A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 5, Oct. 1811-Aug. 31, 1812

by Charles Oman

During the night of the 18th-19th they were able to trace out and begin two batteries, destined to breach the Picurina, in the line of the parallel, and to extend it at both ends, from the Rivillas on one side to the foot of the hill of San Miguel on the other.

This was visible on the following morning, and Phillipon thought the prospects of the fort so bad that he resolved to risk a sortie, to destroy at all costs the trenches which were so dangerously near to their objective. At midday two battalions—1,000 men—starting from the lunette of San Roque, dashed up the hill, got into the north end of the parallel, and drove out the working parties for a distance of some 500 yards: they carried off many entrenching tools, for which the governor had offered the bonus of one dollar a piece. But they had no time to do any serious damage to the parallel, for the guard of the trenches and the working parties, rallying fifty yards up the hill, came down on them in force, within a quarter of an hour, and evicted them again after a sharp tussle. The loss on the two sides was very different—the British lost 150 men, the besieged 304, of whom many were drowned in the inundation, while trying to take short cuts through it to the gates. The effect of the sortie had been practically nil, as far as destroying the works went. During this skirmish Colonel Fletcher was wounded in the groin by a ball, which hit his purse, and while failing to penetrate further, forced a dollar-piece an inch into his thigh. He was confined to his tent for some fourteen days, and his subordinates, Majors Squire and Burgoyne, had to take up his duty, though Wellington ordered that he should still retain nominal charge of the work, and consulted him daily upon it.

On the next night (March 20th) the parallel and approach against the Picurina being practically complete, and only the battery emplacements in it requiring to be finished, the engineers of the besieging army resolved to continue the line of trenches into the flat ground in front of the Bastion of San Pedro and the Castle, it being intended that batteries should be constructed here to play on the Trinidad and the neighbouring parts of the fortress, when the Picurina should have fallen. It would save time to have everything ready on this side, when the fort should have been mastered. Trouble at once began—not only from the enemy’s fire, which swept all this low ground, but still more from the continuous bad weather. The rain which had easily run away from the sloping trenches on the Cerro de San Miguel, lodged in the new works, could not be drained off, and melted away the earth as fast as it was thrown up. Mud cast into the gabions ran off in the form of slimy water, and the parapets could only be kept upright by building them of sandbags. The men were actually flooded out of the trenches by the accumulated water, which was almost knee deep. In the rear the Guadiana rose, and washed away the two bridges which connected the army with its base at Elvas. The deluge lasted four days and was a terrible hindrance, it being impossible to finish the parallel in the low ground, or to begin moving the battering-guns, even those destined for the long-completed batteries on the Cerro de San Miguel.

It was not till the afternoon of the 24th that fine weather at last set in; this permitted the guns to be brought at once into the two batteries facing the Picurina, and, after herculean efforts, into other batteries (nos. 4 and 5) in the low ground also. Three days at least had been lost from the vile weather.

On the morning of the 25th all the batteries opened simultaneously, ten guns against the Picurina, eighteen against the parts of the fortress behind it. The fort was completely silenced, as was the little lunette of San Roque. Not much damage appeared to have been inflicted on the Picurina beyond the breaking of many of its palisades, and the degradation of its salient angle. But Wellington ordered that it should be stormed that night, in order that he might make up for the lost time of the 20th-24th.

The storm was duly carried out by General Kempt and 500 men of the Light and the 3rd Divisions, at ten o’clock that night. It was a desperate affair, for the ditch was deep, and not in the least filled with rubbish, and the scarp was intact save at the extreme salient angle. Though the garrison’s guns had been silenced, they kept up a furious fire of musketry, which disabled 100 men before the stormers reached the ditch. The main hope of the assault had been that two turning columns might break in at the gorge: but it was found so strongly closed, with a double row of palisades and a cutting, that all efforts to force an entrance were repelled with loss. Baffled here, one party tried the desperate expedient of casting three long ladders, not into, but across the ditch on the right flank of the fort, which though deep was not so broad but that a 30-foot ladder would reach from its lip to the row of fraises, or projecting beams, ranged horizontally at the top of the scarp some feet below the brim of the parapet. The ladders sagged down but did not break, and some fifty men headed by Captain Oates of the 88th ran across on the rungs and got a lodgement inside the fort. At the same moment General Kempt launched the reserve of the storming party—100 men, mostly from the 2/83rd and headed by Captain Powys of that regiment—at the exact salient of the fort, the only place where it was seriously damaged, and succeeded in breaking in. The garrison, who made a stubborn resistance, were overpowered—83 were killed or wounded, the governor, Colonel Gaspard-Thierry, and 145 taken prisoners, only 1 officer and 40 men escaped into the town. The losses of the stormers had been over 50 per cent. of the men engaged! Four officers and 50 rank and file were killed, 15 officers and 250 men wounded, out of a little over 500 who joined in the assault. Phillipon tried a sortie from the lunette of San Roque, just as the fort fell, in hopes to recover it: but the battalion which came out was easily beaten off by the fire of the men in the trenches to the right, and lost 50 killed and wounded.

The last stage of the siege had now been reached. By capturing the Picurina on its commanding knoll, the British had established themselves within 400 yards of the Trinidad and 450 yards of the Santa Maria bastions, which they could batter with every advantage of slope and ground. But it was a very costly business to make the necessary lodgement in the ruined fort, to demolish it, and throw its earth in the reverse direction, and to build in its gorge the two batteries (nos. 8, 9), which were to breach the body of the place. The fire of three bastions bore directly on the spot where the batteries were to be placed, and there was also a most deadly enfilading fire from the high-lying Castle, and even from the distant San Cristobal. Though the three batteries in the flat ground (to which a fourth was presently added) endeavoured to silence this fire, they only succeeded in doing so very imperfectly, for the French kept replacing one gun by another, from their ample store, when any were disabled. From the 26th to the 30th four days were employed in building the Picurina batteries, with great loss of life all the time, which fell mainly on the engineer officers who were directing the work and on the sappers under their orders. The French covered the whole of the Picurina knoll with such a hail of projectiles that no amount of cover seemed to guarantee those labouring in it from sudden death. When the batteries had been completed, the bringing forward of the guns and the ammunition cost many lives more. Twice there were considerable explosions of powder, while the magazines in the batteries were being filled.

At last, however, on March 30, one of the two new batteries in the gorge of the Picurina was able to open, and on the 31st the other followed suit, supported by a third supplementary battery (no. 7), planned under the left flank of the fort. The practice was excellent, but at first the effect was not all that had been hoped: the Trinidad and the Santa Maria bastions were solidly built and resisted well. On April 2, however, both began to show considerable and obvious injury, and it was clear that a few days more would ruin them. But there was one serious contretemps: the inundation between the Picurina and the fortress showed no signs of going down—it had been swollen by the rains of the 20th-24th, and could not flow away so long as the dam at the lunette of San Roque kept it back. While the water was held up, the breaches, soon about to develop, could only be got at by a narrow and curved route, between the inundation and the steep slope on which stands the Pardaleras. It had been intended that the assault should be delivered from the trenches, but this was impossible till the Rivillas should have fallen to its usual insignificant breadth and depth. Hence efforts were made to burst the dam at all costs, but neither did artillery fire suffice, nor a venturesome expedition on the night of the 2nd of April by the engineer Lieutenant Stanway and 20 sappers, who slipped down the ravine and laid powder-bags against the dam, despite of the French fire. The powder exploded, but did not do its work. For several days an attempt was made to sap down to the dam from the second parallel. But it cost so many lives at the head of the sap, and the zig-zags advanced so slowly, that on the 3rd of April the attempt was given up, and it was determined that the breaches must be assaulted from the west bank of the Rivillas only.

Meanwhile the two breaches, the larger one in the front of the Trinidad bastion, the smaller in the flank of the Santa Maria, began to be very apparent, and gave good hope to the besiegers. The French, however, delayed their progress by the most gallant efforts: 200 men worked in the ditch after dark, to clear away the débris that was falling into it. This they did under constant artillery fire from the batteries, which played on the ditch with grape at intervals in the night, and killed scores of the workmen. They also deepened the ditch at the foot of the counterscarp, till it was 18 feet from the covered-way to the bottom of its level. The ruined parapets were built up every night with earth and wool-packs, only to be destroyed again every morning. The garrison began to feel uncomfortable, for not only was the loss of life great, but the furious fire, by which they strove to keep down the efficiency of the siege-batteries, had begun to tell so much on their reserves of ammunition that, by April 3, there was no common shell left, and very little grape—of the round-shot much more than half had been expended. Phillipon was obliged to order the artillerymen to be sparing, or a few days more would leave him helpless. As the French fire slackened, that of the besiegers grew more intense, and Wellington put forward the last twelve guns of his siege-park, hitherto reserved, to form some new supplementary batteries on the right of his line [nos. 10, 11, 12].

On April 4th the breaches were both growing practicable, and news from the South warned Wellington that he must hurry; Soult was at last over the Sierra Morena with all the troops that he could scrape together from Andalusia. It was lucky indeed that Marmont was not marching to join Soult, but was executing a raid into central Portugal, not by his own wish but by the special orders of the Emperor, as has already been explained elsewhere. His irruption into the Beira was absolutely disregarded by Wellington: for as long as the two French armies were not united, the British commander did not much fear either of them. Still, if Soult came close up to Badajoz, it would be necessary to send part of the siege-troops to join the covering force—and this would be inconvenient. Wherefore Wellington resolved to strike at once, while Soult was still four or five marches away.