Renewed Siege of San Sebastian. (Aug. 1813.)
After the combats of Echallar and Ivantelly Soult resumed his former defensive positions, that is to say, from the mouth of the Bidassoa up its right bank to Vera, and from thence by the lower ranges of the Pyrenees to St. Jean Pied de Port. Lord Wellington also reoccupied his old positions on the main spine, and on the advanced counter ridges, which gave him the command of the Bastan and the valley of San Estevan. Many causes had concurred to deter him from pushing his success, and though this termination was, perhaps, scarcely defensible on high military principles, the difficulties were so great that he contented himself with renewing the siege of San Sebastian, the blockade of which had been always maintained.
On the 8th of August the attack there was renewed by sinking a shaft and driving a gallery to countermine the enemy, who was supposed to be working under the cask redoubt; but water rose to the height of twelve feet, the work was discontinued, and the siege itself was vexatiously delayed by the negligence of the English government in providing guns and stores, and by the astounding insulting refusal of the Admiralty to supply the necessary naval aid. To use Lord Wellington’s expression, “Since Great Britain had been a naval power, a British army had never before been left in such a situation at a most important moment.”
During this forced inactivity the garrison received supplies and reinforcements by sea, repaired the damaged works, raised new defences, filled the magazines, and put sixty-seven pieces of artillery in a condition to play. Eight hundred and fifty men had been killed and wounded since the commencement of the siege; but more than two thousand six hundred good soldiers, still under arms, celebrated the emperor’s birth-day by crowning the castle with a splendid illumination—encircling it with a fiery legend to his honour in characters so large as to be distinctly read by the besiegers.
On the 19th of August, a battering train demanded by Wellington three months before, did arrive from England, and in the night of the 22nd fifteen heavy pieces were placed in battery. A second battering train came on the 23rd, augmenting the number of pieces to a hundred and seventeen; but with characteristic official negligence, this enormous armament brought shot and shells for only one day’s consumption!
On the 24th the Chofre batteries were enlarged, and two batteries were begun on the heights of Bartolomeo, designed to breach the faces of the horn-work of St. John and the end of the high curtain, which rose in gradation one above another in the same line of shot. The approaches on the isthmus were pushed forward by the sap, but the old trenches were still imperfect, and at daylight on the 25th a sally from the horn-work swept the left of the parallel, injured the sap, and made some prisoners.
On the 26th fifty-seven pieces opened with a general salvo, and continued to play with astounding noise and rapidity until evening. The firing from the Chofres destroyed the revêtment of the demi-bastion of St. John, and nearly ruined the towers at the old breach, together with the wall connecting them; but from the isthmus, the batteries only injured the horn-work, and Wellington, who was present at this attack, ordered a new one of six guns to be constructed amongst some ruined houses on the right of the parallel, and only three hundred yards from the main front: two shafts were also sunk for driving galleries to protect this battery against the enemy’s mines.
In the morning of the 27th the boats of the squadron, carrying a hundred soldiers, put off to attack the island of Santa Clara, and landed with some difficulty under a heavy fire, yet took the island with a loss of twenty-eight men and officers, eighteen being seamen.
In the night of the 27th the French sallied against the new battery on the isthmus, but on the edge of the trenches the 9th Regiment met and checked them with the bayonet.
At daybreak the besiegers’ fire was extremely heavy, and the shrapnel shells were supposed to be destructive; the practice was however very uncertain, the shells frequently flew amongst the guards in the parallel, and one struck the field-officer of the day. To meet sallies the trenches were furnished with banquettes and parapets; yet the work was slow, because the Spanish authorities of Guipuscoa neglected to provide carts to convey materials from the woods, and this hard labour was performed by the Portuguese soldiers.
Lord Wellington again visited the works on the 28th, and in the night the advanced battery, which at the desire of the chief engineer Fletcher had been constructed for only four guns, was armed and opened the 29th; an accident kept back one gun, the enemy’s fire dismounted another, and thus only two instead of six guns, as Wellington had designed, smote St. John and the end of the high curtain. The general firing however damaged the castle and the town-works, their guns were nearly silenced, and as sixty-three pieces, of which twenty-nine threw shells or spherical case-shot, were now in play from the Chofres, the superiority of the besiegers was established.
At this time the Urumea was discovered to be fordable by Captain Alexander Macdonald of the artillery, who had voluntarily waded across in the night, passed close under the works to the breach and returned. Hence, as a few minutes would suffice to bring the enemy into the Chofre batteries, to save the guns from being spiked their vents were covered with iron plates fastened by chains; and this was also done at the advanced battery on the isthmus. The materials for a battery to take the defences of the Monte Orgullo in reverse were now sent to the island of Santa Clara, and some pieces on the Chofres were turned against the retaining wall of the horn-work, in the hope of shaking down any mines there without destroying the wall itself, which offered cover for the troops advancing to the assault.
On the isthmus the trenches were wide and good, the sap was pushed to the demi-bastion of the horn-work, and the sea-wall, supporting the high road into the town, which had cramped the formation of the columns in the first assault, was broken through, giving access to the strand and shortening the way to the breaches.
In this state a false attack was ordered in the night to make the enemy spring his mines, a desperate service, executed by Lieutenant Macadam. The order was sudden, no volunteers were demanded, no rewards offered, no means of excitement resorted to; yet such is the inherent bravery of British soldiers, that seventeen men of the Royals, the nearest at hand, immediately leaped forth ready and willing to encounter what seemed certain death. With a rapid pace, all the breaching batteries playing hotly at the time, they reached the foot of the breach unperceived and rushed up in extended order shouting and firing, but the French musketry laid the whole party low with exception of their commander.
On the 30th, the sea flank of the place being opened from the half-bastion of St. John to the most distant of the old breaches, five hundred feet, the Chofre batteries were turned against the castle and defences of Monte Orgullo, while the advanced battery on the isthmus demolished, in conjunction with the fire from the Chofres, the face of St. John and the end of the high curtain above it. The whole of that quarter was now in ruins, for the San Bartolomeo batteries had broken the demi-bastion of the horn-work and cut away the palisades. Then Wellington, again coming to the siege, resolved to make a lodgement on the breach, and ordered an assault for the next day at eleven o’clock, when the ebb of tide would leave full space between the horn-work and the water.
The galleries on the isthmus had now been pushed close up to the sea wall, and three mines were formed, with the double object of opening an easy way for the troops to reach the strand, and rendering useless any subterranean defensive works of the enemy. At two o’clock in the morning they were sprung and opened three wide passages, which were immediately connected, and a traverse, six feet high, was run across the mouth of the main trench on the left, to screen the opening from the grape-shot of the castle. Everything was then ready for the assault, but ere that terrible event is told the French state of defence must be made known.
General Graham had been before the place fifty-two days, during thirty of which the attack was suspended. All that time the garrison had laboured incessantly, and though the heavy fire of the besiegers since the 26th appeared to have ruined the defences of the enormous breach in the sea flank, it was not so. A perpendicular fall behind of more than twenty feet barred progress, and beyond that, amongst the ruins of the burned houses, was a strong counter wall fifteen feet high, loopholed for musketry and extending in a parallel direction with the breaches, which were also cut off from the sound part of the rampart by traverses at the extremities. The only really practicable road into the town was by the narrow end of the high curtain above the half bastion of St. John.
In front of the loopholed wall, about the middle of the great breach, stood the tower of Los Hornos, still capable of some defence, and beneath it a mine was charged with twelve hundred weight of powder. The streets were all trenched and furnished with traverses to cover a retreat to Monte Orgullo; and before the main breach could be even reached a lodgement was to be effected in the horn-work; or, as in the former assault, the advance made under a flanking fire of musketry for two hundred yards, the first step being close to the sea wall at a salient angle, where two mines charged with eight hundred pounds of powder were prepared to overwhelm the advancing columns. To support this system of retrenchments and mines there was still one sixteen-pounder at St. Elmo, flanking the left of the breaches on the river face; a twelve and an eight-pounder in the casemates of the cavalier, to sweep the land face of St. John; many guns from the Monte Orgullo, also especially those at the Mirador, could play on the advancing columns, and there was a four-pounder hidden on the horn-work to open during the assault. Neither the resolution of the governor nor the courage of the garrison was abated, but the overwhelming fire had reduced the fighting men, and Rey, who had only two hundred and fifty in reserve, demanded of Soult whether his brave garrison should be exposed to another assault. “The army would endeavour to succour him,” was the reply, and he abided his fate.
This assault, before the defences were ruined, was obviously a repetition of the former fatal error; and the same generals who had before publicly disapproved of the operations now more freely dealt out censures, which, not ill-founded, were most ill-timed, because doubts descend from the commanders to the soldiers. Lord Wellington thought the fifth division had been thus discouraged, and incensed at the cause, demanded fifty volunteers from each of the fifteen regiments composing the first, fourth, and light divisions, “men who could show other troops how to mount a breach.” That was the phrase employed, and seven hundred and fifty gallant soldiers instantly marched to San Sebastian in answer to the appeal. Colonel Cooke and Major Robertson led the Guards and Germans of the first division; Major Rose commanded the men of the fourth division; Colonel Hunt, an officer who had already won his promotion at former assaults, led the fierce rugged veterans of the light division, yet there were good officers and brave soldiers in the fifth division.
At first a simple lodgement on the great breach was designed, and the volunteers and one brigade of the fifth division only were to be employed; but in a council held at night, the engineer Smith maintained that the orders were misunderstood, as no lodgement could be formed unless the high curtain was gained; General Oswald was of the same opinion; wherefore the remainder of the fifth division was brought to the trenches, and General Bradford, having offered the services of his Portuguese brigade, had a discretion to ford the Urumea from the Chofres and assail the farthest breach.
General Leith, commanding the fifth division, directed the attack from the isthmus, and being offended at the arrival of the volunteers would not suffer them to lead the assault; some he spread along the trenches to keep down the fire of the horn-work, the remainder he kept in reserve with Hay’s British and Sprye’s Portuguese brigades. Robinson’s brigade was to assault in two columns, one at the old breach between the towers, the other at St. John and the end of the high curtain. The small breach was left for Bradford, and some large boats filled with troops were to menace the back of Monte Orgullo from the ocean: Graham overlooked all the operations from the Chofres.