by Tom Williams
After they had eaten, James wrapped himself in a blanket and lay looking up at the night sky. Above him, the southern stars twinkled through a haze of wood smoke.
He drifted into sleep and a dream where he saw a condor fall on Buenos Aires and carry it up, up into the night sky to disappear among the stars, while an army of gauchos sang love songs to the tune of a Spanish guitar.
*
On the night of August 9th, 1806, Jorge and Gustavo met Miguel at The Angel. The place was strangely quiet. There seemed hardly any gauchos in Buenos Aires, but as the evening went on it filled with other young men. Usually these breakers of windows and daubers of slogans were a noisy crowd, but tonight they sat, nursing their drinks in nervous silence.
It was close to midnight when Miguel arrived. He opened the door and, without entering, beckoned those inside to join him in the street. There in front of the tavern was a handcart. Miguel reached into the cart and pulled out a liberty bonnet.
There was a nervous shuffling and Jorge stepped forward and took the bonnet. Miguel reached into the handcart again and passed a musket to Jorge.
Jorge stood, wearing the bonnet and carrying the gun, hardly believing this was really happening to him. Then, as if a spell had been broken, Gustavo cried out ‘Viva La Plata! Viva Argentina!’ and suddenly everyone was cheering and pushing forward to be issued with their bonnet and their gun.
In the distance, they heard other young men cheering.
The people of Buenos Aires were preparing for battle.
*
De Liniers’ criollo army arrived with the dawn.
As the gauchos rode in from the west, Sergeant Leonard was leading his morning patrol north from the fort. Half a mile from the Plaza Victoria, they were ambushed by young men wearing liberty bonnets and carrying muskets.
The rebels, though decently armed, had no experience of warfare and their first volley left the patrol unharmed. The British fired back but, outnumbered and uncertain of what the attack portended, Sergeant Leonard decided to withdraw to the fort and report.
Jorge, safely hidden in a side street, waited until the tramp of feet was a safe distance away before emerging to shake his fist at the retreating redcoats. That was when he saw a huddle of rags lying in the street – rags that looked pitifully familiar.
He ran, shouting, to his friend, but Gustavo lay still. The revolt had claimed its first victim.
Even as Gustavo died, de Liniers’ cavalry encountered its first British forces. The main road from the west was guarded by a sergeant, a corporal, and just four private soldiers. Faced with the rebel cavalry, they did the only sensible thing they could do. They ran.
The pickets that Beresford had mounted at the city margins were overwhelmed within minutes and those patrols that were caught in the streets found themselves, like Sergeant Leonard, retreating to the fort, taking casualties as they fled.
By noon, the rebels had driven the British back to their headquarters. Beresford’s men did not even control the Plaza Victoria because the Recova blocked their field of fire from the fort, whilst its colonnaded arcade provided the ideal cover for rebel marksmen.
De Liniers had set up his headquarters in a draper’s shop – chosen because it was just out of range of the fort’s cannons and its windows provided a vantage point from which, if you leaned far enough out, you could see the fighting at the end of the long, straight street. With the attack in full swing, Iglesias had relinquished his prisoner to de Liniers, and Burke now stood under guard in a corner of the makeshift command post.
‘You should enjoy this, Lieutenant.’ De Liniers was too refined to gloat openly but he could not resist this comment to his prisoner. ‘I doubt you have ever had the opportunity to observe the staff command of an assault on this scale.’
Burke said nothing, but the experience did, indeed, hold an awful fascination for him. He was forced to admit that de Liniers was a brilliant tactician. He had a flair for urban warfare that the British, with their emphasis on set piece drill and battlefield tactics, simply could not match.
Although the ground in front of the fort was clear, the buildings on the sides of the square extended to the sides of the fort. Rather than bother with a frontal assault, de Liniers simply sent his troops into these houses, the flat roofs of which overlooked the fort’s bastions.
While the gauchos busied themselves building barricades in the roads around the Plaza Victoria, trapping the British in their base, men in liberty bonnets were running along the roofs of the fashionable houses overlooking the square and settling themselves into firing positions that let them pick off the British soldiers manning the fort’s defences.
Barricaded in by the rebels’ blockades and unable to return any effective fire against their enemies on the rooftops, the British could do nothing but shelter in such cover as they could find. The walls offered no protection, and the troops were forced to withdraw to the Viceroy’s palace. Trapped in the building, they could make no effective response to the withering fire of the enemy.
Around the middle of the afternoon, the British attempted to bring their artillery to bear on the rebel barricades, but they could not do this without exposing their men on the walls of the fort. De Liniers’ militia were by now increasingly confident in their aim. A steady stream of reports came to the draper’s shop of entire gun crews shot down at their posts. After an hour of carnage, the British abandoned the attempt to use their artillery without having succeeded in firing a single round.
Trapped in the buildings, the troops could not eat properly and, more importantly, had no access to water. The fort was equipped with its own well, but this was in a corner of the courtyard, and the sharpshooters on the rooftops made sure that any man attempting to approach it was hit before he could pump up a single bucket.
Burke thought that the best hope for the British was to attempt a break out under cover of night, but, as darkness fell, he realised there de Liniers had anticipated this danger. Horsemen passed through the Recova and galloped across the square with lighted brands that they threw toward the gates of the fort. De Liniers had had the dockyards raided for pitch, and wood soaked in tar burned well, keeping enough of a flickering light in the square to make any surprise breakout impossible.
The besiegers were confident and relaxed. They had as much food and water as they needed and knew themselves to be in little physical danger. There were so many of them that they could keep a watch through the night without any danger of the troops becoming over-tired and they would fire volleys into the darkness every now and then to disturb the rest of those trapped in the fort.
Colonel Beresford took stock of the situation at first light the next morning. A dozen men had been killed by enemy fire and, more importantly, over twenty had been injured. These now spilled out of the fort’s tiny hospital, a mass of writhing suffering. Many were missing arms or legs where the surgeon had been forced to amputate and several were obviously not going to survive. The rest, pale from loss of blood, lay or sat stoically on the ground. Beresford was aware of horror bravely borne and of the hopelessness of their position.
Half a mile offshore, Lieutenant John Thomson had been enjoying his first command. The Neptuno had been captured in port when the British attacked the city and the Lieutenant, in his mid-thirties and overdue promotion, had been given the vessel when Popham took the rest of his command to Monte Video. His orders had been vague – he was to ‘keep an eye on the place’ and ‘make himself useful’ to Beresford should the need arise. It had seemed an easy enough task, but since he had heard the sound of gunfire across the water the previous afternoon, he had found himself completely at a loss as to what to do. The mud made it impossible to bring his ship up to the jetties near the fort. He tried positioning himself a few hundred yards from land and using his guns to support the men of the 71st but the fort, built to command the shoreline, blocked his guns from the main body of the enemy.
A signaller on the bows of the ship had tried to make contact wit
h the besieged soldiers by semaphore but, with the garrison forced to stay under cover, there was no way that signals could be returned, even if they were being read.
While Beresford made his rounds ashore, aboard the Neptuno Thomson decided that he should try to land a party to establish the needs of the garrison and take in supplies. A second lieutenant was accordingly put off in a longboat with a dozen sailors and a midshipman and they set off toward the fort’s seaward walls.
Thomson watched the boat pull strongly toward the shore until, a hundred yards from land, one of the sailors collapsed at his oar. Through his telescope, Thomson could see clearly as another fell, blood pouring from his chest. The Second Lieutenant half rose to urge the others to row faster but his action simply made him an easier target and he was next to fall. The midshipman gave frantic orders to go about and row out of range but with two rowers already dead and the other confused as to what to do, the craft floundered, allowing another three sailors to be picked off.
The mate was standing next to Thomson, pointing to where the fishermen had pulled their boats up on shore. The fire was coming from the cover of this little encampment.
‘Man the capstan. Bring her round by the head.’
The crew, who had been lining the rails, watching as the longboat came under fire, hurried to their posts. As the anchor cable was tightened, the bow of the ship swung over, allowing the guns to be brought to bear on the fishermen’s encampment. But all this took time and, already, two more of the men in the longboat were dead.
The first shot from the Neptuno’s cannon fell short but it served its purpose. Before the gunners had the chance to improve their aim, the rebels broke from hiding and sprinted for the cover of the houses beyond the beach. By now, though, it was too late for any attempt to land the longboat. It was already limping back to the Neptuno. Four of her crew were dead and four more were injured.
Thomson visited the injured in their quarters below decks. Stooping under the beams his face was inches from theirs as they lay in their hammocks, trying to find ease from their wounds. Two were lying still, breathing shallowly, and he saw death clouding their eyes.
Back on deck, he called the mate.
‘Hoist sail and get us down to Monte Video.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
A more experienced commander would have left it at that, but Thomson was young and felt the need to explain himself.
‘They’ll have other ambushes prepared. We can’t bombard the enemy; we can’t relieve our friends. All we can do is stay and watch. We’re best warning Commodore Popham.’
But the mate wasn’t even listening. He was giving the orders that would see the Neptuno set sail.
Ashore, Beresford was alerted by a shout from the seaward wall. He ran to an embrasure and saw the sails unfurling, white as they caught the morning sun.
Now he was utterly alone.
*
In de Liniers’ headquarters, Burke followed every detail of the siege. There was a large table in the shop, used by the draper for laying out and cutting bolts of cloth. De Liniers had appropriated this as a map table and it was now covered with plans showing the approaches to the fort. The admiral pointed at the barricaded streets.
‘Here and here, we could place cannon.’
There were fewer than half a dozen cannon available to him: weapons that had been positioned around the city, and which the British had abandoned as they fled. They were intended as static defences and were not mounted on carriages, so moving them would take time.
‘But we have all the time we want.’ De Liniers shrugged. ‘We might as well bring them up.’
The cannon, he explained to Burke, were hardly a military necessity. He did not intend to storm the fort, so the cannon were not essential to his strategy.
‘No, Lieutenant, an assault is unnecessary. We have them pinned down. The only forces that could relieve them are in Europe and cannot arrive here for months – by which time they will have starved. Meanwhile, every hour someone will show himself in the courtyard and my men will shoot him. So all the time men are dying in a futile effort to defend that which cannot be defended. I know your Colonel Beresford is stupid but he will work this out eventually.’
‘So why bring up cannon?’
De Liniers shrugged again – a Gallic gesture that reminded Burke that the admiral was French, not Spanish.
‘The navy put me in command of coastal defence. That’s really an artillery command. You could say that the cannon are a sentimental indulgence.’
There was nothing sentimental about his prosecution of the siege, though. Throughout the day, James watched helplessly as runners brought details of more casualties in the fort. Once the besieged troops tried to sally out. They made it across the square but once in the streets they came under fire from the buildings on either side of them. They retreated long before they reached the barricades, dragging their injured back as the rebels poured fire into them from the rooftops.
When the news was brought to de Liniers, he turned to Burke.
‘It seems your Colonel Beresford is more of a fool than I took him for. Perhaps we will have time to bring up the cannon after all.’
The first of the cannon arrived that afternoon. The musket fire from the roofs was silenced, allowing the British to venture onto the walls so that they could see the artillery being positioned.
The arrival of the guns was the last straw. As the crews laboured to fix them in position, the gate of the fort opened and an officer walked out under a white flag.
Five minutes later the man was brought before de Liniers who stood beside his map table. Although he was still dressed as a common gaucho, he had an unmistakable air of command and the Captain instinctively saluted him. As he did so, he noticed James for the first time, standing back toward the rear of the shop.
‘Lieutenant Burke? What the hell are you doing here?’
Before James could reply, de Liniers cut in.
‘Lieutenant Burke is my guest. He is here to ensure what you English call “fair play”. I assume you are here to discuss terms.’
‘Colonel Beresford is anxious to avoid more damage to the city and to relations between the people of La Plata and the British. He is willing to withdraw from Buenos Aires and be taken off by Commodore Popham’s vessels.’
The Captain had the decency to look embarrassed as he made this offer. De Liniers laughed politely.
‘So Colonel Beresford is kind enough to say that if we lift the siege he will march his men away. Commodore Popham will, no doubt, use them to take Monte Video.’
The Captain looked even more awkward.
‘I really wouldn’t know the colonel’s intentions, sir.’
De Liniers smiled politely and sat down.
‘Find the Captain a chair,’ he commanded. ‘Lieutenant Burke, join us, please.’
The three men sat and wine was brought.
‘Captain, you have the advantage of me as I do not know your name.’
‘Captain Henderson, sir.’
‘Very good, Captain Henderson. Let me explain the situation to you. Colonel Beresford is surrounded. The fort will fall. The only question is how many of his men are allowed to die before this happens. Once the fort has fallen, his men are my prisoners to do with it as I wish. I certainly do not intend to release them unconditionally. Do you understand all this?’
‘The laws of war, Admiral . . .’
‘Ensure that you will be well treated if you surrender. But they do not demand that I release you unconditionally.’ De Liniers paused and sipped from his wine.
‘Fortunately for you, I have an understanding with Lieutenant Burke here. He has interceded for you. He has assured me that if Colonel Beresford gives his parole, his men will remove themselves to Europe and will undertake not to engage in any further military expeditions to the Americas. Do you understand this?’
Henderson nodded.
‘Commodore Popham will lift his blockade of Monte Video and will se
nd his transports to embark your men. The escort ships will remain out at sea and will not approach within a mile of the shore. Again, do you understand this?’
‘Will we be allowed to retain the honours of war?’
‘You may leave the fort with your colours and arms but you will pile your arms in the plaza and your colours will be surrendered to me.’
‘I will put your offer to Colonel Beresford.’
De Liniers turned to Burke.
‘I will check on the placing of the guns. While I am gone, Captain Henderson, I recommend that you talk with Lieutenant Burke. His rank may be junior to yours but I think he has a finer understanding of the position.’
De Liniers left the shop and Henderson turned on Burke.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Burke? And why is de Liniers having you do his dirty work for him.’
Two days of watching as the men of the 71st died because of the stupidity of their commander had left James with no patience for that group of so-called ‘staff officers’ Beresford had surrounded himself with. This included Captain Henderson.
‘Captain Henderson, I am here under the direct command of the Duke of York. Under his authority, I negotiated an arrangement that could have given us the wealth of South America without the necessity for this battle. Now you have thrown that away, I have negotiated a separate arrangement that will get the 71st out of there with no loss of life. If you turn this offer down, de Liniers will refuse terms and keep you fighting to defend that fort until the last man of you is dead. When Beresford sent me to demand the surrender of the town, he refused to offer terms. If you do not accept the arrangement I have negotiated for you, de Liniers will repay Beresford in kind. Tell your damn fool colonel that this is his last chance to get anyone out alive.’
‘You don’t talk to me like that, Lieutenant.’
‘I’ll talk to you how I damn well want. De Liniers hates me. He’ll let you go because I can give him something he wants. Once he’s got that, he’ll kill me.’