compassionating the sufferings of the others, and admiring their bravery, permitted Laval to fetch them off. The siege was then suspended, for the rain had partially ruined the French batteries, interrupted their communications, and stopped their supplies; and the torrent, again swelling, broke the stockades of the allies and injured their retrenchments: some vessels also, coming from Gibraltar with ammunition, were wrecked on the coast. Nevertheless a fresh assault was expected until the night of the 4th, when frequent firing in the French camp without any bullets reaching the town, indicated that the enemy were destroying guns previous to retreating. Hence, at daylight the besieged, issuing from the convent, commenced a skirmish with the rear-guard, but were impeded by a heavy storm and returned, after making a few prisoners. Laval’s misfortunes did not end there. His troops had contracted sickness, many deserted, and it was computed the expedition cost him a thousand men, while the allies lost only one hundred and fifty, and but one officer, Longley of the engineers, was killed.

Such is the simple tale of Tarifa, yet the true history of its defence cannot there be found. Colonel Skerrett obtained the credit, but he and Lord Proby, second in command, always wished to abandon both town and island. It was the engineer Smith’s vigour and capacity which overmatched the enemy’s strength without, and the weakness of those commanders within, repressing despondency where he failed to excite confidence. Next in merit was the artillery captain, Mitchel, a noble soldier who has since perished in the Syrian campaign against Ibrahim Pasha: his talent and energy at Tarifa were conspicuous.

English Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. (Jan. 1812.)

Lord Wellington, unable to maintain the blockade of Rodrigo, had withdrawn behind the Coa in November and widely spread his army for provisions; but the year 1812 opened favourably for his views. Napoleon, then preparing for his gigantic invasion of Russia, had recalled from Spain many old officers and sixty thousand of the best soldiers, including all the Imperial Guards. The Army of the North, thus reduced, was ordered to quarter about Burgos, while the Army of Portugal, leaving troops to guard Almaraz, moved across the Gredos mountains into the Salamanca country. It had been reinforced with eighteen thousand men, but was spread for subsistence from Salamanca to the Asturias on one side, and to the valley of the Tagus and Toledo on the other; Montbrun also had been detached from it to Valencia. The Army of the Centre was in a state of great disorder, and the king and Marmont were at open discord. In this state of affairs, seeing that Ciudad Rodrigo was weakly guarded, that Marmont, deceived by previous combination, had no suspicion of a siege, that Soult’s attention was fixed on Tarifa; seeing in fine that opportunity was ripe, Lord Wellington leaped with both feet on Ciudad Rodrigo.

Thirty-five thousand men, cavalry included, were disposable for this siege, the materials for which were placed in villages on the left of the Azava river, and the ammunition in Almeida, where seventy pieces of ordnance had been secretly collected. Hired carts and mules were employed to bring up the stores, but for the guns the means of transport were so scanty that only thirty-eight could be brought to the trenches. A bridge was laid down on the Agueda, six miles below the fortress, on the 1st of January, and the investment was designed for the 6th, but the native carters took two days to travel ten miles of good road with empty carts, and it could not be made before the 8th: to find fault with them was dangerous, as they deserted on the slightest offence.

Rodrigo was on high ground overhanging the right bank of the Agueda; an old rampart thirty feet high, nearly circular and flanked with a few projections, formed the body of the fortress; a second bulwark, called a Fausse-braye, with a ditch and covered way, enclosed this rampart, yet was placed so low on the descent, as to give little cover to the main wall.

Beyond the walls, on the side farthest from the river, the suburb of Francisco was intrenched, and within it two large convents were fortified; the convent of Santa Cruz on the opposite side, near the river, was fortified as another outwork; and nearly between those points was an isolated ridge called the Little Teson, of less elevation than the place but only one hundred and fifty yards distant.

Behind the Little Teson and parallel to it, was another ridge called the Great Teson, which at six hundred yards overlooked the lesser one, and saw over it to the bottom of the ditch.

In the centre of the large Teson, on the edge towards the town, was an enclosed and palisadoed redoubt called Francisco, which was supported by the fire of two guns and a howitzer, placed on the flat roof of a convent in the fortified suburb. An old castle, forming part of the walls, gave access to the bridge at pistol-shot distance, but was of little value in defence.

On the side of the Tesons the ground was rocky, the front of the place better covered with outworks, and more fire could be directed on the trenches; yet that line of attack was adopted with reason, because elsewhere the batteries must have been constructed on the edge of the counterscarp to see low enough for breaching; whereas the lesser Teson would enable them to strike over the glacis, and a deep gully near the latter offered cover for the miner. It was therefore resolved to storm Fort Francisco, form a lodgement there, open the first parallel along the greater Teson, place thirty-three pieces in counter-batteries, ruin the defences and drive the besieged from the convent of Francisco; then, working forward by the sap, breaching batteries were to be raised on the lesser Teson and the counterscarp blowed in, while seven guns demolished a weak turret on the left, and opened a second breach to turn retrenchments behind the principal one. Previous to breaking ground, Carlos EspaÑa and Julian Sanchez were pushed to the Tormes, and then four British divisions and Pack’s Portuguese commenced the siege; but as neither fuel nor cover were to be had on that side of the Agueda, the troops kept their quarters on the hither bank, cooking their provisions there and fording the river each day in severe frost and snow. Eight hundred carts drawn by horses had been constructed by the artificers, and were now the surest means for bringing up ammunition; but so many delays were anticipated from the irregularity of the native carters and muleteers, and the chances of weather, that Wellington calculated upon an operation of twenty-four days. He hoped to steal that time from his adversaries, yet knew, if he failed, the clash of arms would draw their scattered troops to this quarter as tinkling bells draw swarming bees: and to make them thus gather and consume their magazines was an essential part of his warfare.

On the 8th of January the light division and Pack’s Portuguese forded the Agueda, three miles above the fortress, and took post beyond the great Teson, where they remained quiet, and as there was no regular investment the enemy did not think the siege was commenced. But in the evening the troops stood to their arms, and Colonel Colborne, now commanding the 52nd, taking two companies from each regiment of the light division stormed the redoubt of Francisco. This he did with so much fury that the assailants appeared to be at one and the same time in the ditch, mounting the parapets, fighting on the top of the rampart, and forcing the gorge of the redoubt, where the explosion of a French shell had burst the gate open. Of the defenders, a few were killed and forty made prisoners. The post being thus taken with a loss of only twenty-four men and officers, a lodgement was begun on the right, because the fort was instantly covered with shot and shells from the town. This tempest continued through the night, yet at daybreak the parallel, six hundred yards in length, was sunk three feet deep, four wide, and a communication over the Teson was completed: thus the siege gained several days by this well-managed assault.

On the 9th the first division took the trenches, and the place was encircled by posts to prevent any external communication. In the night twelve hundred workmen commenced three counter-batteries for eleven guns each, under a heavy fire of shells and grape; before daylight the labourers obtained cover, and a ditch was sunk in front to provide earth for the batteries, which were made eighteen feet thick at top to resist the powerful artillery of the place.

On the 10th the fourth division relieved the trenches, and a thousand men laboured, yet in great peril, for the besieged had a superabundance of ammunition and did not spare it. In the night a communication from the parallel to the batteries was opened, and on the 11th the third division undertook the siege.

This day the magazines in the batteries were excavated and the approaches widened; but the enemy’s fire was destructive, and shells fell so on the ditch in front of the batteries that the troops were withdrawn, and earth raised from the inside. Great damage was also sustained from salvos of shells with long fuzes, whose simultaneous explosion cut away the parapets in a strange manner, and in the night a howitzer from the garden of the Francisco convent killed many men.

On the 12th the light division resumed work, and the riflemen during a thick fog digged pits for themselves in front of the trenches, from whence they picked off the enemy’s gunners; yet the weather was so cold and the besieged shot so briskly little progress was made. The 13th, the same causes impeded the labourers of the first division. The scarcity of transport also baulked the operations, for one third only of the native carts arrived, the drivers were very indolent, most of the twenty-four pound ammunition was still at Villa de Ponte, and intelligence arrived that Marmont was preparing to succour the place. Wellington, thus pressed, decided to open a breach with his counter-batteries, which were only six hundred yards from the curtain, and then storm without blowing in the counterscarp: in other words, to overstep the rules of science and sacrifice life rather than time, for the capricious Agueda might in one night flood and enable a small French force to relieve the place.

The whole army was now brought up and posted in villages on the Coa, ready to cross the Agueda and give battle. Hill also sent a division across the Tagus, lest Marmont, despairing to save Rodrigo, should fall on the communications by Castello Branco and Villa Velha.

In the night of the 13th the batteries were armed with twenty-eight guns, the approaches were continued by the flying sap, and the Santa Cruz convent was surprised by the Germans of the first division, which secured the right flank of the trenches.

On the 14th the enemy, who had observed that the men in the trenches, when relieved, went off in a disorderly manner, made a sally and overturned the gabions of the sap; they even penetrated to the parallel, and were upon the point of entering the batteries, when a few workmen getting together checked them until a support arrived. The guns were thus saved, but this sally, the death of the engineer on duty, and the heavy fire from the town, delayed the opening of the breaching-batteries. However, at half-past four in the evening twenty-five heavy guns battered the fausse-braye and ramparts, while two pieces smote the convent of Francisco. Then was beheld a spectacle fearful and sublime. For the French replied with more than fifty pieces, and the bellowing of eighty large guns shook the ground far and wide; the smoke rested in heavy volumes upon the battlements of the place, or curled in light wreaths about the numerous spires, and the shells hissing through the air seemed fiery serpents leaping from the darkness; the walls crashed to the stroke of the bullet, and the distant mountains, faintly returning the sound, appeared to moan over the falling city. When night put an end to this turmoil, the quick clatter of musketry was heard like the pattering of hail after a peal of thunder, for the 40th Regiment assaulted and carried the convent of Francisco, and established itself in the suburb on the left of the attack.

Next day the ramparts were again battered, and fell so fast it was judged expedient to commence the small breach, wherefore in the night five more guns were mounted. The 16th, at daylight, the batteries recommenced, but at eight o’clock a thick fog compelled them to desist; nevertheless the small breach was open and the place was summoned, yet without effect. At night the parallel on the Lower Teson was extended, a sharp musketry was directed against the great breach, and the riflemen of the light division, from their pits, picked off the enemy’s gunners.

The 17th the fire on both sides was heavy and the wall was beaten down in large cantles; but several of the besiegers’ guns were dismounted, their batteries injured, many men killed, the general of artillery wounded, and the sap entirely ruined. The riflemen in the pits were overpowered with grape, yet towards evening recovered the upper hand; the French could then only fire from distant embrasures, and in the night a new battery against the lesser breach was armed, and that on the Lower Teson was raised to afford more cover.

On the 18th, the besiegers’ fire being resumed with great violence, a turret was shaken at the small breach, and the large breach became practicable in the middle; the enemy commenced retrenching it and the sap made no progress, the engineer was badly wounded, and a twenty-four pounder, bursting, killed several men. In the night the battery on the Lower Teson was improved, and a field-piece and howitzer from thence played on the great breach to destroy the retrenchments.

On the 19th both breaches became practicable, the assault was ordered, the battering-guns were turned against the artillery of the ramparts, and the order of attack terminated with these remarkable words, “Ciudad Rodrigo must be stormed this evening.”—“We will do it,” was the soldiers’ comment.

For the storm the third and light divisions and Pack’s Portuguese were organized in four parts.

1°. Right attack. On the extreme right, troops posted in some houses beyond the bridge were to cross the river and escalade an outwork in front of the castle, where there was no ditch, but where two guns commanded the junction of the counterscarp. On their left, two regiments, assembled behind the convent of Santa Cruz with a third in reserve, were to enter the ditch at the extremity of the counterscarp, escalade the fausse-braye, and scour it on their left as far as the great breach.

2°. Great breach. One hundred and eighty men carrying hay-bags were to move out of the second parallel, followed by a storming party, and supported by Mackinnon’s brigade of the third division.

3°. Left attack. The light division, assembled behind the convent of Francisco, was to send three rifle companies to scour the fausse-braye on the right. At the same time a storming party, preceded by men carrying hay-sacks and followed by the division, was to assault the small breach, detaching men, when the fausse-braye should be passed, to their right to assist the main assault, to the left to force a passage at the Salamanca gate.

4°. False attack. An escalade, to be attempted by Pack’s Portuguese at the opposite side of the town.

The right attack was conducted by Colonel O’Toole. Five hundred volunteers under Major Manners, with a forlorn hope under Lieut. Mackie, composed the storming party of the third division. Three hundred volunteers led by Major George Napier,23 with a forlorn hope under Lieutenant Gurwood, composed the storming party of the light division.

The deserters, of which there were many, had told the governor the light division was come out of its turn, and it must be to storm, yet he took no heed, and all the troops reached their posts without seeming to attract attention; but before the signal was given, and while Wellington, who in person had pointed out the lesser breach to Major Napier, was still on the ground, the attack at the right commenced, and was instantly taken up along the whole line. The space between the trenches and the ditch was then suddenly covered with soldiers and ravaged by a tempest of grape from the ramparts; for though the storming parties in the centre jumped out of the parallel when the first shout arose, so rapid were the troops on their right, that before they could reach the ditch, Ridge, Dunkin, and Campbell, with the 5th, 77th, and 94th Regiments, had already scoured the fausse-braye, and pushed up the great breach amidst bursting shells, the whistling of grape and musketry, and the shrill cries of the French, who were driven fighting behind the inner retrenchments. There they rallied, and, aided by musketry from the houses, made hard battle for their post; none would go back on either side; yet the British could not get forward, and the bodies of men and officers, falling in heaps, choked up the passage, which from minute to minute was raked with grape, from two guns flanking the breach, at the distance of a few yards; yet striving and trampling alike upon dead and wounded these brave men maintained the combat.

Meanwhile the stormers of the light division, who had three hundred yards of ground to clear, would not wait for the hay-bags, and with extraordinary swiftness running to the crest of the glacis jumped down the scarp, a depth of eleven feet, and rushed up the fausse-braye under a smashing discharge of grape and musketry. The ditch was dark and intricate, and the forlorn hope inclined to the left while the stormers went straight to the breach, which was so narrow at top that a gun placed across nearly barred the opening; then the forlorn hope rejoined, and the whole rushed up, yet the head, forcibly contracted as the ascent narrowed, staggered under the fire. With the instinct of self-preservation the men snapped their muskets though they had not been allowed to load, and Napier, his arm shattered by a grape-shot, went down, but in falling called aloud to use the bayonet, while the unwounded officers instantly and simultaneously sprung to the front: the impulse of victory was thus given and with a furious shout the breach was carried. The supporting regiments, coming up abreast, then gained the rampart, the 52nd wheeled to the left, the 43rd to the right, and the place was won. During this contest, which lasted about ten minutes, the fighting at the great breach was unabated: but when the stormers and the 43rd poured along the rampart towards that quarter, the French wavered, three of their expense magazines exploded, and the third division with a mighty effort broke through the retrenchments: the garrison still fought awhile in the streets indeed, but finally fled to the castle, where the governor surrendered.

Now plunging into the town from all quarters, and throwing off all discipline, the troops committed frightful excesses; houses were soon in flames, the soldiers menaced their officers and shot each other, intoxication increased the tumult to absolute madness, and a fire being wilfully lighted in the middle of the great magazine, the town would have been blown to atoms but for the energetic coolness of some officers and a few soldiers who still preserved their senses. To excuse these excesses it was said, “the soldiers were not to be controlled.” Colonel M^cLeod of the 43rd, a young man of a noble and energetic spirit, proved the contrary. He placed guards at the breach and constrained his men to keep their ranks for a long time, but as no organized efforts were made by higher authorities, and the example was not followed, the regiment dissolved by degrees in the general disorder.

Three hundred French fell, fifteen hundred were made prisoners, and immense stores of ammunition with a hundred and fifty pieces of artillery, including the battering-train of Marmont’s army, were captured. The loss of the allies was twelve hundred soldiers and ninety officers, of which six hundred and fifty men and sixty officers had been slain or hurt at the breaches. General Craufurd and General Mackinnon, the former a person of great ability, were killed, and with them died many gallant men; amongst others a captain of the 45th, of whom it has been felicitously said, that “three generals and seventy other officers had fallen, yet the soldiers fresh from the strife only talked of Hardyman.” General Vandeleur, commanding the light division after Craufurd fell, was badly wounded; so was Colonel Colborne, with a crowd of inferior rank; and unhappily the slaughter did not end with the storm; for as the prisoners and their escort were marching out by the breach, an accidental explosion killed numbers of both.

This siege lasted only twelve days, half the time originally calculated, yet from the inexperience of engineers and soldiers, and the extraordinarily heavy fire of the place, the works were rather slowly executed. The cold also impeded the labourers, yet with less severe frost the trenches would have been overflowed, because in open weather the water rises everywhere to within six inches of the surface. The greatest impediment was the badness of the cutting tools furnished from the storekeeper-general’s office in England; the profits of the contractor seemed to be the only thing respected: the engineers eagerly sought for French cutlery, because the English was useless!

Marmont heard of the siege the 15th and made great efforts to collect his forces at Salamanca. The 26th he heard of its fall and retired to Valladolid, thus harassing his men by winter marches. Had he remained between Salamanca and Rodrigo with strong advanced guards he would have recovered the place; for on the 28th the Agueda flooded two feet over the stone bridge, and carried away the allies’ trestle-bridge. The army was then on the left bank, the breaches not closed, and no resistance could be offered. The greatest captains are the very slaves of fortune.

When Ciudad Rodrigo fell, Wellington’s eyes were turned towards Badajos. He desired to invest it again early in March, because the flooding of the rivers in Beira, from the periodical rains, would then render a French incursion into Portugal difficult, enable him to carry nearly all his forces to the siege, and impede the junction of Soult and Marmont in Estremadura. Many obstacles arose, some military, some political, some from the perverseness of coadjutors and the errors of subordinates; yet on the 5th of March the troops were well on their way towards the Tagus, and then the English general, who had remained on the Coa to the last moment that he might not awaken the enemy’s suspicions, gave up Rodrigo to CastaÑos and departed for Elvas.

Victor Alten’s cavalry was left on the Yeltes in advance of the Agueda to mask the movements, but Marmont was unable to measure his adversary’s talent or fathom his designs. He had again spread his army far and wide, appeared to expect no further winter operations, and having lost all his secret friends and emissaries at Ciudad Rodrigo, where they had been discovered and put to death by Carlos EspaÑa, with an overstrained severity that gave general disgust, knew nothing of the allies’ march to the Tagus. On the other hand the projected siege was, by the incredibly vexatious conduct of the Portuguese Regency, delayed ten days, and thrown into the violent equinoctial rains, which greatly augmented the difficulties. It was in vain Wellington threatened, remonstrated and wasted his mental powers to devise remedies for those evils, and to impart energy and good faith to that extraordinary government. Insolent anger, falsehood or stolid indifference in all functionaries, from the highest to the lowest, met him at every turn, and the responsibility even in small matters became too onerous for subordinate officers; he was compelled to arrange every detail of service himself with the native authorities. His iron strength of body and mind were thus strained until all men wondered how they resisted, and indeed he did fall sick, but recovered after a few days.

On the 15th of March pontoons were laid over the Guadiana four miles from Elvas, where the current was dull, and two large Spanish boats being arranged as flying-bridges, Beresford crossed that river on the 16th to invest Badajos with fifteen thousand men.

Soult was then before Cadiz, but Drouet and Daricau were with ten thousand men in Estremadura; wherefore General Graham marched with three divisions of infantry and two brigades of cavalry upon Llerena, while Hill moved by Merida upon Almendralejos. These covering corps were together thirty thousand strong, five thousand being cavalry, and the whole army presented fifty-one thousand sabres and bayonets, of which twenty thousand were Portuguese. CastaÑos had gone to Gallicia, and the fifth Spanish army, under Morillo and Penne Villemur, four thousand strong, passed down the Portuguese frontier to the Lower Guadiana, intending to fall on Seville when Soult should march to succour Badajos.

As the allies advanced, Drouet moved by his right towards Medellin, to maintain the communication with Marmont by Truxillo. Hill and Graham then halted, the latter at Zafra, having Slade’s cavalry in front. Marmont meanwhile recalled his sixth division from Talavera to Castile, and four other divisions and his cavalry, quartered at Toledo, marched over the Guadarama towards Valladolid.

It was therefore manifest that he would not act this time in conjunction with Soult.

Third English Siege of Badajos. (March, 1812.)

Badajos stands between the Rivillas, a small stream, and the Guadiana, a noble river five hundred yards broad. From the angle formed by their confluence the town spread out like a fan, having eight regular bastions and curtains, with good counterscarps, covered way, and glacis.

At the meeting of the rivers, the Rivillas being there for a short distance deep and wide, was a rock one hundred feet high, crowned with an old castle, the ascent to which was not steep. This was the extreme point of defence on the enemy’s left, and from thence to the Trinidad bastion, terminating this the eastern front of resistance, an inundation protected the ramparts, one short interval excepted, which was defended by an outwork, beyond the stream, called the cunette of San Roque.

On the enemy’s right of San Roque, also beyond the Rivillas and four hundred yards from the walls, another outwork called the Picurina was constructed on an isolated hill, about the same distance from San Roque as the latter was from the castle. These two outworks had a covered communication with each other, and the San Roque had one with the town, but the inundation cut the Picurina off from the latter, and it was an inclosed and palisadoed work.

The southern front, the longest, was protected in the centre by a crown-work, constructed on the lofty Sierra de Viento, the end of which, at only two hundred yards, overlooked the walls. The remainder of that front and the western front had no outworks.

On the right bank of the Guadiana there were no houses, but the twice-besieged fort of San Christoval, three hundred feet square, stood there on a rocky height, and from its superior elevation looked into the castle, which was exactly opposite to it and consequently but five hundred yards distant. This fort also commanded the works heading the stone bridge, a quarter of a mile below stream.

Phillipon’s garrison, nearly five thousand strong, was composed of French and Hessian, and some Spanish troops in Joseph’s service. He had since the last siege made himself felt in every direction, scouring the country, defeating small guerilla bands, carrying off cattle almost from under the guns of Elvas and Campo Mayor, and pushing his spies to Ciudad Rodrigo, Lisbon, and even to Ayamonte, by which he gained a knowledge of the forces, material and personal, combined against his fortress, and prepared accordingly. He had formed an interior retrenchment at the castle, and mounted more guns there; he had strengthened San Christoval on the side before attacked, and made a covered communication to the bridge-head; he had constructed two ravelins on the south front, and commenced a third with counterguards for the bastions. At the eastern front he had dug a cunette at the bottom of the great ditch, which was in some parts filled with water. The gorge of the Pardaleras was enclosed and connected with the body of the place, from whence it was overlooked by powerful batteries; the glacis of the western front was mined, and the arch of a bridge behind the San Roque was built up to cause the inundation. The inhabitants had been compelled to store food for three months, and provisions and ammunition had come in on the 10th and 16th of February, yet the supply of powder was inadequate, and there were not many shells.

Lord Wellington desired to assail the western front, but the engineer had not mortars, miners, or guns enough, or the means of bringing up stores for that attack: indeed the want of transport had again compelled the drawing of stores from Elvas, to the manifest hazard of that fortress. Hence, here, as at Ciudad Rodrigo, time was paid for with the loss of life, and the crimes of politicians were atoned by the blood of soldiers.

It was finally agreed to attack the bastion of Trinidad, because the counterguard there was unfinished, and the bastion could be battered from the Picurina. The first parallel was therefore to embrace that fort, the San Roque and the eastern front, so as to enable the counter-batteries to destroy the armaments of the southern fronts, which bore against the Picurina hill. The Picurina was to be stormed, and from thence the Trinidad and the next bastion, called the Santa Maria, were to be breached. The guns were then to be turned against the connecting curtain, known to be of weak masonry, and to open a third breach, whereby a storming party might turn any retrenchments behind the other breaches. In this way the inundation could be avoided. A French deserter declared, and truly, that the ditch was eighteen feet deep at the Trinidad, yet Wellington was so confident that he resolved to storm the place there without blowing in the counterscarp.

The battering train was of fifty-two pieces, including sixteen twenty-four-pound howitzers for throwing Shrapnel-shells; but this species of missile, much talked of at the time, was little prized by Lord Wellington, who had detected its insufficiency, save with large guns and as a common shell; and partly to avoid expense, partly from a dislike to injure the inhabitants, neither in this, nor in any former siege did he use mortars. Here indeed he could not have brought them up, for the peasantry, and even the ordenanÇa, employed to move the battering train, although well paid, deserted. Of nine hundred gunners present three hundred were British, the rest Portuguese; there were one hundred and fifty sappers, volunteers from the third division, unskilled, yet of signal bravery.

The engineer’s park was established behind the heights of St. Michael which faced the Picurina, and in the night of the 17th, eighteen hundred men broke ground one hundred and sixty yards from that fort. A tempest stifled the sound of the pickaxes, and a communication four thousand feet long, with a parallel of six hundred yards, three feet deep and three feet six inches wide, was opened without hindrance; but when day broke the fort was reinforced, and a sharp musketry, interspersed with discharges from some field-pieces and aided by heavy guns from the body of the place, was directed on the trenches.

In the night of the 18th two batteries were traced, the parallel prolonged, and the previous works improved; but the garrison raised the parapets of the Picurina, lined the top of the covered way with sand-bags, and planted musketeers to gall the men in the trenches.

The 19th, secret notice of a sally being received, the guards were reinforced; nevertheless, at one o’clock some cavalry came out by the Talavera gate, and thirteen hundred infantry under General Vielland, second in command, filed unobserved into the communication between the Picurina and San Roque; one hundred men were also ready in the former, and all these troops, jumping out at once, drove the workmen off and began to demolish the parallel. Previous to this outbreak the French cavalry had commenced a sham fight on the right of the trenches, and the smaller party, pretending to fly toward the besiegers, answered Portuguese to the challenge of the picquets and were allowed to pass. Elated by their stratagem, they galloped to the engineer’s park, a thousand yards in rear, where they killed some men before succour came; meanwhile the troops at the parallel rallied on the relief and beat the infantry back along the front of the ramparts even to the castle.

In this fight the besieged lost three hundred men and officers, the besiegers one hundred and fifty; but the chief engineer, Fletcher, was badly wounded, and several hundred intrenching tools were carried off; Phillipon had promised a high price for each, which turned out ill, because the soldiers, instead of pursuing briskly, dispersed to gather the tools. After the action a squadron of dragoons and six field-pieces were placed behind the St. Michael ridge, and a signal-post was established on the lofty Sierra de Viento, to give notice of the enemy’s motions.

The weather continued wet and boisterous, making the labour very severe, yet in the night of the 19th the parallel was opened on its whole length; the 20th it was enlarged, and though the rain, flooding the trenches, greatly impeded progress, the work was extended to the left. Three counter-batteries were then commenced in its rear, because the ground was too soft in front to sustain the guns, and the San Roque was within three hundred yards; hence, the parallel, eighteen hundred yards long, being only guarded by fourteen hundred men, a few bold soldiers might by a sudden rush have spiked the guns in front of the trench.

A slight sally was this day repulsed, and a shoulder was given to the right of the parallel to cover that flank; in good time, for next day two field-pieces placed on the right bank of the Guadiana, tried to rake the trenches and were baffled by this shoulder. Indications of a similar design against the left flank, from the Pardaleras hill, were then observed, and three hundred men with two guns were posted on that side in some broken ground.

In the night, though the works went on, rain again impeded progress, and the besiegers, failing to drain the lower parts of the parallel by cuts, made an artificial bottom of sand-bags. On the other hand the besieged, thinking the curtain adjoining the castle was the object of attack, threw up earth in front and removed the houses behind; they also made a covered communication from the Trinidad gate to the San Roque, to take this supposed attack in reverse; and as the labour of digging was great, hung up brown cloth which appeared like earth, by which ingenious expedient they passed unseen between those points.

Vauban’s maxim, that a perfect investment is the first requisite in a siege, had been neglected to spare labour, yet the great master’s art was soon vindicated by his countryman. Phillipon, finding the right bank of the Guadiana free, made a battery in the night for three field-pieces, which at daylight raked the trenches, the shots sweeping the parallel destructively; the loss was great and would have been greater but for the soft ground, which prevented the touch and bound of the bullets. Orders were therefore sent to the fifth division, then at Campo Mayor, to invest the place on the other bank, but those troops were distant and misfortunes accumulated. Heavy rain filled the trenches, the Guadiana run the fixed bridge under water, sunk twelve pontoons, and broke the tackle of the flying bridges; the provisions of the army could not be brought over, the battering-guns and ammunition were still on the right bank, and the siege was on the point of being raised. In a few days however the river subsided, some Portuguese craft were brought up to form another flying bridge, the pontoons saved were employed as row-boats, and the communication thus secured for the rest of the siege.

On the 23rd rain again filled the trenches, the works crumbled and the attack was entirely suspended. Next day the fifth division invested the place on the right bank, the weather cleared, and the batteries, armed with twenty-one guns and seven five-and-a-half-inch howitzers, opened on the 25th, but were so vigorously answered, that one howitzer was dismounted, and several artillery and engineer officers killed. Nevertheless the San Roque was silenced, the garrison of the Picurina so galled by marksmen that none dared look over the parapet, and as the external appearance of that fort did not indicate much strength General Kempt was charged to assault it in the night.

This outward seeming of the Picurina was fallacious; it was very strong. The fronts were well covered by the glacis, the flanks deep, the rampart, fourteen feet perpendicular from the bottom of the ditch, was guarded with slanting pales above, and from thence to the top was an earthen slope of sixteen feet. A few palings had been knocked off at the covered way, and the parapet, slightly damaged, was repaired with sand-bags, but the ditch was deep, narrow at the bottom, and flanked by four splinter-proof casemates. Seven guns were mounted. The entrance in the rear was protected with three rows of thick paling, the garrison was above two hundred strong, and every man had two muskets; the top of the rampart was garnished with loaded shells, a retrenched guard-house formed a second internal defence, and small mines, with a loopholed gallery under the counterscarp to take the assailants in rear, were begun but not finished.

Five hundred men of the third division assembled for the attack. Two hundred under Major Rudd were to turn the fort on the left, an equal force under Major Shaw to turn it by the right, each being to detach half their force to seize the communication with San Roque and intercept succour coming from the town. The remainder were to attack Picurina by the gorge, leaving one hundred under Captain Powis as a reserve. The engineers, Holloway, Stanway, and Gipps, with twenty-four sappers bearing hatchets and ladders, guided these columns, and fifty men of the light division, likewise provided with axes, were to move out of the trenches at the moment of attack.

Assault of Picurina. (March, 1812.)

The night was fine and the stormers quickly reached the fort, which, black and silent before, then seemed a mass of fire, under which the stormers run up to the palisades in rear and endeavoured to break through; the destructive musketry and thickness of the pales rendered their efforts nugatory, wherefore, turning against the sides of the work they strove to get in there, but the depth of the ditch and the slanting stakes at the top of the brickwork again baffled them. At this time, the French shooting fast and dangerously, the crisis appeared so imminent that Kempt sent the reserve headlong against the front. The fight was thus supported and the carnage terrible. A battalion which came from the town to succour the fort was beaten back by the men in the communication, the guns from the town and castle then opened, the guard of the trenches replied with musketry, rockets were thrown up by the besieged, and the shrill sound of alarm-bells mixing with the shouts of the combatants increased the tumult.

Still the Picurina sent out streams of fire, by the light of which dark figures were seen furiously struggling on the ramparts; for Powis had escaladed in front where the artillery had broken the pales; and the other assailants, throwing their ladders in the manner of bridges from the brink of the ditch to the slanting stakes thus passed, and all were fighting hand to hand with the enemy. Meanwhile the axemen of the light division, compassing the fort like prowling wolves, discovered the gate, and hewing it down broke in by the rear. Nevertheless the struggle continued. Powis, Holloway, Gipps, and Oates fell wounded on or beyond the rampart, Nixon of the 52nd was shot two yards within the gate, Shaw, Rudd, and nearly all the other officers of the 79th had fallen outside, and it was not until half the garrison were killed, that Gaspar Thiery, the commandant, surrendered with eighty-six men, while others, not many, rushing out of the gate endeavoured to cross the inundation and were drowned.

Phillipon had thought to delay the siege five or six days by the resistance of Picurina, and one day later this would have happened; for the mines and loop-holed gallery in the counterscarp would have been completed, and the work was too well covered by the glacis to be quickly ruined by fire. His calculations were baffled by this heroic assault, which, lasting only an hour, cost four officers and fifty men killed, fifteen officers and two hundred and fifty men wounded; and so vehement was the fight throughout, that the garrison forgot or had no time to roll over the shells and combustibles on the ramparts. Phillipon did not conceal the danger accruing to Badajos from the loss of the Picurina, but he stimulated his soldiers’ courage, by calling to their recollection, how infinitely worse than death it was to be the inmate of an English prison-hulk—an appeal which must have been deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison-ships of England.

When Picurina was taken three battalions advanced to secure it, and though a great turmoil and firing from the town continued until midnight, a lodgement in the works and communication with the first parallel were established; the second parallel was also begun, but at daylight the redoubt was overwhelmed with fire, no troops could remain and the lodgement was destroyed. In the evening the sappers effected another lodgement on the flanks, the second parallel was then opened in its whole length, and next day the counter-batteries on the right of Picurina exchanged a vigorous fire with the town.

In the night of the 27th three breaching-batteries were traced out. The first, between the Picurina and the inundation, to breach the right face of the Trinidad. The second, on the Picurina, to breach the Santa Maria. The third, on a prolonged line of the front attacked, contained three Shrapnel howitzers to scour the ditch and prevent the garrison working in it; for Phillipon, having now discovered the true line of attack, was raising the counterguard of the Trinidad and the imperfect ravelin. At daybreak these works being well furnished with gabions and sandbags were lined with musketeers, who severely galled the workmen employed on the breaching-batteries, and the artillery practice was brisk on both sides. Two of the besiegers’ guns were dismounted, the gabions placed in front of the batteries to protect the workmen were knocked over, and the musketry became so destructive the men were withdrawn to throw up earth from the inside.

In the night of the 27th the second parallel was extended on the right, to raise batteries against San Roque and the dam which held up the inundation, and to breach the curtain behind: but the ground was hard, the moon shone brightly, the labourers were quite exposed and the work was relinquished.

On the 28th the screen of gabions before the batteries was restored, the workmen resumed their labours outside and the parallel was improved. The besieged then withdrew their guns from San Roque, yet their marksmen still shot from thence with great exactness, and the plunging fire from the castle dismounted two howitzers in one of the counter-batteries. During the night the French observed the tracing-string, marking the direction of the sap in front of San Roque, and a daring fellow, creeping out before the workmen arrived, brought it on the line of the castle fire, whereby some loss was sustained.

In the night the howitzer battery was re-armed with twenty-four pounders to play on the San Roque, and a new breaching-battery was traced on the site of the Picurina; the second parallel was extended by sap, and a trench was digged for riflemen in front of the batteries.

The 29th a slight sally made on the right bank of the river was repulsed by the Portuguese; but the sap at San Roque was ruined by the enemy’s fire, and the besieged continued to raise the counterguard and ravelin of the Trinidad, and to strengthen the front attacked. The besiegers armed two batteries with eighteen-pounders, which opened next day against Santa Maria, yet with little effect, and the explosion of an expense magazine killed many men.

While the siege was thus proceeding, Soult, having little fear for the town but designing a great battle, was carefully organizing a powerful force to unite with Drouet and Daricau. Those generals had endeavoured to hold the district of La Serena and keep open the communication with Marmont by Medellin and Truxillo, but Graham and Hill forced them into the Morena; and on the other side of the country Morillo and Penne-Villemur descended to the Lower Guadiana, to fall on Seville when Soult should advance. Nor were there wanting other combinations to embarrass and delay that marshal. In February, a Spanish army had assembled in the Ronda to fall on Seville from that side also, which compelled Soult to send troops there, and fatally delayed his march to Estremadura. Marmont was however concentrating his army in the Salamanca country, and it was rumoured he meant to attack Ciudad Rodrigo. This disquieted Wellington: for though Marmont had no battering-train, the Spanish generals and engineers had neglected the repairs of the place, and had not even brought up from St. JÃo da Pesqueira the provisions given to them from the British stores: the fortress therefore had only thirty days’ supply, and Almeida was in as bad a state.

On the 30th, it being known that Soult was advancing from Cordova, the fifth division was brought over the Guadiana as a reserve to the covering army, leaving a Portuguese brigade with some cavalry of the same nation to maintain the investment on the right bank. The siege was then urged on, forty-eight pieces of artillery being in constant play, and the sap against San Roque advancing: the French fire was however destructive, and their progress in strengthening the front attacked was visible.

On the 1st of April the sap was pushed close to San Roque, the Trinidad bastion crumbled under the stroke of the bullet, and the flank of the Santa Maria, which was casemated, also began to yield. Next day the face of the Trinidad was broken, but the Santa Maria casemates being laid open the bullets were lost in their cavities, and Phillipon commenced a retrenchment to cut off the whole of the attacked front from the town.

In the night a new battery against San Roque being armed, two officers with some sappers glided behind that outwork, gagged the sentinel, placed powder-barrels and a match against the dam of the inundation and retired undiscovered. The explosion did not destroy the dam, the inundation remained and the sap made no progress, because of the French musketeers; for though the besiegers’ marksmen slew many, reinforcements were sent across the inundation by means of a raft with parapets, and men also passed unseen behind the cloth communication, from the Trinidad. But the crisis of the siege was now approaching rapidly. The breaches were nearly practicable, Soult had effected his junction with Drouet and Daricau; and Wellington, who had not sufficient force to assault the place and give battle at the same time, resolved to leave two divisions in the trenches and fight at Albuera. In this view Graham fell back towards that place, and Hill, destroying the bridge at Merida, marched to Talavera Real.

Time was now, as in war it always is, a great object, and the anxiety on both sides redoubled. Soult was however still at Llerena when, the breaches being declared practicable, the assault was ordered for that evening, and Leith’s division recalled to the siege; yet a careful personal examination caused Wellington to doubt, and he delayed the storm, until a third breach, as originally projected, should be formed in the curtain between Trinidad and Maria. This could not be commenced before morning, and during the night the French workmen laboured assiduously at their retrenchments, despite of the showers of grape with which the batteries scoured the ditch and the breach. On the 6th all the batteries were turned against the curtain, the bad masonry crumbled rapidly away, in two hours a yawning breach appeared and Wellington renewed his order for the assault. Eagerly then the soldiers got ready for a combat, so fiercely fought, so terribly won, so dreadful in all its circumstances, that posterity can scarcely be expected to credit the tale: but many are still alive who know that it is true.

Wellington spared Phillipon the affront of a summons, and seeing the breach strongly intrenched, the flank fire still powerful, he would not in that dread crisis trust his fortune to a single effort. Eighteen thousand daring soldiers burned for the signal of attack, he was unwilling to lose the service of any, and therefore to each division gave a task such as few generals would have the hardihood even to contemplate.

On the right, Picton’s division was to file out of the trenches, cross the Rivillas, and scale the castle walls, from eighteen to twenty-four feet high, furnished with all means of destruction, and so narrow at top that the defenders could easily reach and as easily overturn the ladders.

On the left, Leith’s division was to make a false attack on the Pardaleras, but a real assault on the distant bastion of San Vincente, where the glacis was mined, the ditch deep, the scarp thirty feet high, the parapet garnished with bold troops: Phillipon also, following his old plan, had three loaded muskets placed beside each man that the first fire might be quick and deadly.

In the centre, the fourth and light divisions, under Colville and Andrew Barnard, were to march against the breaches. Furnished like the third and fifth divisions with ladders and axes, they were preceded by storming parties of five hundred men, having each their separate forlorn hopes. The light division was to assault the Santa Maria, the fourth division the Trinidad and the curtain, both columns being divided into storming and firing parties, the former to enter the ditch, the latter to keep the crest of the glacis.

Between these attacks, Major Wilson of the 48th was to storm the San Roque with the guards of the trenches; and on the other side of the Guadiana General Power was to make a feint at the bridge-head.

At first only one brigade of the third division was to have attacked the castle, but just before the hour fixed, a sergeant of sappers deserted from the enemy and told Wellington there was but one communication from the castle to the town, whereupon he ordered the whole division to advance.

Many nice arrangements filled up this outline, and some were followed, some disregarded, for it is seldom all things are attended to in a desperate fight. The enemy was not idle. While it was yet twilight some French cavalry rode from the Pardaleras, under an officer who endeavoured to look into the trenches with the view to ascertain if an assault was intended, but the picquet there drove him and his escort back into the works, darkness then fell and the troops awaited the signal.

Assault of Badajos. (April, 1812.)

Dry but clouded was the night, the air was thick with watery exhalations from the rivers, the ramparts and trenches unusually still; yet a low murmur pervaded the latter, and in the former lights flitted here and there, while the deep voices of the sentinels proclaimed from time to time that all was well in Badajos. The French, confiding in Phillipon’s direful skill, watched from their lofty station the approach of enemies they had twice before baffled, and now hoped to drive a third time blasted and ruined from the walls. The British, standing in deep columns, were as eager to meet that fiery destruction as the others were to pour it down, and either were alike terrible for their strength, their discipline, and the passions awakened in their resolute hearts.

Former failures there were to avenge on one side, and on both leaders who furnished no excuse for weakness in the hour of trial; the possession of Badajos was become a point of personal honour with the soldiers of each nation; but the desire for glory on the British part was dashed with a hatred of the citizens from an old grudge, and recent toil and hardship, with much spilling of blood, had made many incredibly savage: for these things, which render the noble-minded averse to cruelty, harden the vulgar spirit. Numbers also, like CÆsar’s centurion, who could not forget the plunder of Avaricum, were heated with the recollection of Rodrigo and thirsted for spoil. Thus every passion found a cause of excitement, while the wondrous power of discipline bound the whole together as with a band of iron, and in the pride of arms none doubted their might to bear down every obstacle that man could oppose to their fury.

At ten o’clock, the castle, the San Roque, the breaches, the Pardaleras, the distant bastion of San Vincente, and the bridge-head on the other side of the Guadiana, were to be simultaneously assailed. It was hoped the strength of the enemy would quickly shrivel within that fiery girdle, but many are the disappointments of war. An unforeseen accident delayed the attack of the fifth division, and a lighted carcass, thrown from the castle, falling close to the third division, exposed its columns and forced it to anticipate the signal by half an hour. Thus everything was suddenly disturbed, yet the double columns of the fourth and light divisions moved silently and swiftly against the breaches, and the guard of the trenches, rushing forward with a shout, encompassed the San Roque with fire and broke in so violently that scarcely any resistance was made.

Soon however a sudden blaze of light and the rattling of musketry indicated the commencement of a more vehement combat at the castle. There Kempt, for Picton, hurt by a fall in the camp and expecting no change in the hour, was not present; there Kempt, I say, led the third division. Passing the Rivillas in single files by a narrow bridge under a terrible musketry, he re-formed his men, and run up the rugged hill with great fury, but only to fall at the foot of the castle severely wounded. Being carried back to the trenches, he met Picton at the bridge hastening to take the command, and meanwhile the troops, spreading along the front, had reared their heavy ladders, some against the lofty castle some against the adjoining front on the left, and with incredible courage ascended amidst showers of heavy stones, logs of wood, and bursting shells rolled off the parapet, while from the flanks musketry was plied with fearful rapidity, and in front the leading assailants were with pike and bayonet stabbed and the ladders pushed from the walls: and all this was attended with deafening shouts, the crash of breaking ladders, and the shrieks of crushed soldiers answering to the sullen stroke of the falling weights.

Still swarming round the remaining ladders those undaunted veterans strove who should first climb, until all were overturned, when the French shouted victory, and the British, baffled, yet untamed, fell back a few paces to take shelter under the rugged edge of the hill. There the broken ranks were re-formed, and the heroic Colonel Ridge, again springing forward, called with stentorian voice on his men to follow, and seizing a ladder raised it against the castle to the right of the former attack, where the wall was lower and where an embrasure offered some facility: a second ladder was placed alongside by the grenadier officer Canch, and the next instant he and Ridge were on the rampart, the shouting troops pressed after them, and the garrison, amazed and in a manner surprised, were driven fighting through the double gate into the town: the castle was won. Soon a reinforcement from the French reserve came to the gate, through which both sides fired and the enemy retired; but Ridge fell, and no man died that night with more glory—yet many died, and there was much glory.

All this time the tumult at the breaches was such as if the earth had been rent asunder and its central fires bursting upwards uncontrolled. The two divisions reached the glacis, just as the firing at the castle had commenced, and the flash of a single musket, discharged from the covered way as a signal, showed them the French were ready: yet no stir followed, and darkness covered the breaches. Some hay-packs were then thrown, some ladders placed, and the forlorn hopes and storming parties of the light division, five hundred in all, descended into the ditch without opposition: but then a bright flame, shooting upwards, displayed all the terrors of the scene. The ramparts crowded with dark figures and glittering arms were on one side, on the other the red columns of the British, deep and broad, coming on like streams of burning lava: it was the touch of the magician’s wand, a crash of thunder followed, and the storming parties were dashed to pieces by the explosion of hundreds of shells and powder-barrels.

For an instant the light division soldiers stood on the brink of the ditch, amazed at the terrific sight, but then, with a shout that matched even the sound of the explosion they flew down the ladders, or, disdaining their aid, leaped, reckless of the depth, into the gulf below; and nearly at the same moment, amidst a blaze of musketry that dazzled the eyes, the fourth division came running in to descend with a like fury. There were only five ladders for both columns, which were close together, and the deep cut made in the bottom of the ditch, as far as the counterguard of the Trinidad was filled with water from the inundation: into this miry snare the head of the fourth division fell, and it is said above a hundred of the fusileers, the men of Albuera, were there smothered. Those who followed, checked not, but, as if the disaster had been expected, turned to the left and thus came upon the face of the unfinished ravelin, which, rough and broken, was mistaken for the breach and instantly covered with men; a wide and deep chasm was however still between them and the ramparts, from whence came a deadly fire wasting their ranks. Thus baffled, they also commenced a rapid discharge of musketry, and disorder ensued; for the men of the light division, whose conducting engineer had been disabled early, having their flank confined by an unfinished ditch, intended to cut off the Santa Maria, rushed towards the breaches of the curtain and the Trinidad, which were indeed before them, but which the fourth division had been destined to storm.

Great was the confusion, the ravelin was crowded with men of both divisions, and while some continued to fire, others jumped down and run towards the breach; many also passed between the ravelin and the counterguard of the Trinidad; the two divisions got mixed, and the reserves, which should have remained at the quarries, also came pouring in until the ditch was quite filled, the rear still crowding forward and all cheering vehemently. The enemy’s shouts also were loud and terrible, and the bursting of shells and of grenades, the roaring of guns from the flanks, answered by the iron howitzers from the parallel, the heavy roll and horrid explosion of the powder-barrels, the whizzing flight of the blazing splinters, the loud exhortations of the officers, and the continual clatter of the muskets made a maddening din.

Now a multitude bounded up the great breach as if driven by a whirlwind: but across the top glittered a range of sword-blades, sharp-pointed, keen-edged, immovably fixed in ponderous beams chained together and set deep in the ruins; and for ten feet in front the ascent was covered with loose planks studded with iron points, on which the feet of the foremost being set the planks slipped, and the unhappy soldiers falling forward on the spikes rolled down upon the ranks behind. Then the Frenchmen, shouting at the success of their stratagem and leaping forward, plied their shot with terrible rapidity, for every man had several muskets, and each musket in addition to its ordinary charge contained a small cylinder of wood stuck full of wooden slugs, which scattered like hail when they were discharged.

Once and again the assailants rushed up the breaches, but the sword-blades, immovable and impassable, always stopped the charge, and the hissing shells and thundering powder-barrels exploded unceasingly. Hundreds of men had fallen, hundreds more were dropping, yet the heroic officers still called aloud for new trials, and sometimes followed by many, sometimes by few, ascended the ruins; and so furious were the men themselves, that in one of these charges the rear strove to push the foremost on to the sword-blades, willing even to make a bridge of their writhing bodies; the others frustrated the attempt by dropping down, yet men fell so fast from the shot it was hard to say who went down voluntarily, who were stricken, and many stooped unhurt that never rose again. Vain also would it have been to break through the sword-blades; for a finished trench and parapet were behind the breach, where the assailants, crowded into even a narrower space than the ditch was, would still have been separated from their enemies, and the slaughter have continued.

At the beginning of this dreadful conflict, Andrew Barnard had with prodigious efforts separated his division from the other, and preserved some degree of military array; but now the tumult was such, no command could be heard distinctly except by those close at hand, while the mutilated carcases heaped on each other, and the wounded, struggling to avoid being trampled upon, broke the formations; order was impossible! Nevertheless officers of all stations, followed more or less numerously by the men, were seen to start out as if struck by a sudden madness and rush into the breach, which yawning and glittering with steel seemed like the mouth of some huge dragon belching forth smoke and flame. In one of these attempts Colonel Macleod of the 43rd, whose feeble body would have been quite unfit for war if it had not been sustained by an unconquerable spirit, was killed. Wherever his voice was heard there his soldiers gathered, and with such strong resolution did he lead them up the ruins, that when one, falling behind him, plunged a bayonet into his back, he complained not, but continuing his course was shot dead within a yard of the sword-blades. There was however no want of gallant leaders or desperate followers, until two hours passed in these vain efforts convinced the soldiers the Trinidad was impregnable; and as the opening in the curtain, although less strong, was retired, and the approach impeded by deep holes and cuts made in the ditch, the troops did not much notice it after the partial failure of one attack, which had been made early. Gathering in dark groups and leaning on their muskets they looked up with sullen desperation at the Trinidad, while the enemy stepping out on the ramparts and aiming their shots by the light of the fireballs which they threw over, asked, as their victims fell, Why they did not come into Badajos?

In this dreadful situation, while the dead were lying in heaps, and others continually falling, the wounded crawling about to get some shelter from the merciless shower above, and withal a sickening stench from the burnt flesh of the slain, Captain Nicholas of the engineers, was observed by Lieut. Shaw of the 43rd, making incredible efforts to force his way with a few men into the Santa Maria. Collecting fifty soldiers of all regiments he joined him, and passing a deep cut along the foot of this breach, these two young officers, at the head of their band, rushed up the slope of the ruins, but ere they gained two-thirds of the ascent, a concentrated fire of musketry and grape dashed nearly the whole dead to the earth: Nicholas was mortally wounded, and the intrepid Shaw stood alone!24 After this no further effort was made at any point, and the troops remained passive, but unflinching, beneath the enemy’s shot, which streamed without intermission: for many of the riflemen on the glacis, leaping early into the ditch, had joined in the assault, and the rest, raked by a cross-fire of grape from the distant bastions, baffled in their aim by the smoke and flames from the explosions, and too few in number, had entirely failed to quell the French musketry.

About midnight, when two thousand brave men had fallen, Wellington, who was on a height close to the quarries, sent orders for the remainder to retire and re-form for a second assault; he had just then heard that the castle was taken, and thinking the enemy would still hold out in the town was resolved to assail the breaches again. This retreat from the ditch was not effected without further carnage and confusion; for the French fire never slackened, and a cry arose that the enemy were making a sally from the flanks, which caused a rush towards the ladders. Then the groans and lamentations of the wounded, who could not move and expected to be slain, increased; and many officers who did not hear of the order endeavoured to stop the soldiers from going back, some would even have removed the ladders but were unable to break the crowd.

All this time the third division lay close in the castle, and either from fear of risking the loss of a point which insured the capture of the place, or that the egress was too difficult, made no attempt to drive away the enemy from the breaches. On the other side however, the fifth division had commenced the false attack on the Pardaleras, and on the right of the Guadiana the Portuguese were sharply engaged at the bridge: thus the town was girdled with fire. For Walker’s brigade had, during the feint on the Pardaleras, escaladed the distant bastion of San Vincente. Moving up the bank of the river, he reached a French guard-house at the barrier-gate undiscovered, the ripple of the waters smothering the sound of the footsteps; but then the explosion at the breaches took place, the moon shone out, the French sentinels discovering the column fired, and the British soldiers, springing forward under a sharp musketry, began to hew down the wooden barrier at the covered way; the Portuguese, panic-stricken, threw down the scaling-ladders, but the others snatched them up, forced the barrier and jumped into the ditch; there the guiding engineer was killed, a cunette embarrassed the column, and when the foremost men succeeded in rearing the ladders they were found too short, for the walls were generally above thirty feet high. The fire of the French was deadly, a small mine was sprung beneath the soldiers’ feet, beams of wood and live shells were rolled over on their heads, showers of grape from the flank swept the ditch, and man after man dropped dead from the ladders.

At this critical moment some of the defenders being called away to aid in recovering the castle, the ramparts were not entirely manned, and the assailants, having discovered a corner of the bastion where the scarp was only twenty feet high, placed three ladders under an embrasure which had no gun, and was only stopped with a gabion. Some men got up with difficulty, for the ladders were still too short, but the first man being pushed up by his comrades drew others after him, and thus many had gained the summit; and though the French shot heavily against them from both flanks and from a house in front they thickened and could not be driven back. Half the 4th Regiment then entered the town itself, while the others pushed along the rampart towards the breach, and by dint of hard fighting successively won three bastions. In the last, General Walker, leaping forwards sword in hand just as a French cannonier discharged a gun, fell with so many wounds that it was wonderful how he survived, and his soldiers seeing a lighted match on the ground cried out a mine! At that word, such is the power of imagination, those troops whom neither the strong barrier nor the deep ditch, nor the high walls, nor the deadly fire of the enemy could stop, staggered back, appalled by a chimera of their own raising. While in that disorder a French reserve under General Veillande drove on them with a firm and rapid charge, pitching some over the walls, killing others outright, and cleansing the ramparts even to the San Vincente: but there Leith had placed a battalion of the 38th, and when the French came up, shouting and slaying all before them, it arose and with one close volley destroyed them. This stopped the panic, and in compact order the soldiers once more charged along the walls towards the breaches; yet the French, although turned on both flanks and abandoned by fortune, would not yield.

Meanwhile the detachment of the 4th Regiment which had entered the town when the San Vincente was first carried, was strangely situated; for the streets though empty were brilliantly illuminated, no person was seen, yet a low buzz and whisper were heard around, lattices were now and then gently opened, and from time to time shots were fired from underneath the doors of the houses by the Spaniards, while the regiment, with bugles sounding, advanced towards the great square of the town. In its progress several mules going with ammunition to the breaches were taken, but the square was as empty and silent as the streets, and the houses as bright with lamps. A terrible enchantment seemed to prevail, nothing to be seen but light, and only low whispers heard, while the tumult at the breaches was like the crashing thunder: there the fight raged, and quitting the square the regiment attempted to take the enemy in reverse, but they were received with a rolling musketry, driven back with loss, and resumed their movement through the streets.

At last the breaches were abandoned by the French, other parties entered the place, desultory combats took place in various parts, and finally Veillande and Phillipon, both wounded, seeing all ruined, passed the bridge with a few hundred soldiers and entered San Christoval. Early next morning they surrendered upon summons to Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who with great readiness had pushed through the town to the drawbridge ere the French had time to organize further resistance; yet even at the moment of ruin, this noble governor with an imperturbed judgment had sent horsemen out from the fort in the night to carry the news to Soult’s army, which they reached in time to prevent a greater misfortune.

Now commenced that wild and desperate wickedness, which tarnished the lustre of the soldier’s heroism. All indeed were not alike, hundreds risked, and many lost their lives in striving to stop violence; but madness generally prevailed, and the worst men being leaders all the dreadful passions of human nature were displayed. Shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder, shrieks and piteous lamentations, groans, shouts, imprecations, the hissing of fires bursting from the houses, the crashing of doors and windows, and the reports of muskets used in violence resounded for two days and nights in the streets of Badajos! On the third, when the city was sacked, when the soldiers were exhausted by their own excesses, the tumult rather subsided than was quelled: the wounded men were then looked to, the dead disposed of!

Five thousand men and officers fell during the siege, including seven hundred Portuguese; three thousand five hundred were stricken in the assault, sixty officers and more than seven hundred men slain on the spot. Five generals, Kempt, Harvey, Bowes, Colville, and Picton were wounded, the first three severely; six hundred men and officers fell in the escalade of San Vincente, as many at the castle, and more than two thousand at the breaches: each division there lost twelve hundred! But how deadly the strife was at that point may be gathered from this; the 43rd and 52nd regiments of the light division, alone lost more men than the seven regiments of the third division engaged at the castle!

Let it be remembered that this frightful carnage took place in a space of less than a hundred yards square. That the slain died not all suddenly nor by one manner of death. That some perished by steel, some by shot, some by water; that some were crushed and mangled by heavy weights, some trampled upon, some dashed to atoms by the fiery explosions; that for hours this destruction was endured without shrinking and that the town was won at last: these things considered, it must be admitted that a British army bears with it an awful power. And false would it be to say the French were feeble men, the garrison stood and fought manfully and with good discipline, behaving worthily. Shame there was none on any side. Yet who shall do justice to the bravery of the British soldiers? the noble emulation of the officers? Who shall measure out the glory of Ridge, of Macleod, of Nicholas, of O’Hare of the rifles, who perished on the breach at the head of the stormers, and with him nearly all the volunteers for that desperate service? Who shall describe the springing valour of that Portuguese grenadier who was killed, the foremost man, at the Santa Maria? or the martial fury of that desperate rifleman, who, in his resolution to win, thrust himself beneath the chained sword-blades, and there suffered the enemy to dash his head to pieces with the ends of their muskets? Who can sufficiently honour the intrepidity of Walker, of Shaw, of Canch, or the resolution of Ferguson of the 43rd, who having at Rodrigo received two deep wounds was here, with his hurts still open, leading the stormers of his regiment, the third time a volunteer and the third time wounded! Nor are these selected as pre-eminent; many and signal were the other examples of unbounded devotion, some known some that will never be known; for in such a tumult much passed unobserved, and often the observers fell themselves ere they could bear testimony to what they saw: but no age, no nation ever sent forth braver troops to battle than those who stormed Badajos.

When the havoc of the night was told to Wellington, the pride of conquest sunk into a passionate burst of grief for the loss of his gallant soldiers.

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