Some days were lost to the French in completing the survey of Tarragona, in settling down the troops into their permanent camps, and in bringing up from the rear, along the Tortosa road, the remainder of the battering-train and its munitions. It was not till May 8th that serious operations began. Suchet’s first object was to drive away from the northern end of the harbour the English and Spanish ships, whose fire swept the ground about the mouth of the Francoli, across which his siege-works were to be constructed. With this object a large fort was constructed on the shore, in which very heavy guns, fatal to shipping, were to be placed. Commodore Codrington, who was lying in the harbour with a small squadron of two 74’s and two frigates, assisted by several Spanish gunboats, bombarded the fort incessantly, but what he destroyed in the day the French rebuilt with additions every night, and on May 13th the fort was sufficiently completed to receive its armament of 24-pounders. The ship-guns were unable to cope with them, and the vessels of the Allies during the rest of the siege were compelled to keep to the south end of the port, and could only vex the besieger’s subsequent trench-building by a distant and ineffective fire. On the 16th a first parallel, directed against the most advanced Spanish work, Fort Francoli, was begun in the low ground beside the new fort.
Before this check to the squadron had been completed a great change in the situation was made by the arrival of Campoverde on May 10, with 4,000 regular troops brought by sea from Mataro—fractions of the divisions of Eroles and Sarsfield, though neither of these generals had come in person[642]. The garrison being strengthened up to 10,000 men, and raised in morale by the reinforcement, became very bold and enterprising. Sorties began almost at once: Harispe’s division having seized on the 13th May two slight outlying entrenchments below Fort Olivo, three battalions sallied out on the 14th and made a desperate attempt to retake them. It failed, but on the 18th an equally vigorous sortie was made against the fort beyond the Francoli, and the first parallel near it, by about 2,000 men, who drove in the trench-guards and destroyed a section of the works, but were finally thrust back into the lower city by the arrival of reinforcements led by General Habert. How hot the fighting had been here is shown by the fact that Suchet’s dispatch owns to a loss of over 150 men, with three officers killed and eleven wounded. The sallying force lost 218, a figure which Suchet enlarges in his report to 250 killed and 600 wounded. On the 20th the Spaniards made a third sally, on a different front, far to the north-east, across the high ground north of the Barcelona road, and tried to break through the line of blockade kept up by Harispe’s Italian brigades. This was on a smaller scale, and had no luck; it was apparently intended to open up communication with Sarsfield, who (marching by circuitous ways across central Catalonia) had reached Valls and Alcover, only ten miles from Tarragona, on the upper Francoli, with 1,200 men. This trifling force was to be the nucleus of an ‘army of relief’ which was to be collected from all quarters to threaten Suchet’s rear. Sarsfield made his appearance known to his chief in Tarragona by lighting beacons on the mountain tops. Learning that the Spanish force was insignificant, Suchet detached two battalions and some cuirassiers to drive Sarsfield further away from Alcover, and did so with small loss, forcing him to retire to the mountains above Valls.
About this time the French artillery and engineer commanders reported to their chief that it would be at least ten days before they were in a position to begin a serious attack against the western front of the city, and Suchet resolved that the enforced delay should be utilized for an attack on Fort Olivo, whose capture would sooner or later be a necessity, if the main operations against the city were to prosper.
Accordingly, while the approaches against the west front went steadily on, a separate offensive advance against the Olivo was prepared. Between the 22nd and the 28th of May trenches were pushed towards the fort, and batteries containing thirteen guns erected to bear upon it. Their fire had effected serious damage on the parapets and the artillery of the fort by the 29th, yet the engineers reported that they could not fill the ditch, which was dug in the solid rock, and could not promise to make accessible breaches beyond it. But they reported that the rear face of the work, which the French artillery could not reach, was very weak, the low wall and palisade closing the gorge being no more than nine feet high. There was also a gap in the front protection caused by the entry, into the right end of the fort, of an aqueduct which carried water down into Tarragona. This structure made a sort of bridge across the ditch; it had not been cut, but only closed with palisades, which were being rapidly demolished by the French cannonade[643].
On the night of the 29th Suchet made the rather rash venture of trying to escalade Fort Olivo at the two weak points. One column was to turn the work under cover of the darkness, and to endeavour to break in at the gorge in its rear. The other was to try the imperfect breach in the right front, by crossing the aqueduct, though it was only seven feet broad, if it should be found that the ditch was impassable. Meanwhile a general demonstration was to be made by scattered tirailleurs against the whole face of the Olivo, so as to distract the attention of the enemy, and the batteries down by the Francoli were to bombard the lower city with the same purpose. Both attacks were successful—more by luck than by their deserts, for the plan was most hazardous. The column which had gone round to the rear of the fort ran in upon a Spanish regiment[644] which was coming up the hill to relieve the garrison. The two forces hustled against each other in the dark, and became hopelessly mingled in a close combat just outside the postern gate of the gorge. The garrison was unable to fire upon their enemies, because they were intermixed among their friends, and, when the fight surged against the postern and the palisades, the French succeeded in entering the gorge, some by scrambling up the low and weak defences, others by bursting in at the gate along with the Spanish reinforcements with whom they were engaged. They might have been checked, for the defenders were fighting fiercely, if the other attack had not also succeeded. But at the right front of the fort, where the second assault was made, though many of the forlorn hope fell into the ditch, a desperate charge took the storming-party across the seven-foot gangway of the aqueduct, and over the shattered palisades that blocked it. The garrison could tell by the noise of the musketry that the enemy had entered both in front and in rear, and were stricken by despair[645]. But the greater part of them clubbed together and continued a desperate resistance, which was only subdued when Suchet sent in all his reserves and the trench-guards to back the stormers. They were then beset on all sides, and finally overwhelmed.
The losses of the garrison were terrible—of the five battalions of Iliberia and Almeria, and the two companies of artillery which had been engaged—some 3,000 men in all—very nearly one-third, as it would appear, were slain or captured[646]. The prisoners were about 970 in number, many wounded, including the commander of the fort, Colonel Gomez, who had received no less than ten bayonet stabs. Three or four hundred men had been killed—the French had given little quarter during the earlier part of the fighting. The remainder of the garrison had escaped into the city, by climbing over the low wall of the gorge and running down the slopes, at the moment of the final disaster. The French loss, according to Suchet, was only about 325 killed and wounded, and probably did not greatly exceed that figure. The assailants had, it must be confessed, extraordinary luck. If the turning column had not become mingled with the Spanish reinforcements it might never have been able to break into the gorge; while the other attack could not have succeeded if the governor had taken the proper precaution of cutting the aqueduct, which served the stormers as a bridge—for the ditch proved wholly impracticable, and the breach could not be approached.
On the morning after the assault the spirit of the Spaniards was so little broken that a sortie was made with the purpose of retaking the Olivo, the survivors of the two regiments which had lost it volunteering to head the attack. Campoverde thought that the French might be caught before they had made new defences to protect the weak rear face of the fort, but they had built up the entry of the gorge with sandbags, and the assault—led by Colonel O’Ronan, a Spanish-Irish officer—was beaten off with loss, though a few daring men not only reached the gorge, but scrambled in through its broken palisades to die inside the work. All the guns of the upper city were then turned upon the Olivo, and reduced its rear to a shapeless mass of earth. But this did not seriously harm the French, who burrowed into its interior and made themselves strong there. They only wanted to be masters of the hill because it flanked their projected approaches in the low ground, and did not intend to use it as their base for any further active operations.
After the Olivo disaster Campoverde held a council of war (May 30th), and announced to his officers that the means by which Tarragona could be saved was the collecting of a great army of succour to fall upon Suchet’s rear. He was himself about to depart, in order to take command of it; Sarsfield’s and Eroles’s small detachments, all of which he would collect, must form its nucleus. The somatenes of all central Catalonia should be called in, and the province of Valencia had promised to lend him a whole division of regulars. So saying, he departed by sea along with his staff and a number of the richer inhabitants of the city (May 31st). General Caro, who had hitherto acted as governor, was sent to hurry up the Valencians, and the command of the place was made over to an officer newly arrived from Cadiz, General Juan Senen Contreras[647], who by no means liked the task assigned to him. The garrison was still 8,000 strong, for just after the fall of the Olivo two battalions of regulars arrived from Valencia[648]—the first-fruits of the succours promised from that province—and a draft of 400 recruits landed from Majorca. It seems to have been a mistake of Campoverde to come to Tarragona at all—his presence would have been much more valuable in the interior, where a supreme commander was much wanted, and while he was shut up in the fortress (from May 10th to May 31st) little had been done outside. The Junta of Catalonia, now sitting at Montserrat, had been issuing many proclamations, but had not accomplished much in the way of gathering in the somatenes.
On June 3rd Campoverde reached Igualada, and established his head quarters there, but found only 3,000 men assembled under Sarsfield. He sent that general off to Tarragona, to act as second in command to Contreras, and took over charge of his few battalions; by calling in Eroles, and hunting up deserters and detachments, he had collected in a fortnight 5,280 regular infantry and 1,183 cavalry—all that there were of mounted men in Catalonia. The whole was much too small a force to justify him in attacking Suchet in his lines—even when the somatenes should come in to join him. All depended on the expected succours from Valencia, and they were slow in arriving. Charles O’Donnell, the newly appointed Captain-General of that province, had made up a scheme for drawing off Suchet by attacking his garrisons in southern Aragon, and had gone off early in May with his main force against Teruel. This scheme had no effect whatever; Suchet had fixed his teeth into Tarragona, and was not to be distracted by any demonstrations against his more distant detachments. Campoverde grew so desperate that he offered to give over supreme command to O’Donnell, if the latter would come into Catalonia with his whole disposable force, and begin by attacking Mora, Suchet’s great dépôt on the Ebro. The Valencian Captain-General, though he refused to take this responsibility, finally agreed to send a division of regulars under General Miranda by sea to join the Catalans. This force, about 4,000 strong, appeared at Tarragona on June 14th, and came ashore, but was immediately afterwards reshipped by Campoverde’s orders, and transferred to Villanueva de Sitjes, where it landed, and marched inland to Igualada to join the ‘army of succour,’ which by its arrival was raised to nearly 11,000 regular troops.
While Campoverde was slowly beating up his reinforcements, Tarragona was already in grave danger. The formal attack on the lower city began on the night of June 1st, when Vallée and Rogniat, the commanders of the French artillery and engineers, declared that they had everything ready. The front selected for attack was the two south-westerly bastions, those called San Carlos and Orleans, but as a preliminary task it was necessary to drive the Spaniards out of the subsidiary and external defence formed by the outlying Fort Francoli, at the mouth of the river, and by the long entrenchment which joined it to the city, with the lunette of the Prince, a very small work, inserted in its midst. For Fort Francoli had a position which would enable it to enfilade the French trenches when they should draw near to the enceinte of the city.