A NOTE ON SIEGES
Every one knows that the record of the Peninsular Army in the matter
of sieges is not the most brilliant page in its annals. It is not to
the orgies that followed the storm of Badajoz or San Sebastian that
allusion is here made, but to the operations that preceded them, and to
the unhappy incidents that accompanied the luckless siege of Burgos.
Courage enough and to spare was lavished on those bloody leaguers;
perseverance was shown in no small measure; and to a certain extent
professional skill was not lacking. But the tale compares miserably
with the great story of the triumphs of Wellington’s army in the open
field. Reckless bravery had to supply the place of the machinery and
organization that was lacking, and too much blood was spilt, and
sometimes spilt to no effect.
The responsibility for these facts is hard to distribute. As is
generally the case when failures are made, it is clear that a system
was to blame rather than any individual, or body of individuals.
Great Britain had been at war with France for some sixteen years;
but in all her countless expeditions she had never, since 1794, been
compelled to undertake regular sieges on a large scale. The battering
of old-fashioned native forts in India, the blockades of Malta or
Alexandria, the bombardments of Flushing or Copenhagen, need hardly
be mentioned. They were not operations such as those which Wellington
had to carry out in 1811 or 1812. For a long time the Peninsular War
had been considered as a purely defensive affair; it was concerned
with the protection of Portugal, almost (we might say) of Lisbon, from
the French invader. The home Government kept sending reinforcements to
Wellington, but they were under the impression that an over-powerful
combination of the enemy’s forces might some day force him to
re-embark. He himself regarded such a contingency as by no means
impossible.
[Sidenote: Wellington’s Battering Train]
But in the spring of the year 1811 it became clear that a defensive
war may have offensive episodes. After Masséna’s retreat from before
the Lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington had to protect the frontiers
of Portugal; and to guard them efficiently he needed possession of
Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz, which had all been in the hands
of the allies in the summer of 1810, but were now French fortresses. To
subdue these three places he required a large battering-train, properly
equipped for movement, and such a thing was not at his disposition.
There were a number of heavy guns mounted on the Lines of Torres
Vedras, and on the ramparts of Elvas, Abrantes, and Peniche. There were
also many companies of Portuguese gunners attached to those guns, and
a lesser number of British companies which had been immobilized in the
Lisbon lines. But heavy guns and gunners combined do not complete a
battering train. An immense amount of transport was required, and in
the spring of 1811 it was not at Wellington’s disposition. Well-nigh
every available ox-cart and mule in Portugal was already employed
in carrying the provisions and baggage of the field army. And water
transport, which would have been very valuable, could only be used for
a few miles of the lower courses of the Tagus and Douro. To begin a
regular siege of Almeida in April, 1811, was absolutely impossible,
not because there were not guns or gunners in Portugal, but because
there were no means of moving them at the time. Wellington did not
even attempt it, contenting himself with a mere blockade. On the other
flank an endeavour was made to besiege Badajoz, but this was only
possible because within a few miles of that city lay the Portuguese
fortress of Elvas, from whose walls was borrowed the hastily improvised
and imperfect battering-train with which the Spanish stronghold was
attacked.
The first two sieges of Badajoz in 1811 were lamentable failures,
precisely because this haphazard battering-train was wholly inadequate
for the end to which it was applied. Alexander Dickson, the zealous
and capable officer placed in charge of the artillery, was set an
impossible task. He had about 400 Portuguese and 120 English gunners,
all equally untrained in siege duty, to work a strange collection of
antiquated and unserviceable cannon. The pieces borrowed from Elvas
were of irregular calibre and ancient pattern. Almost incredible as
it may appear, some of these long brass 24-pounders were nearly two
hundred years old—observers noted on them the arms and cyphers not only
of John IV. the first king of the Braganza dynasty, but of Philip III.
and Philip IV. of Spain, the contemporaries of our James I. and Charles
I.[286] Even the better guns were of obsolete eighteenth-century types.
No two had the same bore, nor were the shot supplied for them uniform
in size; it was necessary to cull and select a special heap of balls
for each particular gun. The whole formed, indeed, a sort of artillery
museum rather than an effective battering-train. The guns shot wildly
and weakly, and their gunners were inexperienced. No wonder that their
effect was poor.
But this was not all: indeed, the inefficiency of the guns was perhaps
the secondary rather than the primary cause of the failure of the two
early sieges of Badajoz. More important still was it that Wellington
was as weak in the engineer as in the artillery arm. The number of
trained officers of engineers with the Peninsular Army was very
small—not much over thirty; but of rank and file to serve under them
there were practically none. Of the corps called the “Royal Military
Artificers,” the ancestors of the “Royal Sappers and Miners,” there
were actually only thirty-four attached to the army in 1810, and it
was far on in 1811 before their numbers reached a hundred. Many of them
were with Wellington’s field army on the distant frontier of Beira,
and before Badajoz, in May, there were little more than a score. For
the trench-work of the siege untrained volunteers had to be borrowed
from the line battalions, and to be instructed by the engineer officers
actually under the fire of the French guns. Their teachers were almost
all as ignorant of practical siege operations as themselves; the
British Army, as has already been remarked, had done little work of the
sort for many years.
The officers, it is true, were zealous and often clever; the men
were recklessly brave, if unpractised in the simplest elements of
siegecraft. But good-will could not atone for want of experience, and
it seems clear that in these early sieges the plans were often unwise,
and the execution unskilful. The points of attack selected at Badajoz
were the strongest and least accessible points of the fortress, not
those against which the French had operated in their earlier siege in
February with success. This choice had been made because the British
were working “against time”; there were French armies collecting
for the relief of Badajoz, and if the leaguer took many weeks, it
was certain that an overwhelming force would be brought against the
besiegers and compel them to depart. Hence the engineer officers,
in both the unsuccessful sieges, tried to break in at points where
victory would be decisive; they thought it would be useless to begin
by capturing outworks, or by making a lodgment in the lower parts of
the city, which would leave its stronger points intact and capable of
further defence. They battered the high-lying fort of San Cristobal,
and the citadel on its precipitous height, arguing that if they could
capture either of them the whole fortress was at their mercy. Both
the points assailed turned out to be too strong: the stony hill of
San Cristobal proved impossible for trench work; desperate attempts
to storm the fort that crowned it, by columns advancing across the
open, were beaten off with heavy loss. The castle walls, after long
battering, refused to crumble into practicable breaches. Before
anything decisive had been accomplished, the French armies of succour
came up. Beresford beat the first at Albuera in May and renewed the
siege; the second (Soult and Marmont combined) was so strong that
Wellington dared not face it, and withdrew from his abandoned trenches
to within the Portuguese frontier in July.
[Sidenote: Colonel Dickson’s Work]
A great change for the better in Wellington’s position as regards
sieges had been made by the autumn of 1811. He had at last received
a number of good modern British iron guns, much superior to the old
Portuguese brass 24-pounders. And with infinite trouble and delay he
had at last created a battering-train that could move. This was the
work of Alexander Dickson, already mentioned, who was occupied from
July to November in accumulating at the obscure town of Villa da
Ponte, behind Almeida, masses of waggon-transport and trains of mules
and oxen, for the moving of the heavy cannon and the immense store of
ammunition belonging to them. The guns were brought up the Douro to
Lamego, where the river ceased to be navigable, and then dragged over
the hills by oxen. Several companies of Portuguese and British gunners
were attached to the park, and instructed, so far as was possible, in
siege work. At the same time the military artificers—still far too few
in numbers—were instructing volunteers from the line in the making of a
great store of gabions, platforms, fascines, and other necessaries.
This long preparation, which was almost unsuspected by the French,
because it was unostentatious and made at a great distance from the
front, enabled Wellington to execute the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in
January, 1812, with unexampled rapidity and success. The fortress
was not one of the first class, the garrison was rather weak, the
battering-train was now ample for the task required of it, and, to the
surprise and dismay of Marmont, Rodrigo fell after a siege of only
twelve days at midwinter (January 7–19) long before he could collect
his scattered divisions for its relief.
The third attack on Badajoz, in March-April, 1812, turned out a much
less satisfactory business, though it ended in a triumphant success.
Like the two sieges of the preceding year, it was conducted “against
time”; Wellington being fully aware that if it went on too long the
relieving armies would be upon him. The means employed were more
adequate than those of 1811, though only a part of the battering-train
that had subdued Ciudad Rodrigo could be brought across the hills from
the distant frontier of Beira. The remainder was composed of ship-guns
borrowed from Lisbon. But though the artillery was not inadequate, and
the walls were thoroughly well breached, both the trench-work and the
storm cost over-many lives. Indeed, the main assault on the breaches
failed, and the town fell because two subsidiary attacks by escalade,
one carried out by Picton, the other by General Walker with a brigade
of the 5th Division, were both triumphantly successful. Wellington laid
the blame of the fearful loss of life upon the fact that his engineers
had no trained sappers to help them, and were unskilled in siegecraft.
They had attacked a point of the defences far more promising than those
battered in 1811, and had opened up immense gaps in the defences, but
nevertheless he was not satisfied with their direction. In a private
letter to Lord Liverpool, which is not printed in either of the two
series of his dispatches, he wrote:—
[Illustration: _PLATE VII._
PRIVATE OF HEAVY DRAGOONS.
1809.
OFFICER OF FIELD ARTILLERY.
1809.]
“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. I assure your lordship that it
is quite impossible to carry fortified places by ‘_vive force_’ without
incurring great loss, and being exposed to the chance of failure,
unless the army should be provided with a sufficient trained corps
of sappers and miners.... The consequence of being so unprovided with
the people necessary to approach a regularly fortified place are,
first, that our engineers, though well-educated and brave, have never
turned their minds to the mode of conducting a regular siege, as it
is useless to think of that which it is impossible, in our service,
to perform. They think they have done their duty when they have
constructed a battery with a secure communication to it, which can
breach the place. Secondly, these breaches have to be carried by _vive
force_, at an infinite sacrifice of officers and soldiers.... These
great losses could be avoided, and, in my opinion, time gained in every
siege, if we had properly trained people to carry it on. I declare that
I have never seen breaches more practicable in themselves than the
three in the walls of Badajoz, and the fortress must have surrendered
with these breaches open, if I had been able to ‘approach’ the place.
But when I had made the third breach on the evening of the 6th, I could
do no more. I was then obliged either to storm or to 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, and I earnestly recommend to your lordship to have a corps
of sappers and miners formed without loss of time.”[287]
[Sidenote: Wellington and His Engineers]
The slaughter of Badajoz, then, in Wellington’s estimation, was due
partly to the fact that the British Army, unlike all other armies,
lacked regular companies of sappers and miners, and partly to the
inexperience of the engineer officers in carrying out the last stages
of a siege—the advance towards the glacis and the ditch by scientific
trench-work. They did not, he says, “turn their mind” towards such
operations, because they had never been furnished with skilled workmen
to carry them out. That sappers and miners did not exist as yet was not
the fault of Wellington, nor of the ministers, but of the professional
advisers of the administration, who should long ago have pointed out
that such a corps was wanted. That the Liverpool ministry was not
slow to take advice was shown by the fact that they at once converted
the already existing “Military Artificers” into sappers. On April 23,
less than three weeks after Badajoz fell, a warrant was issued for
instructing the corps in military field works, and shortly after six
companies were ordered to be sent to the Peninsula the moment that they
should have received such training. On August 4 the name of the whole
corps was changed from Royal Military Artificers to Royal Sappers and
Miners.[288] It was not, of course, till very late in the year that the
first of the new sapper companies joined Wellington, but by the next
spring he had 300 trained men with him.
Meanwhile they had of course arrived too late for the siege of
Burgos, the most unhappy of all Wellington’s leaguers, where the
whole trench-work was conducted by volunteers from the line directed
by precisely eight of the old artificers—of whom one was killed and
the remaining seven wounded. The story of the Burgos operations reads
like an exaggerated repetition of the first siege of Badajoz. The
battering-train that took Badajoz had been left behind, and to attack
Burgos (whose strength was undervalued) Wellington had with him no
proper means. Only eight guns were brought up—because the transport
with the army could only provide a few spare teams, and the whole of
Castile had been swept clear of draught-beasts. This ridiculously weak
train proved wholly insufficient for the work set it. “Had there been
a siege establishment with the army even moderately efficient, so as
to have admitted of the performance of the rudiments of the art, the
attack (even with the inadequate artillery) might have been carried
through,” writes the historian of the Peninsular sieges.[289] But there
were only five engineer officers present, just eight artificers, no
tools save regimental picks and shovels borrowed from line regiments,
no _material_ save wood requisitioned from the town of Burgos, and so
little transport that the fire had sometimes to cease, to allow fresh
ammunition to be brought up from the distant Madrid. Wellington ordered
repeated assaults on the inadequately battered walls; they all failed,
and he finally retired after thirty-two days of open trenches, and with
the loss of nearly 2000 men, from before a “bicocque,” as the French
called it, which could not have withstood a proper battering-train for
a third of that time.
[Sidenote: The Failure at Burgos]
The fact is that Wellington had undervalued the strength of Burgos;
he thought it would fall easily. If he had known that it would hold
out for more than a month, he could have procured more guns from the
captured French arsenal at Madrid, and might have requisitioned all
the beasts of the army to draw them. But by the time that it began to
be seen that Burgos was not about to yield to a mere demonstration, it
was too late to get up the necessary means of reducing it. Finally, the
French armies mustered for its relief, and the British had to retire.
It may be added that the besieging troops, thoroughly disgusted with
the inadequate means used to prepare the way for them, did not act with
the same energy that had been shown at Rodrigo or Badajoz. Several of
the assaults were not pushed well home, and the trench-work was slack.
Wellington wrote, in his General Orders for October 3, a stiff rebuke,
to the effect that “the officers and soldiers of this army should know
that to work during a siege is as much a part of their duty as to
engage the enemy in the field; and they may depend upon it that unless
they perform the work allotted to them with due diligence, they cannot
acquire the honour which their comrades have won in former sieges....
The Commander-in-Chief hopes he shall have no reason to complain in
future.”[290]
The leaguer of San Sebastian, the last of Wellington’s sieges, bore
a great likeness to the last siege of Badajoz. It was conducted in
a time of considerable anxiety, while the army of Soult was making
vigorous and repeated efforts to frustrate it. The place was strong
by nature—a towering castle with the town at its foot joined to the
mainland only by a narrow sandy spit; the defences of this isthmus
were short, and reached from sea to sea: they were fully commanded by
the castle behind. The first great assault (July 25, 1813) was made
while the trenches were still far from the walls, and while the fire
of the besieged had not been silenced. It failed with heavy loss. The
second assault (August 31) was successful, but very bloody—2000 men
were killed or wounded. The most authoritative commentator writes:
“The operations against San Sebastian afford a most impressive lesson
on the advantages of proceeding step by step, and with due attention
to science and rule. The attempt there made to overcome or trample on
such restrictions caused a certain operation of twenty days to extend
to sixty. It bears strong testimony to the truth of the maxim laid down
by Marshal Vauban: ‘La précipitation dans les sièges ne hâte point
la prise des places, la retarde souvent, et ensanglante toujours la
scène.’”[291]
[Sidenote: Trench Work]
There can be no doubt that siege-work was loathed by the rank and file,
not so much for its danger—there was never any lack of volunteers for
a forlorn hope—but for its discomfort. There was a sort of underlying
feeling that entrenching was not soldier’s but navvy’s work; the
long hiding under cover in cramped positions, which was absolutely
necessary, was looked upon as a sort of skulking. With an unwise
disregard for their personal safety, which had a touch of bravado and
more than a touch of sulkiness in it, the men exposed themselves far
more than was necessary. I fancy that on some occasions, notably at
the early sieges of Badajoz and at Burgos, there was a general feeling
that matters were not being scientifically or adequately conducted, and
that too much was being asked of the rank and file, when they were
made to attempt a hard task without the proper means. It must have been
clear to them that there were too few engineer officers, not enough
artillery, and no proper provision of tools. Hence came a spirit of
anger and discontent.
At Ciudad Rodrigo, and at the third and last leaguer of Badajoz, the
weather was so abominable that the siege-work was long looked back
on as a perfect nightmare. At Rodrigo, in the high upland of Leon,
the month of January was a combination of frost and rain; the water
accumulated in the trenches and there often froze, so that the men
were standing ankle-deep in a mixture of ice and mud, and since they
could not move about, because of the enemy’s incessant fire, suffered
horribly from cold. At Badajoz there was no frost: but incessant
chilling rain was almost as bad during the early weeks of the siege;
the trenches were often two feet deep in water, and the work of the
spade was almost useless, since the liquid mud that was shovelled
up ran away in streams out of the gabions into which it was cast,
and refused to pile up into parapets for the trenches, spreading out
instead into mere broad accumulations of slime, which gave no cover,
and had no resisting power against the round shot of the garrison.
I imagine that the desperate and dirty toil in those operations,
protracted over many days of abominable discomfort as well as danger,
accounts in great measure for the ferocious spirit shown by the victors
both at Rodrigo and Badajoz. The men were in a blind rage at the misery
which they had been enduring, and it found vent, after the storm was
over, in misconduct far surpassing that which would have followed a
pitched battle where the losses had been equally great. One observer
writes: “The spirit of the soldiers rose to a frightful height—I say
frightful because it was not of that sort which denoted exultation at
the prospect of achieving an exploit which was about to hold them up
to the admiration of the world; there was a certain _something_ in
their bearing which told plainly that they had suffered fatigues of
which they had not complained, and seen their comrades and officers
slain around them without repining, but that they had smarted under
the one and felt acutely for the other. They smothered both, so long
as body and mind were employed, but now, before the storm, they had a
momentary licence to think, and every fine feeling vanished—plunder and
revenge took their place.... A quiet but desperate calm replaced their
usual buoyant spirits, and nothing was observable in their manner but a
tiger-like expression of anxiety to seize upon their prey.”[292]
[Sidenote: Waiting for the Storm]
Preparation for the storm affected different men in different ways:
some tried to make up old quarrels and exchanged words of forgiveness;
a good many wrote letters home, which were to be delivered only in
the case of their falling. “Each arranged himself for the combat
in such manner as his fancy would admit of: some by lowering their
cartridge-boxes, others by turning them to the front for more
convenient use; others unclasped their stocks or opened their shirt
collars; others oiled their bayonets. Those who had them took leave
of their wives and children—an affecting sight, but not so much so as
might have been expected, because the women, from long habit, were
accustomed to such scenes of danger.”[293]
One intelligent sergeant speaks of the moment of waiting for the order
to storm as full of a stress that nothing else could produce: “We felt
a dead weight hanging on our minds; had we been brought hurriedly into
action, it would have been quite different, but it is inconsistent with
the nature of man not to feel as I have described. The long warning,
the dark and silent night, the known strength of the fortress, the
imminent danger of the attack, all conspired to produce this feeling.
It was not the result of want of courage, as was shown by the calm
intrepidity of the advance when we came in range of the French
cannon.”[294] That the revulsion from the long waiting took the shape
of frenzied violence, when the men were at last let loose, was not
unnatural. A certain amount of the horrors which took place at Badajoz
and San Sebastian may be ascribed to mere frenzy, if the rest was due
to more deliberate wickedness on the part of the baser spirits of the
army.