Every one knows that the record of the Peninsular Army in the matter of sieges is not the most brilliant page in its annals. It is not to the orgies that followed the storm of Badajoz or San Sebastian that allusion is here made, but to the operations that preceded them, and to the unhappy incidents that accompanied the luckless siege of Burgos. Courage enough and to spare was lavished on those bloody leaguers; perseverance was shown in no small measure; and to a certain extent professional skill was not lacking. But the tale compares miserably with the great story of the triumphs of Wellington’s army in the open field. Reckless bravery had to supply the place of the machinery and organization that was lacking, and too much blood was spilt, and sometimes spilt to no effect.

The responsibility for these facts is hard to distribute. As is generally the case when failures are made, it is clear that a system was to blame rather than any individual, or body of individuals. Great Britain had been at war with France for some sixteen years; but in all her countless expeditions she had never, since 1794, been compelled to undertake regular sieges on a large scale. The battering of old-fashioned native forts in India, the blockades of Malta or Alexandria, the bombardments of Flushing or Copenhagen, need hardly be mentioned. They were not operations such as those which Wellington had to carry out in 1811 or 1812. For a long time the Peninsular War had been considered as a purely defensive affair; it was concerned with the protection of Portugal, almost (we might say) of Lisbon, from the French invader. The home Government kept sending reinforcements to Wellington, but they were under the impression that an over-powerful combination of the enemy’s forces might some day force him to re-embark. He himself regarded such a contingency as by no means impossible.

But in the spring of the year 1811 it became clear that a defensive war may have offensive episodes. After MassÉna’s retreat from before the Lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington had to protect the frontiers of Portugal; and to guard them efficiently he needed possession of Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz, which had all been in the hands of the allies in the summer of 1810, but were now French fortresses. To subdue these three places he required a large battering-train, properly equipped for movement, and such a thing was not at his disposition. There were a number of heavy guns mounted on the Lines of Torres Vedras, and on the ramparts of Elvas, Abrantes, and Peniche. There were also many companies of Portuguese gunners attached to those guns, and a lesser number of British companies which had been immobilized in the Lisbon lines. But heavy guns and gunners combined do not complete a battering train. An immense amount of transport was required, and in the spring of 1811 it was not at Wellington’s disposition. Well-nigh every available ox-cart and mule in Portugal was already employed in carrying the provisions and baggage of the field army. And water transport, which would have been very valuable, could only be used for a few miles of the lower courses of the Tagus and Douro. To begin a regular siege of Almeida in April, 1811, was absolutely impossible, not because there were not guns or gunners in Portugal, but because there were no means of moving them at the time. Wellington did not even attempt it, contenting himself with a mere blockade. On the other flank an endeavour was made to besiege Badajoz, but this was only possible because within a few miles of that city lay the Portuguese fortress of Elvas, from whose walls was borrowed the hastily improvised and imperfect battering-train with which the Spanish stronghold was attacked.

The first two sieges of Badajoz in 1811 were lamentable failures, precisely because this haphazard battering-train was wholly inadequate for the end to which it was applied. Alexander Dickson, the zealous and capable officer placed in charge of the artillery, was set an impossible task. He had about 400 Portuguese and 120 English gunners, all equally untrained in siege duty, to work a strange collection of antiquated and unserviceable cannon. The pieces borrowed from Elvas were of irregular calibre and ancient pattern. Almost incredible as it may appear, some of these long brass 24-pounders were nearly two hundred years old—observers noted on them the arms and cyphers not only of John IV. the first king of the Braganza dynasty, but of Philip III. and Philip IV. of Spain, the contemporaries of our James I. and Charles I.286 Even the better guns were of obsolete eighteenth-century types. No two had the same bore, nor were the shot supplied for them uniform in size; it was necessary to cull and select a special heap of balls for each particular gun. The whole formed, indeed, a sort of artillery museum rather than an effective battering-train. The guns shot wildly and weakly, and their gunners were inexperienced. No wonder that their effect was poor.

But this was not all: indeed, the inefficiency of the guns was perhaps the secondary rather than the primary cause of the failure of the two early sieges of Badajoz. More important still was it that Wellington was as weak in the engineer as in the artillery arm. The number of trained officers of engineers with the Peninsular Army was very small—not much over thirty; but of rank and file to serve under them there were practically none. Of the corps called the “Royal Military Artificers,” the ancestors of the “Royal Sappers and Miners,” there were actually only thirty-four attached to the army in 1810, and it was far on in 1811 before their numbers reached a hundred. Many of them were with Wellington’s field army on the distant frontier of Beira, and before Badajoz, in May, there were little more than a score. For the trench-work of the siege untrained volunteers had to be borrowed from the line battalions, and to be instructed by the engineer officers actually under the fire of the French guns. Their teachers were almost all as ignorant of practical siege operations as themselves; the British Army, as has already been remarked, had done little work of the sort for many years.

The officers, it is true, were zealous and often clever; the men were recklessly brave, if unpractised in the simplest elements of siegecraft. But good-will could not atone for want of experience, and it seems clear that in these early sieges the plans were often unwise, and the execution unskilful. The points of attack selected at Badajoz were the strongest and least accessible points of the fortress, not those against which the French had operated in their earlier siege in February with success. This choice had been made because the British were working “against time”; there were French armies collecting for the relief of Badajoz, and if the leaguer took many weeks, it was certain that an overwhelming force would be brought against the besiegers and compel them to depart. Hence the engineer officers, in both the unsuccessful sieges, tried to break in at points where victory would be decisive; they thought it would be useless to begin by capturing outworks, or by making a lodgment in the lower parts of the city, which would leave its stronger points intact and capable of further defence. They battered the high-lying fort of San Cristobal, and the citadel on its precipitous height, arguing that if they could capture either of them the whole fortress was at their mercy. Both the points assailed turned out to be too strong: the stony hill of San Cristobal proved impossible for trench work; desperate attempts to storm the fort that crowned it, by columns advancing across the open, were beaten off with heavy loss. The castle walls, after long battering, refused to crumble into practicable breaches. Before anything decisive had been accomplished, the French armies of succour came up. Beresford beat the first at Albuera in May and renewed the siege; the second (Soult and Marmont combined) was so strong that Wellington dared not face it, and withdrew from his abandoned trenches to within the Portuguese frontier in July.

A great change for the better in Wellington’s position as regards sieges had been made by the autumn of 1811. He had at last received a number of good modern British iron guns, much superior to the old Portuguese brass 24-pounders. And with infinite trouble and delay he had at last created a battering-train that could move. This was the work of Alexander Dickson, already mentioned, who was occupied from July to November in accumulating at the obscure town of Villa da Ponte, behind Almeida, masses of waggon-transport and trains of mules and oxen, for the moving of the heavy cannon and the immense store of ammunition belonging to them. The guns were brought up the Douro to Lamego, where the river ceased to be navigable, and then dragged over the hills by oxen. Several companies of Portuguese and British gunners were attached to the park, and instructed, so far as was possible, in siege work. At the same time the military artificers—still far too few in numbers—were instructing volunteers from the line in the making of a great store of gabions, platforms, fascines, and other necessaries.

This long preparation, which was almost unsuspected by the French, because it was unostentatious and made at a great distance from the front, enabled Wellington to execute the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in January, 1812, with unexampled rapidity and success. The fortress was not one of the first class, the garrison was rather weak, the battering-train was now ample for the task required of it, and, to the surprise and dismay of Marmont, Rodrigo fell after a siege of only twelve days at midwinter (January 7–19) long before he could collect his scattered divisions for its relief.

The third attack on Badajoz, in March-April, 1812, turned out a much less satisfactory business, though it ended in a triumphant success. Like the two sieges of the preceding year, it was conducted “against time”; Wellington being fully aware that if it went on too long the relieving armies would be upon him. The means employed were more adequate than those of 1811, though only a part of the battering-train that had subdued Ciudad Rodrigo could be brought across the hills from the distant frontier of Beira. The remainder was composed of ship-guns borrowed from Lisbon. But though the artillery was not inadequate, and the walls were thoroughly well breached, both the trench-work and the storm cost over-many lives. Indeed, the main assault on the breaches failed, and the town fell because two subsidiary attacks by escalade, one carried out by Picton, the other by General Walker with a brigade of the 5th Division, were both triumphantly successful. Wellington laid the blame of the fearful loss of life upon the fact that his engineers had no trained sappers to help them, and were unskilled in siegecraft. They had attacked a point of the defences far more promising than those battered in 1811, and had opened up immense gaps in the defences, but nevertheless he was not satisfied with their direction. In a private letter to Lord Liverpool, which is not printed in either of the two series of his dispatches, he wrote:—

“The capture of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I anxiously hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as that to which they were put last night. I assure your lordship that it is quite impossible to carry fortified places by ‘vive force’ without incurring great loss, and being exposed to the chance of failure, unless the army should be provided with a sufficient trained corps of sappers and miners.... The consequence of being so unprovided with the people necessary to approach a regularly fortified place are, first, that our engineers, though well-educated and brave, have never turned their minds to the mode of conducting a regular siege, as it is useless to think of that which it is impossible, in our service, to perform. They think they have done their duty when they have constructed a battery with a secure communication to it, which can breach the place. Secondly, these breaches have to be carried by vive force, at an infinite sacrifice of officers and soldiers.... These great losses could be avoided, and, in my opinion, time gained in every siege, if we had properly trained people to carry it on. I declare that I have never seen breaches more practicable in themselves than the three in the walls of Badajoz, and the fortress must have surrendered with these breaches open, if I had been able to ‘approach’ the place. But when I had made the third breach on the evening of the 6th, I could do no more. I was then obliged either to storm or to give the business up, and when I ordered the assault, I was certain that I should lose our best officers and men. It is a cruel situation for any person to be placed in, and I earnestly recommend to your lordship to have a corps of sappers and miners formed without loss of time.”287

The slaughter of Badajoz, then, in Wellington’s estimation, was due partly to the fact that the British Army, unlike all other armies, lacked regular companies of sappers and miners, and partly to the inexperience of the engineer officers in carrying out the last stages of a siege—the advance towards the glacis and the ditch by scientific trench-work. They did not, he says, “turn their mind” towards such operations, because they had never been furnished with skilled workmen to carry them out. That sappers and miners did not exist as yet was not the fault of Wellington, nor of the ministers, but of the professional advisers of the administration, who should long ago have pointed out that such a corps was wanted. That the Liverpool ministry was not slow to take advice was shown by the fact that they at once converted the already existing “Military Artificers” into sappers. On April 23, less than three weeks after Badajoz fell, a warrant was issued for instructing the corps in military field works, and shortly after six companies were ordered to be sent to the Peninsula the moment that they should have received such training. On August 4 the name of the whole corps was changed from Royal Military Artificers to Royal Sappers and Miners.288 It was not, of course, till very late in the year that the first of the new sapper companies joined Wellington, but by the next spring he had 300 trained men with him.

Meanwhile they had of course arrived too late for the siege of Burgos, the most unhappy of all Wellington’s leaguers, where the whole trench-work was conducted by volunteers from the line directed by precisely eight of the old artificers—of whom one was killed and the remaining seven wounded. The story of the Burgos operations reads like an exaggerated repetition of the first siege of Badajoz. The battering-train that took Badajoz had been left behind, and to attack Burgos (whose strength was undervalued) Wellington had with him no proper means. Only eight guns were brought up—because the transport with the army could only provide a few spare teams, and the whole of Castile had been swept clear of draught-beasts. This ridiculously weak train proved wholly insufficient for the work set it. “Had there been a siege establishment with the army even moderately efficient, so as to have admitted of the performance of the rudiments of the art, the attack (even with the inadequate artillery) might have been carried through,” writes the historian of the Peninsular sieges.289 But there were only five engineer officers present, just eight artificers, no tools save regimental picks and shovels borrowed from line regiments, no material save wood requisitioned from the town of Burgos, and so little transport that the fire had sometimes to cease, to allow fresh ammunition to be brought up from the distant Madrid. Wellington ordered repeated assaults on the inadequately battered walls; they all failed, and he finally retired after thirty-two days of open trenches, and with the loss of nearly 2000 men, from before a “bicocque,” as the French called it, which could not have withstood a proper battering-train for a third of that time.

The fact is that Wellington had undervalued the strength of Burgos; he thought it would fall easily. If he had known that it would hold out for more than a month, he could have procured more guns from the captured French arsenal at Madrid, and might have requisitioned all the beasts of the army to draw them. But by the time that it began to be seen that Burgos was not about to yield to a mere demonstration, it was too late to get up the necessary means of reducing it. Finally, the French armies mustered for its relief, and the British had to retire. It may be added that the besieging troops, thoroughly disgusted with the inadequate means used to prepare the way for them, did not act with the same energy that had been shown at Rodrigo or Badajoz. Several of the assaults were not pushed well home, and the trench-work was slack. Wellington wrote, in his General Orders for October 3, a stiff rebuke, to the effect that “the officers and soldiers of this army should know that to work during a siege is as much a part of their duty as to engage the enemy in the field; and they may depend upon it that unless they perform the work allotted to them with due diligence, they cannot acquire the honour which their comrades have won in former sieges.... The Commander-in-Chief hopes he shall have no reason to complain in future.”290

The leaguer of San Sebastian, the last of Wellington’s sieges, bore a great likeness to the last siege of Badajoz. It was conducted in a time of considerable anxiety, while the army of Soult was making vigorous and repeated efforts to frustrate it. The place was strong by nature—a towering castle with the town at its foot joined to the mainland only by a narrow sandy spit; the defences of this isthmus were short, and reached from sea to sea: they were fully commanded by the castle behind. The first great assault (July 25, 1813) was made while the trenches were still far from the walls, and while the fire of the besieged had not been silenced. It failed with heavy loss. The second assault (August 31) was successful, but very bloody—2000 men were killed or wounded. The most authoritative commentator writes: “The operations against San Sebastian afford a most impressive lesson on the advantages of proceeding step by step, and with due attention to science and rule. The attempt there made to overcome or trample on such restrictions caused a certain operation of twenty days to extend to sixty. It bears strong testimony to the truth of the maxim laid down by Marshal Vauban: ‘La prÉcipitation dans les siÈges ne hÂte point la prise des places, la retarde souvent, et ensanglante toujours la scÈne.’”291

There can be no doubt that siege-work was loathed by the rank and file, not so much for its danger—there was never any lack of volunteers for a forlorn hope—but for its discomfort. There was a sort of underlying feeling that entrenching was not soldier’s but navvy’s work; the long hiding under cover in cramped positions, which was absolutely necessary, was looked upon as a sort of skulking. With an unwise disregard for their personal safety, which had a touch of bravado and more than a touch of sulkiness in it, the men exposed themselves far more than was necessary. I fancy that on some occasions, notably at the early sieges of Badajoz and at Burgos, there was a general feeling that matters were not being scientifically or adequately conducted, and that too much was being asked of the rank and file, when they were made to attempt a hard task without the proper means. It must have been clear to them that there were too few engineer officers, not enough artillery, and no proper provision of tools. Hence came a spirit of anger and discontent.

At Ciudad Rodrigo, and at the third and last leaguer of Badajoz, the weather was so abominable that the siege-work was long looked back on as a perfect nightmare. At Rodrigo, in the high upland of Leon, the month of January was a combination of frost and rain; the water accumulated in the trenches and there often froze, so that the men were standing ankle-deep in a mixture of ice and mud, and since they could not move about, because of the enemy’s incessant fire, suffered horribly from cold. At Badajoz there was no frost: but incessant chilling rain was almost as bad during the early weeks of the siege; the trenches were often two feet deep in water, and the work of the spade was almost useless, since the liquid mud that was shovelled up ran away in streams out of the gabions into which it was cast, and refused to pile up into parapets for the trenches, spreading out instead into mere broad accumulations of slime, which gave no cover, and had no resisting power against the round shot of the garrison. I imagine that the desperate and dirty toil in those operations, protracted over many days of abominable discomfort as well as danger, accounts in great measure for the ferocious spirit shown by the victors both at Rodrigo and Badajoz. The men were in a blind rage at the misery which they had been enduring, and it found vent, after the storm was over, in misconduct far surpassing that which would have followed a pitched battle where the losses had been equally great. One observer writes: “The spirit of the soldiers rose to a frightful height—I say frightful because it was not of that sort which denoted exultation at the prospect of achieving an exploit which was about to hold them up to the admiration of the world; there was a certain something in their bearing which told plainly that they had suffered fatigues of which they had not complained, and seen their comrades and officers slain around them without repining, but that they had smarted under the one and felt acutely for the other. They smothered both, so long as body and mind were employed, but now, before the storm, they had a momentary licence to think, and every fine feeling vanished—plunder and revenge took their place.... A quiet but desperate calm replaced their usual buoyant spirits, and nothing was observable in their manner but a tiger-like expression of anxiety to seize upon their prey.”292

Preparation for the storm affected different men in different ways: some tried to make up old quarrels and exchanged words of forgiveness; a good many wrote letters home, which were to be delivered only in the case of their falling. “Each arranged himself for the combat in such manner as his fancy would admit of: some by lowering their cartridge-boxes, others by turning them to the front for more convenient use; others unclasped their stocks or opened their shirt collars; others oiled their bayonets. Those who had them took leave of their wives and children—an affecting sight, but not so much so as might have been expected, because the women, from long habit, were accustomed to such scenes of danger.”293

One intelligent sergeant speaks of the moment of waiting for the order to storm as full of a stress that nothing else could produce: “We felt a dead weight hanging on our minds; had we been brought hurriedly into action, it would have been quite different, but it is inconsistent with the nature of man not to feel as I have described. The long warning, the dark and silent night, the known strength of the fortress, the imminent danger of the attack, all conspired to produce this feeling. It was not the result of want of courage, as was shown by the calm intrepidity of the advance when we came in range of the French cannon.”294 That the revulsion from the long waiting took the shape of frenzied violence, when the men were at last let loose, was not unnatural. A certain amount of the horrors which took place at Badajoz and San Sebastian may be ascribed to mere frenzy, if the rest was due to more deliberate wickedness on the part of the baser spirits of the army.