To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  The assaulting troops were soon out of control, plundering, burning, abusing the local people. It was nothing to what was to happen just three months later at Badajoz, but it was an ugly episode. Groups of townspeople stood half naked in the street, stripped by the soldiers of all they had. Women went up to British officers and clung to them asking for protection. The officers tried to regain control of their troops. They even came under attack from their men for trying to restore discipline. One young light-infantry officer was appalled. ‘If I had not seen, I never could have supposed that British soldiers would become so wild and furious. It was quite alarming to meet groups of them in the street, flushed as they were with drink and desperate in mischief.’ Thomas Picton exploded with anger at his men’s behaviour. He flew in all directions calling in a voice of thunder on the frantic soldiers to remember that they were ‘men, and Englishmen – not savages!’ and by exhortations and threats he contrived to bring some back to their senses. Kincaid heard Picton’s voice, ‘with the power of twenty trumpets … proclaim damnation to everybody’.

  There was the odd bit of light relief: Grattan and four friends were resting in one house when they heard the crash of something falling in the apartment above. They went up and found a soldier covered in soot. He had been on a plundering expedition, but while he was surveying prospects from the roof of the house he fell down the chimney and was lucky it was large enough ‘to admit an elephant to pass down it’. Picton met a band of soldiers who had been on a drinking spree: they called out, ‘Well, General, we gave you a cheer last night: it’s your turn now!’ Picton smiled, raised his hat and replied, ‘Here then, you drunken set of brave rascals, hurrah! We’ll soon be in Badajoz!’

  Costello saw one gang of British looters plunder a house full of giant casks of spirits. They immediately smashed in the tops of the butts, and several of them ‘fell into the liquor head foremost and perished, unnoticed by the crowd’. That wasn’t all: someone mistakenly dropped a light into one of the casks of spirit and the whole place went up in flames. To many of those who recorded their memories, the looting of Ciudad Rodrigo – and, later, of Badajoz – shamed the British army. But there was a more cynical view, expressed by Grattan, that part of the soldiers’ reward after a successful siege was the looting of those things ‘which they considered themselves entitled to by “right of conquest”. I believe on a service such as the present, there is a sort of tacit acknowledgement of this “right”.’

  By dawn calm was restored and the shooting stopped. There were piles of bodies in and around the breaches. Ned Costello found the sight ‘heartrending in the extreme. The dead lay in heaps, numbers of them stripped …’ The remains of those who had been blown up in the explosion were ‘dreadfully mangled and discoloured … strewed about were dissevered arms and legs’. One corpse brought back a harrowing memory for Donaldson. He remembered a scene on the quayside back home. A crowd of wives had waited in deep anxiety while a lottery was conducted to decide which of them would accompany their husbands to the war. There would only be a handful, six to each hundred. One particular woman, known to be devoted to her husband, was shattered when she drew a blank, and Donaldson watched her tearfully but vainly imploring the ship’s captain to allow her to go with Sandy, her husband. In great distress she clung to him and held out her baby for one last kiss from its dad. Convinced that she would never see him again, she bade him ‘one last farewell’. That morning at Ciudad Rodrigo Donaldson saw Sandy among the dead. ‘When I saw him stretched lifeless on the breach, that scene flashed full upon my memory, and I could not but remark how true his wife’s forebodings had turned out.’

  Craufurd was taken back to the Convent of San Francisco, where Wellington came to see him. They spent some time together and Craufurd congratulated his Commander in Chief on the successful storming of the town. To which, according to Shaw Kennedy, Wellington replied, ‘Yes, a great blow, a great blow …’, presumably referring not to the siege but to Craufurd’s imminent death. Craufurd died of his wounds four days later, in what Wellington called ‘the bitterest blow of the war’. He attended Craufurd’s funeral when they buried him at the foot of the breach he had helped to carry. Wellington had had his differences with ‘Black Bob’, who had been insubordinate, reckless and often insolent, but he greatly admired his courage and flair, and recognised that the Light Division under his leadership had become one of the finest fighting forces in the world. Colborne, who was wounded twice in the final assault, rated Craufurd very highly. ‘He was a fine fellow, though very stern and tyrannical, but after all, that was the way he got his division into such fine order.’ When Craufurd’s men were on the march and their commander saw a soldier stepping across a puddle, he would call out, ‘Sit down in it, Sir, sit down in it.’ Kincaid, one of his junior officers, reckoned that Craufurd’s obsession with stern discipline had made him very unpopular with the Light Division ‘at the commencement. And it was not until a short time before he was lost to us for ever, that we were capable of appreciating his merits and fully sensible of the incalculable advantages we derived from the perfection of his system.’

  Ciudad Rodrigo transformed Wellington’s image among the doubters in London. Parliament voted him another bonus of £2,000 and even the Prince Regent honoured him with a new title, Earl of Wellington. Fred Ponsonby wrote home, ‘Depend upon it, we shall have Badajoz … and the ensuing campaign promises better than any which we have heretofore entered into.’

  9

  The town’s our own. Hurrah!

  Badajoz, 1812

  WELLINGTON HAD conducted a faultless siege of one of the great frontier fortresses. He now turned his attention to the other, far more forbidding stronghold at Badajoz, 150 miles to the south. The storming of Ciudad Rodrigo had opened up the road to Salamanca and northern Spain; Badajoz commanded the road to Madrid. Wellington was now four years into his campaign. If he was to loosen Napoleon’s grip on the Peninsula, he had to crack Badajoz once and for all. But it had ramparts as formidable as any in the world. And Wellington’s siege trains had failed there twice before.

  His first job was to assemble the artillery that would do the job properly. The year before he had abandoned a hopeless attempt to batter down the walls of Badajoz with a set of old brass guns that were no match for the city’s immense stone walls. Now, in February 1812, he had a new set of iron siege guns, sixteen eighteen-pounders and eighteen massive twenty-four-pounders, shipped up from Lisbon and then towed across land to Badajoz. Portuguese militiamen were made to carry the twenty-four-pound balls, one each, a distance of twelve miles ‘cursing all the way and back again’. Assembling the gunnery was a giant task, but Wellington knew he now had the men who could do it. Alexander Dickson had masterminded the bombardment of Ciudad Rodrigo. Colonel Fletcher, architect of the Lines of Torres Vedras, was his chief engineer. Even if he still hadn’t the full team of dedicated engineers he needed, Wellington was confident that Badajoz could be taken.

  Throughout February Wellington sent his army south towards Badajoz, as unobtrusively as he could. Unit by unit the allied army slipped away. To confuse the French, Wellington himself remained very visibly at Ciudad Rodrigo, watching the Spanish repair the breaches. All the time he kept a wary eye on intelligence reports about his enemy’s moves. Once again Napoleon made his job easier. Instead of sending Marmont down to help defend Badajoz, he ordered him west towards northern Portugal. Soult, down in the south, believed Badajoz could hold out against a siege. Its commander, a resourceful and imaginative professional, Baron Armand Philippon, had a large garrison of 5,000 men behind walls he believed were virtually impregnable. A soldier for thirty-four years, Philippon had served Napoleon all over Europe and had foiled two earlier attempts by the British to storm Badajoz.

  The Siege of Badajoz

  By the middle of March Wellington had quietly redeployed his army and had even managed to enjoy a few days in the saddle chasing hounds. He joined his troops in camp outside Badajoz. He knew the place well
already. But he rode around it two or three times to remind himself of the defiant strength of its walls, fifteen feet thick and thirty feet high. Badajoz was one of Europe’s most robust fortresses, built over the previous two centuries with five outlying forts and a main perimeter wall of spectacular thickness. Every hundred yards or so a great bastion – eight of them altogether – provided the defenders with a lethal field of fire against the flanks as well as against the front of an assault. Wellington decided to attack in three places. First he would seize Fort Picurina, a small redoubt 500 yards across a valley to the south-east of the city. From there his guns would pound the walls between the Santa María and Trinidad bastions. When they crumbled, he would throw his 4th and Light Divisions into the breach. At the same time, Picton’s 3rd Division would attempt to scale with ladders the walls of the castle at the north-east corner, and the 5th Division would storm the bastion of San Vincente in the north-west corner of the walls. It would be a simultaneous three-pronged attack. He hoped the good weather would hold.

  Harry Smith suddenly found himself doing what he and most infantrymen hated – digging siege trenches. At the end of his shift, he still found the time to do some hare coursing with his dog Moro, in order to keep the officers’ mess supplied with soup. He had an Irish horse he called Paddy. It was, he said, ‘a stupid beast of a horse’, and got its foot stuck in a warren on one chase and fell on top of him. His fellow Light Division officers thought him lucky to survive. Few escaped working in the trenches, and the day after the digging began the rain came, and didn’t stop. ‘The elements … adopted the cause of the besieged … We never were dry the whole time,’ said Kincaid. Every man did six hours’ digging each day and six hours each night, ankle deep in mud. At least the sodden ground made the digging less obvious. At Ciudad Rodrigo the pickaxes had struck the hard ground with a crack. Here they made a dull thump.

  There was one awkward moment when the defenders of Badajoz burst out and assaulted the British trenches. Fortunately William Grattan of the Connaught Rangers had noticed what the commanding officer had not – an unusual amount of bustle on the enemy side. Ignoring the commander, Grattan shouted at the men to drop their shovels and picks and grab their firearms. It was not a moment too soon. A ferocious struggle followed, with the British losing 120 dead and scores more wounded including Richard Fletcher, Wellington’s chief engineer. The French escaped with a whole selection of the men’s precious entrenching tools. After this encounter John Cooke of the Light Division came across one British soldier who had lost his leg and been left for dead. ‘An adventurous Portuguese began to disencumber him of his clothes, when the poor soldier opened his eyes in a most imploring manner. The Portuguese had him by the belts, lifting him up, so I gave the humane Portuguese a blow with the back of my sabre, which for a time laid him prostrate by the side of the soldier he was stripping.’

  The small outpost of Picurina fell on 25 March after a fierce battle. The British guns could now be hauled forward to within 300 yards of the walls of the city, and the siege proper began. For two weeks some 20,000 cannon balls – around a thousand tons in weight – were hurled at the walls of Badajoz. It took this vast weight of iron shot to produce the tell-tale signs of collapsing masonry that indicated a breach. Tom Garrety was in one of the gun trenches loading sandbags. They were constantly exposed to French fire. A cannon ball severed the leg of a man right next to him. Moments later a comrade was loading his musket, and ‘while the ramrod was in the barrel, the piece was accidentally discharged. The ramrod pierced through his body, and so firmly was the worm-end fixed near the backbone that the strongest man among us was unable to move it.’

  The 5th of April was the day Wellington set for the assault on Badajoz. He was up early. No time for hunting today, not until this piece of business was out of the way. They had told him the night before that the guns had almost done their job. With the first light his guns would be pounding again, and he had to see for himself how well their work was done. The bombardment of the bastions of Trinidad and Santa María should by now be taking its toll of the city’s south-east corner.

  At least the weather was looking up. The ceaseless early-spring rains that had drenched the gun crews and turned their emplacements into mudslides had given way to clear skies. There was more than a hint of the summer heat that would soon burn all the green out of the Extremadura landscape. Wellington’s guns had now been dragged so close that the twenty-four-pound balls were rupturing the once strong line of the stone walls. The sharp profile of the fortress which loomed over the flat and empty plain of the Guadiana was showing signs of fraying. Wellington knew the breaches his guns were making would soon be ‘practicable’. They would soon offer openings through which his men could try to force their way in.

  The French commander Baron Philippon knew it too. He summoned his chief engineer, Colonel Lamare, to a meeting that same morning – minutes after Lamare had toured the battlements and seen the ramparts being pulverised in several places. ‘Death was dealt in every direction amongst us … the breaches were becoming practicable, the efforts which the workmen made nightly to clear them were ineffectual.’ At the meeting Philippon gave his detailed orders for the defence of the breaches. He was well aware of the threat: he had been wounded two days earlier as he went among his men on the bastions urging them ‘everywhere to make the most determined resistance’ and to ‘make the enemy pay with the blood of his best soldiers’. Lamare could tell that the assault was imminent: a long train of British wagons had been spotted loaded with scaling ladders.

  Wellington spent some time at the gun line that morning. As usual, he was heedless of his own safety, determined to make his own personal assessment of when the breaches would be ready to assault. He was not inclined to trust the observations of his subordinates. His confidence in his own judgement and his patent contempt for any delegation of authority had long since become a fact of life for his commanders, though many still resented it. He decided that the assault on Badajoz would take place that night. The two key breaches would be tackled by the Light Division (Santa María bastion) and the 4th Division (La Trinidad). Thomas Picton, the 3rd Division commander, had the most challenging task of all. The walls of the castle which his men had to scale with ladders were thirty feet high and unbreached. Picton was nonetheless determined that his men would be first into the city.

  Wellington issued a great sheaf of orders. With his usual attention to detail he was going to leave as little as he could to chance. Each unit’s timetable was itemised. The men of the 4th and Light Divisions should ‘not advance beyond the shelter afforded by the quarries on the left of the road, till they shall have seen the heads of the advanced guards ascend the breaches’. The men were to ‘leave their knapsacks in camp’. And Picton’s 3rd Division, which was to attack the castle walls, would take ‘all the long ladders in the Engineers’ park and must be attended by 12 carpenters with axes and six miners with crowbars’.

  Wellington’s men were in that mood of feverish expectation and anxiety that came before a clash in which they knew that many would die. ‘Although there was a certainty’, wrote John Kincaid, the wry Scots subaltern, ‘of about one man in every three being knocked down … so great was the rage for passports into eternity … that even the officers’ servants insisted on taking their places within the ranks.’

  The men who would form the perilous forlorn hopes made the best of their last few hours before an ordeal they knew they had little chance of surviving. Bugler William Green would attack with the Light Division, and he like all forlorn hopers was given the day off. He went down to the river ‘for a good bathe. I thought I would have a clean skin whether killed or wounded.’ Ned Costello, the Irish corporal, whose bravado had not been dented by the two leg wounds he had suffered on the River Côa two years earlier, had volunteered for the Light Division’s forlorn hope. He would remember the battle for Badajoz as ‘one of the most sanguinary and awful engagements on the records of any country’. Lieutenant H
arvest was to command the Light Division’s forlorn hope and John Cooke watched him that afternoon ‘sucking an orange … and very thoughtful … He observed “My mind is made up; I am sure to be killed.” He was killed!’ One of the main assault parties, which would follow behind the forlorn hope, would be commanded by an elderly Irish major, Peter O’Hare, who also knew the odds against surviving: ‘A Lieutenant Colonel or cold meat within a few hours,’ he confided to a fellow officer.

  The air of agonised suspense was heightened at 4.00 p.m. when Wellington decided to postpone the attack until the following day. The formidable obstacles that Philippon and his staff had piled up in the breaches persuaded Wellington’s engineers to create another breach between the two main ones. The breaches and the ditches in front of them were full of horrific mantraps. Sets of spikes were fixed in the ground, sometimes concealed beneath water; large wooden beams – so-called chevaux de frise – bristled with sword blades. Mines were laid with fuses that could be lit from behind the breaches. And on the battlements, defenders were ready with barrels of powder and what were known as carcasses – bundles of fire – which would be rolled down to ignite among the attackers. Philippon had also organised the damming of the small river, the Rivillas, that flowed past the walls, so that part of the approach to the breaches would be flooded.

  The 6th of April was a dry, very still day and the night that followed was very dark. Wellington set 10 p.m. as the time for the assaults on the breaches to begin. Moments before that hour the men in the forlorn hopes began to steal forward. The longer they could retain an element of surprise, the further they would get through the ditches and up through the debris of the breaches before the enemy reacted. All they could hear above the soft pad of their own footsteps was the noise of frogs croaking. Green, ordered to carry his bugle at the head of one of the columns, had never felt such a sense of horror before, and thought to himself, ‘You’ll be in hell before daylight.’