by Mark Urban
Private James Burke was another determined to volunteer. He had been on the Forlorn Hope at Rodrigo with Fairfoot, but had neither that man’s intellect nor Mayberry’s contrition. Burke, an illiterate labourer from Kilkenny, personified the hard-fighting, fatalistic Irish in the 95th’s ranks. He was, in the damning words of one of his officers, ‘one of those wild untamable animals that, the moment the place was carried, would run to every species of excess’. In short, Burke was bound to volunteer because he had learned it was the best way to get the fight of his life, with a fuck and the devil of a good drink at the end of it.
Among the officers, too, there were many who wanted to put themselves forward. The chances of promotion were one factor, but like the men, many of them had become convinced of the doctrine, ‘The more the danger, the more the honour.’
All of this meant that when the volunteers were finally called for, ‘so great was the rage for passports to eternity in our battalion, on that occasion, that even the officers’ servants insisted on taking their place in the ranks; and I was obliged to leave my baggage in charge of a man who had been wounded some days before.’
On 5 April, Wellington’s engineers told him that their battering of the two bastions at the south-east corner of the defences, Santa Maria and La Trinidad, had shattered them to the point where they were vulnerable to assault. Fearing the approach of a relieving French column, he gave orders for the attack, but at the last minute, concerned about the height of the rampart in front of those broken works, he postponed it for twenty-four hours. The extra time would allow the gunners to pound away, to see if they could do anything to blow away this rampart in order to make the job a little easier.
The postponement of the assault meant that the picked men waited throughout 6 April, knowing their trial would come that night. Sergeant Fairfoot, having volunteered for his fourth storm in as many months, would be part of the Forlorn Hope – so would Private Burke and Ned Costello. Major O’Hare had been given the command of the storming party, to be made up of three hundred men. Esau Jackson was not among the volunteers.
Such was the zeal to take part that some curious deals had been done between Colonel Barnard and the officers of his division. Lieutenant Willie Johnston would not be put off, so a task had been invented for him, in command of a ‘rope party’ to advance with the Forlorn Hope and pull down some defences the French had erected on top of the breach. The command of that Forlorn Hope was ultimately given to Lieutenant Horatio Harvest of the 43rd on the basis of seniority alone – precisely the nonsensical solution rejected by Craufurd in January. ‘He insisted on his right as going as senior lieutenant; so over-scrupulous was he that his permitting a junior officer to occupy this post might be construed to the detriment of his honour,’ one officer of the 95th wrote years later, evidently still angry. ‘He went, and … by his too refined sense of honour deprived another officer, probably, of that promotion which would have been the consequence of going on this duty had he survived.’
The volunteers were excused normal duties on the 6th. ‘I went to the river and had a good bathe,’ wrote Bugler Green, who joined Fairfoot in the Forlorn Hope. ‘I thought I would have a clean skin whether killed or wounded.’ It was a sunny day, one in which the soldiers were able to lie about and reflect on the trials ahead. One subaltern of the 43rd chanced upon Horatio Harvest, sitting on a bank, sucking an orange. ‘My mind is made up. I am sure to be killed,’ said Harvest, without apparent emotion.
This lull before the storm played very badly with Lieutenant Thomas Bell. He had joined the 1st/95th in February, just after Rodrigo, with two other subalterns sent out from England to replace casualties. Bell was an old acquaintance of George Simmons, having served with him in the Lincolnshire Militia – they volunteered into the 95th on the same day back in April 1809. Bell had sat the war out in Shorncliffe so far. Although he had no experience of fighting whatsoever, he arrived in the regiment with a more senior rank than a hardened warrior like John Kincaid.
Sympathetic voices would have told Bell that he would have every chance to prove himself soon, just as Gairdner had quickly shown his mettle at Rodrigo. But the gallows humour and fatalistic resignation of the 95th’s soldiers only made Bell more anxious. As the siege of Badajoz wore on, Bell’s feelings of turmoil grew unbearable.
The day also gave way to some uncomfortable meditations for O’Hare. He had been wounded before, in south America, but had somehow gone through the current Peninsular campaign with only one slight wound (at Fuentes). Did that give him the mysterious aura of a survivor, or had he already pushed his luck too far?
At around 8 p.m. the stormers fell in, prior to being given a last-minute pep talk by their officers. Lieutenant Bell chose this moment to complain of feeling sick, and to abandon his men, heading back towards his tent. A double allowance of grog was doled out to each soldier, to numb them for the business ahead. O’Hare was ill at ease. Captain Jones, of the 52nd, asked him, ‘Well O’Hare what do you think of tonight’s work?’
‘I don’t know, tonight, I think, will be my last,’ said O’Hare.
‘Tut tut man! I have the same sort of feeling, but I keep it down with a drop of this.’ Jones handed O’Hare his calabash and the old Irish major took a good draught of brandy. The Light Division stormers had formed up in some quarries about a third of a mile from the Santa Maria breach. They waited a while longer, for they were not due to move forward until 10 p.m. One more chance to peer into the gloom and talk over the objective.
The Santa Maria and Trinidad bastions had their tops shattered by the incessant artillery fire. The sloped stonework bases remained intact, having been protected – such was the design of a fortress – by the earthen rampart around it. Heavy damage to the bastions, though, meant that the batteries located in them at the start of the siege had been largely disabled. Great chunks of the wall stretching about 150 yards between these two targets had also collapsed under the bombardment, being only partially screened by the ravelin that sat between the two bastions and the edge of the great ditch in front of them.
For the stormers, the line of assault would take them almost due north from the quarry for about four hundred yards until the gentle rise of the surrounding escarpment began. Another fifty or sixty yards would bring them to the top of that feature, where the ground fell away vertically in front of them, dropping about twenty feet to the floor of the ditch. There was every chance that a man jumping down into it would break his legs, so ladders and haybags would be used to help them down. The Light Division men would then have to bear slightly left and travel another ten or twenty yards, circumventing the ravelin (lest they assault it by mistake in the chaos, as Kincaid had at Rodrigo) in order to get their ladders onto the wall of the Santa Maria bastion itself. The Trinidad bastion would be attacked by stormers from the 4th Division. Simultaneously, Picton’s 3rd Division would approach the medieval castle walls at Badajoz’s north-east corner and escalade them with long ladders. The 5th Division would make a diversionary attack on the western side of the town.
General Phillipon, the governor, had made elaborate precautions to turn Wellington’s planned attacks into a bloody fiasco. Where sections of the main enciente or wall had collapsed between the bastions, a retrenchment had been thrown up, a makeshift wall made from piled-up debris to form a new obstacle right behind the old one. Along this breach and on the bastions, chevaux de frises – wooden frames with sword blades and bayonets attached – formed a prickly last line of defence. The engineers had partly flooded the ditch between the wall and outer rampart; calculating where the troops would have to go to avoid the water, they placed mines and planks with nails driven through. The men atop the ramparts would have piles of loaded muskets, grenades and stones to throw down.
The stormers moved up, with a couple of hundred riflemen of Right Wing who would provide a covering fire. O’Hare caught sight of George Simmons, the subaltern he had tutored, now one of the battalion’s most experienced officers. The men shook
hands, and as he turned to part, the major told Simmons: ‘A lieutenant colonel or cold meat in a few hours.’
Shortly before 10 p.m., the four companies of the 95th’s Right Wing, under the commandof Major Alexander Cameron, began trotting forward. They were going to line the protective slope around the walls, to provide a covering fire for the stormers. Some British cannon had kept up a fire of blanks in order to deceive the garrison, but as the riflemen crawled into position on top of the escarpment, many felt sure they could see the defenders watching them and doing nothing. Both sides were holding their fire.
The rope party and Forlorn Hope came forward too now, dozens of men trotting up the incline, many carrying ladders or haybags in order to break the fall into the ditch ahead. As they came to the top of the slope, silhouetted against the sky, a couple of carcasses were thrown down by the defenders, burning with a furious intensity and illuminating walls and men alike with an unearthly flickering pink light.
‘Instantly a volley of grape-shot, canister, and small arms poured in among us as we stood on the glacis about thirty yards from the walls,’ one officer recalled. Men dropped all around as Cameron’s riflemen tried to answer the French fire. ‘What a sight! The enemy crowding the ramparts, with the French soldiers standing on the parapets … a tremendous firing now opened on us and for a moment we were stationary.’
‘I was in the act of throwing my bag when a ball went through the thick part of my thigh, and having my bugle in my left hand, it entered my left wrist and I dropped,’ wrote William Green. ‘When it entered my wrist, it was more like a six-pounder than a musket ball! It smashed the bone and cut the guides, and the blood was pouring from both wounds, I began to feel very faint.’
Sergeant Fairfoot heard Green’s cries and asked him, ‘Bill, are you wounded?’ He gave Green his flask, which still held some rum, and bid him, ‘Drink it, but I cannot assist to carry you out of the reach of shot.’ Fairfoot knew the attack would instantly falter if they stopped to help the wounded.
Some men endured the first moments of this hail of fire lying flat, and as it slackened a little, the first ladders were tipped down into the ditch where some intrepid stormers, including Ned Costello, climbed onto them. Almost as soon as he was down, Costello was flattened by the body of another who’d been shot on the ladder behind him. The group in the ditch built to a few score. They were floundering about, discovering the water, several feet deep in places they had not expected, treading on rusty nails, flinching with the impact of splinters and mines that lacerated their flesh.
Many men were falling among the covering party and reserves gathered on the rampart, even though they had not been designated for the initial assault. Second Lieutenant James Gairdner fell on this slope, pierced in a breath by musket or canister balls in his right leg, left arm and through his chin.
Those in the ditch were looking about, confused, unable to gain their bearings or see the way ahead clearly. The Forlorn Hope commander, Lieutenant Harvest, was dead. Willie Johnston, the rope party commander, had fallen seriously wounded. It was down to the NCOs or anyone with a commanding manner to try to organise the men. Sergeant Fairfoot went forward and there was a sickening crack as the musket ball hit the peak of his cap, going through it into his left temple. He dropped like a felled tree. In this hellish chaos, just like at Rodrigo, some men assaulted the ravelin in error.
Seeing Private Mayberry had already taken several wounds, one of the officers told him to go back and find himself the dressing station. ‘No going to the rear for me,’ Mayberry shouted back, ‘I’ll restore myself to my comrades’ opinion or make a finish of myself altogether.’ He fell dead moments later.
Some time had passed, perhaps as much as forty minutes, before Major O’Hare and one or two other officers got enough men together in the ditch to place ladders against the correct walls and prosecute the final phase of the assault. O’Hare got onto one of the ladders and began to climb. A musket shot to the chest stopped him, and he dropped back to the ground. Costello went up the ladders too, only to get a blow from a musket butt or some such that sent him crashing down to the bottom again. Cooke of the 43rd tried his chances: ‘Within a yard of the top, a blow deprived me of sensation and I fell. I recollect a soldier pulling me out of the water, where so many men had drowned.’
One solitary rifleman managed to get to the top of the ladders and was trying to get under the chevaux de frises, when several Frenchmen set about him: ‘Another man of ours (resolved to win or die) thrust himself beneath the chained sword blades, and there suffered the enemy to dash his brains out with the ends of their muskets.’
Those who had fallen, winded or wounded, like Costello and Cooke, now lay among piles of bodies, beaten. ‘I had lost all the frenzy of courage that had first possessed me and felt weak, my spirit prostrate,’ wrote Costello.
Among the dead and wounded bodies around me, I endeavoured to screen myself from the enemy’s shot. While I lay in this position, 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.
Many of them, looking up at the flashes of musketry or grenades briefly lighting the dark walls and the devils who stood on top of them, recorded these grim sights and sounds as their last, as their blood pumped away into this filthy ditch and they drifted into their last sleep.
In that desperate battle of wills that was a storm, the defenders knew they were winning. ‘French troops were standing upon the walls taunting and inviting our men to come up and try again,’ wrote one British officer. The French called down in their broken English, ‘Why don’t you come into Badajoz?’ They were not just savouring their triumph; it was also a way to persuade the British with any fight left in them to get up off the ground and show themselves, so they could pour another volley onto them.
At the rear of the division, down near the quarries, a handful of bandsmen were collecting the wounded and helping them back to a dressing station, where the surgeons laboured in a candlelit tent. Bugler Green peered in to find a terrifying scene of bones being sawed, discarded limbs and anguished screaming.
I stepped up to the doctor; he saw the blood trickling down my leg, and tore off a piece of my trousers to get at the wound, which left my leg and part of my thigh bare. He then made his finger and thumb meet in the hole the ball had made, and said, ‘The ball is out, my lad!’ He put in some lint and covered the wound with some strapping.
Two or three hours after the initial attack, successive waves were still moving forward. All sense of the original grouping of storming party, reserve, and so on had been lost now, and it was just a matter of some intrepid or indeed foolish officer putting himself at the head of whoever wanted to follow. These men dropped down into the ditch, where they found hundreds of dead or dying comrades:
In the awful charnel pit we were then traversing to reach the foot of the breach, the only sounds that disturbed the night were the moans of the dying with the occasional screech from others suffering under acute agony … it was a heart-rending moment to be obliged to leave such appeals unheeded.
Half a mile away, near the city’s castle, men of the 3rd Division had moved up to the walls. They faced a forty-foot climb, as these were far higher than those of the more modern defences on the Light Division’s side. Here too men of different regiments became mingled and confused as the defenders poured fire on them. One gentleman volunteer noted in a letter home:
The men were not so eager to go up the ladders as I expected them to be … I went up the ladder and half way up I called out ‘Here is the 94th!’ and was glad to see the men begin to mount. In a short time they were all up and formed on a road just over the wall.
Picton’s attack was succeeding.
The small group of officers that marked the Light Division’s makeshift HQ stood disconsolately near the outer defensive rampart. The slaughter had gone on a good four hour
s before they had broken off their attack. Just then, Major FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary, popped out of the darkness and accosted Captain Harry Smith. Where was Colonel Barnard? Lord Wellington wanted the Light and 4th Divisions to resume their attack. ‘The devil!’ said Smith in reply. ‘Why, we have had enough; we are all knocked to pieces.’ Somerset was adamant: ‘I dare say, but you must try again.’ Smith smiled and replied, ‘If we could not succeed with two whole fresh and unscathed Divisions, we are likely to make a poor show of it now. But we will try again with all our might.’
Before the order could be passed, a ripple of shouts began spreading through the British ranks – ‘Blood and Wounds! the 3rd Division are in!’ – and as the rumour strengthened, the French fire slackened, for the defenders knew their enemies were now behind them and it was time to sauve qui peut. Badajoz had fallen.
SEVENTEEN
The Disgrace
April 1812
Major Cameron walked slowly and deliberately up and down the ranks of riflemen. The four companies under his command had been formed up on top of Badajoz’s defensive rampart once the French firing stopped. It was about 4 a.m., and the men could hear gunshots and women’s screams occasionally rising above the constant moaning of the hundreds of wounded still lying just below them in the ditch. Cameron fixed them with his grey eyes; the flashes of gunfire and flames licking around buildings behind them occasionally lit up the Celtic pallor of his countenance. He knew they were itching to join the plunder. ‘If any man leaves the ranks,’ he shouted, ‘I shall have him put to death on the spot.’
