The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  Badajoz was held by nearly 5000 veteran troops under General Philhpon, a past-master of fortification. Faced by Napoleon's threat to shoot the Governor of any fortress who surrendered before it had been stormed—a defiance of the eighteenth-century convention that allowed the Governor of a besieged town to yield as soon as a practicable breach had been effected so as to avoid casualties and the horrors of a sack—he had sealed off the breaches with tiers of trenches and strewn the unbridged ditch before them with thousands of mines, iron harrows, crows' feet and chevaux de frise. Believing the rest of the city's defences to be impregnable, he had then concentrated half the garrison at the point and armed every man with eight loaded muskets.

  It was Wellington's plan that of the four divisions besieging the town, the 7500 men of the 4th and Light should storm the breaches. At Picton's eleventh-hour entreaty, the 3 rd Division on their right had been given the supplementary task of trying to take the main castle by escalade—a feat apparently impossible, for part of its walls rose a hundred feet sheer above the ditch and the Guadiana. Meanwhile, on the other side of the town, which was known to be heavily mined, General Leith's 5th Division and some Portuguese were to pin down as many of the garrison as possible by a demonstration. At the last moment a few ladders had been allotted to them to attempt the ramparts of the San Vincente bastion at the extreme north-west corner of the town.

  By the afternoon of April 6th, the third breach had been made. The order for the assault was immediately given. Though it was certain that there would be terrible losses, the troops received it with grim satisfaction. Even officers' servants insisted on taking their places in the ranks. The gaiety of the southward march had now been succeeded by something in the men's bearing that told that, though during the siege they had made no complaint of their fatigues and had seen their comrades fall without repining, they smarted under the one and felt the other. Their expression of anxiety to seize their prey was almost tiger-like.1

  As evening approached a hush fell on the camp. The men sauntered about, many for the last time, while bands played airs which recalled distant homes and bygone days. The time for the assault had been fixed for seven-thirty, but owing to various mishaps it was postponed till ten, giving the enemy several further hours of darkness in which to sow the ditch and breaches with explosives. Ghostlike sheets of mist rose from the Guadiana, hiding the lanterns of the working-parties; only the rippling waters, the croaking of frogs along the bank and the sentinel's cry on the ramparts broke the silence. Grattan has left a picture of the waiting columns: the men without knapsacks, their shirts unbuttoned, trousers tucked to the knees, tattered jackets so worn as to make the insignia of regiment and rank indistinguishable, the stubby, keen-set faces, the self-assurance, devoid of boast or bravado, that proclaimed them for what they were—an invincible host.

  Soon after nine the order was given to move to the storming positions, and without a word and in pitch blackness the men went forward. Those approaching the castle were discovered shortly before zero hour by the light of a flaming carcass thrown from the ramparts. Immediately every gun opened up. In front of the breaches the storming parties, creeping up to the glacis, had already begun to descend into the ditch. As the first fireball rose, the scene was lit up like a picture; the ramparts crowded with dark figures and glittering arms, and, below, the long red columns coming on "like streams of burning lava." Then there was a tremendous crash, and the leading

  1 Grattan, 193-7; Kincaid, 130; Bell, I, 27.

  files were blown to pieces as hundreds of shells and powder barrels exploded.

  For an instant, wrote an officer, the men stood on the brink of the ditch amazed at the sight; then, with a shout, flew down the ladders or, disdaining their aid, leaped, reckless of the depth, into the gulf below. Hundreds fell, but their comrades, trampling over them, pressed forward through a storm of grape-shot and canister. The ditch became a writhing mass of dead and wounded, across whose bodies fresh assailants struggled through flame and darkness towards the breaches. Many were shot or burnt; some, losing their bearings in the darkness, stumbled into the flooded part of the ditch and, weighed down by their packs, sank beneath the waters. Others were blown to pieces by the exploding grenades, mines and powder-barrels. Yet still little groups of men forced their way through that surf of fire and "went at the breach like a whirlwind. . . . Hundreds fell, dropping at every discharge which maddened the living; the cheer was for ever on, on, with screams of vengeance and a fury determined to win the town; the rear pushed the foremost into the sword-blades to make a bridge of their bodies rather than be frustrated. Slaughter, tumult and disorder continued; no command could be heard, the wounded struggling to free themselves from under the bleeding bodies of their dead comrades; the enemy's guns within a few yards at every fire opening a bloody lane amongst our people, who closed up and, with shouts of terror as the lava burned them up, pressed on to destruction—officers, starting forward with an heroic impulse, carried on their men to the yawning breach and glittering steel, which still belched out flames of scorching death."1 All the while the bugles continued to sound the advance.

  But, though the breaches were three times cleared by the bayonet, none penetrated them. There were soldiers who in the frenzy of attack thrust their heads through the hedge of swords at the summit and allowed the foe to smash them with the butts of their muskets, or, enveloped in streams of fire, died trying to tear with lacerated hands the blades out of the chevaux de frise. All was in vain. No troops could have passed through that curtain of death.

  Yet, "though valour's self might stand appalled," the British refused to withdraw. They stood sullenly facing that terrible fire until some officer, rallying fifty or a hundred tired men, led them forward

  1 Bell, I, 30-1.

  once more, only to meet the same inevitable fate. For two hours the slaughter continued until a third of the Light Division had fallen. The 95th alone lost twenty-two officers.

  About midnight Wellington, who was waiting in a neighbouring quarry, called off the attack. His face, lit by the flame of a candle, was grey and drawn, and his jaw fell as he gave the order. In that bitter hour he ordered one of his aides to hasten to Picton and tell him that he must try at all costs to succeed in the castle. He was unaware that the castle had already fallen. While the buglers on the glacis before the breaches still sounded the retreat and the stubborn survivors of the 4th and Light Divisions began to fall back to the quarries, an officer galloped up with the news that Picton's men were inside the walls. For by their refusal to admit defeat the men of the breaches had given their comrades the chance to achieve the impossible. Those struggling to breast the castle's towering cliffs had, too, suffered terrible casualties, and, baffled by a murderous cross-fire from the bastions and shells, stones and logs thrown from the ramparts, had fallen back in defeat. But Picton, who never did things by halves, wounded though he was in the groin, returned to the ditch and formed up his entire division, 4000 strong, at the base of the wall. Though ladder after ladder was flung down by the defenders and the rungs were slippery with blood, those below took the places of those who fell so swiftly that in the end a lodgment was made, the ramparts cleared, and, after nearly a fifth of its numbers had fallen, the 3 rd Division swarmed into the fortress. Among the casualties was Colonel Ridge of the 5th Fusiliers—the third to reach the summit. "No man," wrote Napier, "died that night with more glory—yet many died, and there was much glory."

  By capturing the castle, and with it the enemy's reserves of food and ammunition, Picton had made the fall of Badajoz certain. He could not alter the immediate situation in front of the breaches because the castle gates leading to the ramparts had been bricked up, and only a single postern, hastily closed by the enemy, gave access to the town. But while his men were dragging up a gun from the embrasure to blow it in, Wellington, still waiting in the quarries near the breaches, thought he heard the sound of an English bugle in the tower of San Vincente at the far side of the town. Here, thoug
h the walls were more than thirty feet high and the ladders too low, a detachment of General Walker's brigade of Leith's 5 th Division, consisting of men of the 4th and 44th Regiments, managed in the darkness to secure a foothold on the under-manned ramparts. They had at once gone to the assistance of their comrades below, and by midnight, had lifted the whole brigade into the town. Though there was fierce fighting on the walls and Walker himself was wounded, Leith brought up the rest of his division with such speed that the enemy was given no chance to recover. It was the appearance in the rear of the breaches of a detachment of this force, marching in haste through the deserted streets, that caused the French to collapse. Unable to imagine how their foes had entered, they threw down their arms or fled. The exhausted survivors of the Light and 4th Divisions, returning to the attack, found the breaches deserted. Badajoz had fallen.

  What followed tarnished the night's glory. The men, separated in the darkness from their officers, parched with thirst and half-mad from the fury of the attack, broke into the cellars and wine-shops. By dawn they had become a mob of fiends. They had been promised, in accordance with the rules of war, that, if the garrison resisted after the breaches had been made, the city would be given up to sack; they did not now mean to lose a prey so hardly won. The worst horrors were the work of the scoundrel minority of an army recruited in part from the gaols, and of the Spanish and Portuguese camp-followers. For two days and nights packs of drunkards rushed from house to house, blowing in doors, firing through windows, and looting everything. Women were dragged screaming from hiding holes and raped, wine casks were broached in the streets, and satyrs with blackened faces drank till the liquor ran from their mouths and ears. No officer could control them. It was not till the third day that Wellington, marching in fresh troops and erecting a gallows in the square, restored order.1

  Yet even during these scenes soldiers risked their lives to stay the tumult. Groups of officers fought their way through the streets escorting women to the church of St. John's where a guard was mounted; others kept watch over Spanish families and drove back the mobs who assailed them. Down at the camp below the town, where the British wounded lay in thousands, two young officers, standing at their tent door on the day after the attack, saw two Spanish ladies approaching, the elder of whom, her ears torn and

  1 Blakeney, 270-8; Grattan, 158, 2o8? 210-16; Gomm, 202; Costello. 120-1; Bell, I, 33-4; Tomkinson, 146; Simmons, 233; Kincaid, 139; Random Shots, 285; Stanhope, 49; Napier, IV, 430-1.

  bleeding from the grasp of drunken savages, confided to their protection her sister, a girl of fifteen. Such was her faith in the British character, she declared, that she knew the appeal would not be in vain. "Nor was it," wrote one of the officers, "nor could it be abused, for she stood by the side of an angel—a being more trans-cendently lovely than any I had ever before beheld. To look at her was to love her—and I did love her, but I never told my love, and in the meantime another and a more impudent fellow stepped in and won her!" Two days later Juanita Maria de los Dolores de Leon was married to Captain Harry Smith of the Rifles. The Commander-in-Chief gave her away, and she became the darling of the Army, henceforward sharing all its adventures and hardships. Many years later, when her husband, the victor of Aliwal, had become the hero of Victorian England and Governor of the Cape, she gave her name to a South African town destined to become the scene of another famous siege.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Salamanca Summer

  "I made a mistake about England, in trying to conquer it. The English are a brave nation."

  Napoleon

  T

  HE price of Badajoz had been 5000 British and Portuguese casualties, 3500 of whom, the flower of the army, fell in the assault. When the sun rose on the morning after the attack the ditch before the breaches was a lake of smoking blood. Yet the price had been worth the sacrifice.1 The key fortress of western Spain with nearly 5000 prisoners was in Wellington's hands. So for the first time in the war was the initiative. Possessing Badajoz as well as Ciudad Rodrigo, he could now concentrate against either of the two French armies barring the road to Spain. With the use of interior lines, he could attack Marmont in the north or Soult in the south before either could come to the other's aid. Nor could either, with the Spanish frontier fortresses in their way, effectively invade Portugal in his absence. On Napoleon's orders, Marmont had attempted to do so during the siege of Badajoz, but though his marauding troops, helped by a panic among the Portuguese militia, had penetrated fifty miles, they were quickly forced back starving to their base at Salamanca. Three weeks later, after returning to the north, Wellington sent Hill's corps of observation in Estremadura to seize Almaraz —Soult's last bridge across the Tagus below Toledo. Thus all direct communication between Soult and Marmont was lost, and the two Marshals could henceforward only communicate through Madrid. Simultaneously, Wellington's engineers improvised a suspension-bridge of ropes and cables—the first of its kind in Europe—across the Tagus gorge at Alcantara, so giving him direct north-to-south

  1 "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. . . . When I ordered the assault I was certain 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." Wellington to Liverpool, April 7th, 1812. Oman, Wellington's Army, 284-5.

  communication along the frontier. It was for this he had been campaigning for the past year.

  Yet Napoleon could still make Spain secure. He had a quarter of a million troops in the Peninsula to Wellington's 45,000 British and 25,000 Portuguese regulars. He had only to call off his attack on Russia to reinforce these to a point beyond which they could not be challenged by so few. But the flaw in his character which Wellington had always seen gave England her chance. Instead of regarding the loss of Badajoz as a warning, the Emperor greeted the news with one of his famous fits of rage, and then, forbidding all reference to it, behaved as though it had never happened. Turning Ms back on Wellington, he marched on June 24th into Russia with half-a .million men.

  By that time Wellington was himself across the frontier. As in 1809, the outbreak of war in eastern Europe enabled him to take the offensive. Throughout May he had been preparing magazines for an advance towards the Douro. True to his unchanging strategy of doing nothing to distract Soult from his selfish preoccupation with his Andalusian viceroyaky, and leaving a token force under Hill to watch the Tagus and the road over the Sierra Morena, he concentrated against the northern highway from Ciudad Rodrigo to Salamanca and Valladolid. It was the road Moore had followed when he struck at Napoleon's communications. It offered
  Yet Wellington, though numerically inferior, had certain advantages; it was his genius as a commander that, seeing the war whole and steadily, he never lost sight of any of them. One was that, so long as he could keep it supplied, his entire force was free for field operations, while the French were preoccupied in garrisoning a vast, turbulent country. Neither General Caffarelli's Army of the North, nor Marshal Suchet's Army of the East, nor King Joseph's and Marshal Jourdan's Army of the Centre, still less Soult's Army of Andalusia, could reinforce the Army of Portugal without abandoning a large part of Spain to the guerrillas and the Spanish hill armies. Here Wellington's second asset operated: that, thanks to Napoleon's system of ruling by division, no one of his Marshals trusted any other or would willingly send troops fr
om his own domain to help the common cause. His third asset was that the Peninsula was almost surrounded by sea over which his country enjoyed complete mastery. Her ships could succour the Spanish guerrillas at any point and keep the French in continual alarm and uncertainty. Because of this, Caffarelli in Biscaya, Suchet in Catalonia and Soult in Andalusia instinctively faced, not westwards towards Wellington, but north, east and south towards the sea. Even Marmont, on Napoleon's orders, had had to send part of his army to the Asturias, where the Cantabrian guerrillas and the Spanish Army of Galicia were armed and supplied by the Royal Navy.

  in planning his summer campaign Wellington made use of these factors. His object was to destroy Marmont while keeping the latter's colleagues busy elsewhere. The Spanish general, Ballasteros, with his raggle-taggle army in the mountains round Seville, supported by Hill's corps of observation in distant Estremadura, was to tie down Soult by threatening as many Andalusian towns as possible. In the east a British expeditionary force of 10,000 men, temporarily released from garrison duty in Sicily by the departure of Murat's Neapolitan army for Russia,1 together with 7000 Spanish troops from Alicante and Majorca, were to be landed by the Mediterranean Fleet on the Valencian coast to harry Suchet's communications. And in the north, along the Atlantic cliffs, that erratic champion of amphibious war, Commodore Sir Home Popham, with two battleships, half a dozen frigates, a battalion of marines and a company of marine artillery was to keep the coastline from Gijon to the French frontier in an uproar. So sustained, the guerrillas of the Basque country and Navarre—the most serious of all the thorns in King Joseph's flesh— were to make it impossible for the harassed Caffarelli to reinforce Marmont. At the same time the Spanish Army of Galicia was to take the offensive against the latter's northern wing, lay siege to Astorga and prevent even the Army of Portugal from concentrating.