The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  it required every man to be actually in the trenches digging for six hours every day and the same length of time every night which, with the time required to march to and from them, through fields more than ankle deep in stiff mud, left us never more than eight hours out of the 24 in camp, and we were never dry the whole time.

  The endless downpour was hampering operations in various ways, not least in raising the level of the Guadiana and cutting the British pontoon bridge there. This meant that for a couple of days, had the French surprised them, there would have been no line of retreat for the three divisions digging the approaches.

  On 25 March, at about 10 a.m., the great sheet of rain that had divided the British parallel on the San Miguel ridge from the main defences of Badajoz suddenly drew back like the curtain of a vast natural theatre. On cue, the demented timpani of twenty-four-pounders began its performance. Most of the British batteries were trying to smash French cannon, a task requiring some marksmanship, since it meant directing fire through the embrasures in the bastions. At their end, the French were desperately trying to beat back the British from positions not 200 yards from the Picurina Fort, atop the ridge. Ten of Wellington’s siege guns were firing into that small work at point-blank range. This weight of shot was overwhelming the 200 defenders. Any man who tried to serve one of the Picurina’s cannon was soon scrambled by a British twenty-four-pound ball, disintegrating into a shower of body parts. By the afternoon, the defenders were making no attempt to fire their guns, cowering instead in the lower part of the work and praying for deliverance.

  That evening, Wellington gave the order for Kempt’s brigade of the 3rd Division to storm the Picurina. His engineers had been studying the battered fort closely and believed that the time was right. Major Henry Hardinge, the Deputy QMG of the Portuguese army and Scovell’s friend, decided to accompany the stormers. He had no role in the command of troops, for he was a staff officer after all, but knew that reputations were enhanced in such desperate moments.

  When the signal was given, Kempt’s men ran the short distance through the darkness towards the Picurina’s slanting walls. The order to storm meant British batteries had to stop firing and that allowed the work’s occupants to come running out to defend themselves with primed muskets. The officers leading the storming parties then had a dreadful intimation. They could see no way into the Picurina. Palisades of sharpened stakes surrounded it at every point and even as they hacked their way through, they could see that the ditch in front of the work was so deep that their ladders, once placed in this well, would not reach up to the top of the walls that rose above it. While the redcoats milled about in confusion, it was time for the defenders to repay their earlier sufferings with musketry. Firing down from only forty feet away on to the stormers, the French cut 200 down. In this moment of crisis, one Captain Oates of the 88th was seized by a sudden inspiration. Seeing a lip at the far side of the ditch, he ordered his men to lay their ladders across the deep obstacle. They scurried along them, stood on the ledge hugging the base of the wall, and then raised their ladders in this new position. They were in. The Picurina Fort had fallen.

  The charmed Major Hardinge survived the storm just as he had survived the death of General Moore and the Battle of Albuera. William Warre reported to his father, ‘Hardinge got shot through his coat at the assault and as usual behaved with great zeal and courage.’

  For the French, the fall of the Picurina was an ominous event. It allowed British batteries to be established just 400 yards from the Santa Maria and Trinidad bastions on the city’s south-east corner. It would just be a case of how many days it took them to silence all the guns in these casements and batter some breaches in the walls that connected them.

  Matters looked a little different from Wellington’s perspective. The fausse braie, the great earthen rampart around the walls themselves, was more massive at Badajoz than it had been at Rodrigo. It would have to be blasted away if the stormers were not to drop twenty feet into the ditch behind it. This ridge also screened some of the main wall, even from batteries on the San Miguel ridge above. It would not, therefore, be possible to cut breaches right down to the base of the walls.

  The engineers usually had two ways of dealing with such a problem. They could dig a trench right up to the fausse braie and blow it up with a mine, or they could use the exploding shells fired by howitzers for the same purpose. This usually filled the ditch behind it with earth and debris, further reducing its effectiveness as an obstacle. Unfortunately for Wellington, it was impossible to dig right up to it, because his engineers would have been exposed to murderous fire while trying to negotiate the little ravine that separated the San Miguel ridge from the bastions under attack. As for using artillery to achieve the same object, this would take a long time and Wellington knew he must press matters forward as quickly as possible. Sooner or later, Soult or Marmont, perhaps both of them, would have to do something to save Badajoz.

  For Major Scovell, these final days of the siege were a time of high personal expectation. Mary had set sail on the Lisbon packet. His masters in Headquarters had agreed that he could have a short leave to go and see her as soon as the business at Badajoz was completed. It is unsurprising then that Scovell did not venture into the breaches in search of glory, like those impatient young bachelors Hardinge, Somerset and Lord March. Scovell, after all, had not seen his wife since they had parted at Sprotborough Hall in 1809 and it would be tragic indeed for Mary to endure every hardship of the journey to Lisbon only to receive the terrible word that she had become a widow.

  By the evening of 5 April, Wellington’s engineers reported to him that there were three breaches in the main wall practicable for assault. He was worried, though, that the fausse braie was still too high.

  ‘My Lord, what are your orders?’

  The general was seized by doubt: what if the ditch behind this obstacle was still so deep that injured stormers would pile into it and then be unable to escape? They would be butchered or taken. No. He did not have too much time, but he must see the fausse braie bombarded for at least another day.

  While the British tried to blow away tons of earth with shells, General Philippon made every preparation to resist the assault. Each night, when the bombardment had stopped, French troops went into the great ditch around the walls and scattered every kind of impediment: iron crows’ feet and boards studded with nails to injure the feet of anybody coming through; explosive mines cleverly sited in those places where the stormers might take cover; a new parapet had been built behind the breaches, giving the British a second wall to storm; and an intimidating array of chevaux de frise, wooden trestles bristling with sharp blades, had been chained to the top of the breaches themselves.

  On 6 April, Wellington was once again asked for his orders. He knew that the fausse braie had hardly been touched in the day’s extra battering and that he was running out of time: Marshal Soult was finally reported to have left Seville with a large column on 1 April. Marshal Marmont had begun moving towards northern Portugal (as ordered by Napoleon) and was threatening Almeida. Wellington’s earlier confidence about the security of that fortress began to falter a little. He needed to bring this Badajoz business to a conclusion quickly, and that was going to cost him the lives of more of his soldiers. The assault was ordered. The Light and 4th Divisions would attack the breaches. Picton’s 3rd Division would make an attempt to mount the walls further along with scaling ladders. Two more attacks would go in on the western side of the fort. There, British sappers had been able to put giant mines under the fausse braie and these would be detonated prior to troops at those places attempting their own escalade (assault by means of ladders).

  At lunchtime on 6 April, a heavy pall of apprehension hung over the Staff. As they were sitting eating with Marshal William Beresford, the Portuguese army commander, one diner recalled,

  there was little conversation at table, but a young man inconsiderately said, ‘of the number now present, how many will be alive and w
ith their limbs whole this time tomorrow, or even four hours hence?’ A dead silence of some continuance followed this observation, and the marshal gave the officer a look of displeasure.

  That evening, men of the main storming parties marched down towards the breaches. Sergeant William Lawrence of the 40th had volunteered for the 4th Division’s Forlorn Hope with his mates Pig Harding and George Bowden. They had been inside Badajoz before, back in 1809, and, as Lawrence noted: ‘we knew where the shops were located. Having heard a report that, if we succeeded in taking the place, three hours’ plunder would be allowed, we arranged to meet at a silversmith’s shop.’ Wellington would not have explicitly encouraged looting at any time, but the young officers who walked forward with Sergeant Lawrence and his friends did nothing to disabuse them. Every man needed to believe that if he survived the hideous business ahead, there would be some reward at the end. It was, after all, entirely in accordance with the Laws of War that any town that refused the besiegers’ summons, as Badajoz had done, forfeited all right to the lives and property of its inhabitants.*

  Between 8 and 9 p.m., the stormers were paraded, given lumps of bread and a double tot of rum. They continued on their way in the darkness. ‘Off we went with palpitating hearts,’ one of them later recalled. ‘I never feared nor saw danger until this night. As I walked at the head of the column, the thought struck me forcibly – you will be in hell before daylight!’

  As they approached the walls illuminated by the moon, some could see the French defenders looking down on them. The British batteries had maintained a fire of blank rounds, trying to lull Philippon’s men into a false sense of security. But they were not deceived in any way. They were just waiting for the stormers to enter their killing ground.

  When the first men mounted the fausse braie, barrels of burning tar came bouncing down from the ramparts. Their targets thus illuminated, the defenders unleashed a storm of bullets on to them. Rifleman Costello of the 95th was one of a team burdened with scaling steps:

  three of the men carrying the ladder with me were shot dead in a breath and its weight fell upon me … our men were falling fast. The remainder of the stormers rushed up, disregarding my cries, and those of the wounded men around me. Many were shot and fell upon me so that I was drenched in blood.

  With each flash and bang, some ghastly new sight of decapitation or evisceration came briefly into view. As the stormers fell into the ditch between the fausse braie and the walls, many were hurt and lay helpless as others came piling down on top of them. Rifleman Costello lay under a bank of bodies, ‘the fire continued to blaze over me in all its horrors, accompanied by screams, groans, and shouts, the crashing of stones and the falling of timbers. For the first time in many years I uttered something like a prayer.’

  Sergeant Lawrence had got down into the trench, but with two bits of shrapnel in his knee and a musket ball lodged in his side and, ‘on the cry of “come on my lads!” from our commanders, we hastened to the breach’. Lawrence scambled up the smashed section of wall only to find the immovable array of blades and spikes on top and spy the further ditch the defenders had dug behind this broken wall. ‘The cheval de frise was a fearful obstacle and although attempts were made to remove it – my left hand was dreadfully cut by one of the blades – we had no success.’

  The attack was faltering and hundreds of men were dying in the ditch in front of the breaches. Wellington watched the scene from atop the San Miguel ridge a few hundred yards away. His boyish ADC Lord March was beside him, as was Sir James McGrigor, the Army’s surgeon. Scovell and other staff officers were scurrying about in the darkness, trying to collect reports on the progress of the different columns. Wellington stared grim-faced into the night, racked with worry as he tried to catch sight of what was happening in the brief glare produced by one explosion after another.

  Faint from loss of blood, Sergeant Lawrence staggered out of the trench and back towards the surgeons. His mates were both dead: Pig Harding had been riddled with seven musket balls and George Bowden had had both his legs blown off. Lawrence had forsaken any idea of plundering the silversmiths now: he was just trying to find some help before he bled to death. Stumbling up the San Miguel ridge, he walked straight into Wellington and his two Staff. ‘He enquired whether any of our troops had got into the town,’ Lawrence recalled later. ‘I told him no and that I did not think they ever would because of the cheval de frise, the deep entrenchment and the constant and murderous fire of the enemy behind them.’

  As further news arrived from the breaches, it became clear that the men were losing all cohesion and dying by their hundreds in the breaches. Any hope of breaking in there must be abandoned. This moment, perhaps the greatest crisis of Wellington’s life as a general, was memorably recorded by Sir James McGrigor:

  an officer came up with an unfavourable report of the assault, announcing that Colonel McLeod and several officers were killed, with heaps of men, who choked the breach … another officer came with a still more unfavourable report, that no progress was being made and that he feared none could be made; for almost all the officers were killed, and none left to lead on the men, of whom a great many had fallen. At this moment I cast my eyes on the countenance of Lord Wellington, lit up by the glare of the torch held by Lord March; I shall never forget it to the last moment of my existence, and could even now sketch it. The jaw had fallen, and the face was of unusual length, while the torchlight gave his countenance a lurid aspect; but still the expression of the face was firm.

  At midnight, two hours after this dreadful business had begun, Wellington sent orders for the 4th and Light Divisions to be recalled. Only Picton could save the affair. Wellington did not know it, but Picton had already started, on his own initiative, trying to escalade the old medieval wall on the eastern side of Badajoz. Wellington sent McGrigor forward to tell the fiery Welsh general that his attack was their last hope. But before the surgeon had travelled far, news came that Picton’s men were successfully climbing their long ladders and getting into the fortress. Philippon could not defend every possible point against attack and indeed, at the other end of the fortress, its western point close to the Guadiana, a column of the 5th Division that had been intended only to deliver a diversionary attack was also pressing home its unexpected success.

  After hours of mayhem, Rifleman Costello, still lying in the ditch in front of the great breach, heard, ‘a cry of “Blood and ’ounds! Where’s the Light Division? The town’s ours, hurrah!”’ It was, no doubt, from some of the 3rd Division. Costello struggled out of the killing ground and found his way into Badajoz, where gangs of soldiers began breaking into houses, smashing them up in search of hidden money or drink and beating any Spaniards who stood in their way. ‘It has to be considered that men who besiege a town in the face of such dangers generally become desperate from their own privations and sufferings,’ Costello wrote later of the events of the early hours of 7 April, ‘once they get a footing within its walls, they are flushed by victory. Hurried on by the desire for liquor and eventually maddened by drink, they will stop at nothing.’

  This rioting soon turned to murder and rape and British officers who tried to restrain their men were among those killed. Major FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s young military secretary, fought his way into the town to save General Philippon and his daughters. One eyewitness saw:

  General Philippon, the governor, with his two daughters, holding each by the hand; all three with their hair dishevelled and with them were two British officers, each holding one of the ladies by the arm, and with their swords drawn making thrusts occasionally at soldiers who attempted to drag these ladies away. I am glad to say that these two British officers succeeded in conveying the Governor and his daughter safely through the breach, to the camp. With the exception of these ladies, I was told that very few females, old or young, escaped violation by our brutal soldiery, mad with brandy and passion.

  It would take many hours before this situation could be brought under control, r
equiring the hanging of several soldiers in the town’s main square to serve as an example. William Warre wrote wearily in a letter home:

  it was almost impossible to restrain the avarice and licentiousness of the soldiery, which so greatly sullies the brilliancy of their conduct and victory … it is also prudent to hold our tongues and shut our eyes on miseries it is out of our power to prevent, but must deeply feel.

  As Wellington surveyed the wreck of the town on 7 April, he began to understand the scale of the butcher’s bill he had paid for this victory. There had been 4,600 allied casualties between the investment of the fortress on 17 March and that bleary April morning. More than 1,800 of these dead and wounded had belonged to the storming parties of the Light and 4th Divisions.

  The official dispatch, as always a public document, was full of praise for the conduct of the troops: ‘it is impossible that any expressions of mine can convey to your Lordship the sense which I entertain of the gallantry of the officers and troops on this occasion’. There was fulsome thanks to Picton, who was wounded in the fighting, and many other officers. Scovell’s friends Somerset and Hardinge were both promoted to lieutenant-colonel for their part in events, achieving this lofty step at twenty-three and twenty-seven years old respectively.

  In his private correspondence, however, Wellington expressed great anguish and pain at what had happened. Attaching a confidential note to his victory dispatch, he told the secretary of war, ‘I anxiously hope that I will never again be the instrument of putting [my men] to such a test as that to which they were put last night.’ He expressed dismay that the British Army had no proper corps of engineers for carrying out such operations and that this had forced him to adopt many second-rate improvisations. The inability to demolish the fausse braie ramparts in front of the breach and pressure of time had placed him in an impossible position on 5 April: ‘I was obliged then to storm or 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.’