Picton’s division, as already mentioned, had been detected by the French as it was filing into the parallel below the Castle: and since a heavy fire was at once opened on it, there was no use in halting, and the general gave the order to advance without delay. The men went forward on a narrow front, having to cross the Rivillas at the ruined mill where alone it was fordable. This was done under fire, but with no great loss. The palisade on the other bank of the stream was broken down by a general rush, and the storming-party found itself at the foot of the lofty Castle hill. To get the ladders up it was a most difficult business—the slope was very steep, almost precipitous in parts, and the ladders were thirty feet long and terribly heavy. Though no assault had been expected here, and the preparations were not so elaborate as at the breaches, yet the besieged were not caught unprepared, and the column, as it climbed the hill, was torn by cannon shot and thinned by musketry. The French threw fire-balls over the wall, and other incandescent stuff (carcasses), so there was fair light by which to see the stormers. Picton was hit in the groin down by the Rivillas, and the charge of the assault fell to his senior brigadier, Kempt, and Major Burgoyne of the Engineers. The narrow space at the foot of the walls being reached, the ladders were reared, one after the other, toward the south end of the Castle wall. Six being at last ready in spots close to each other, an attempt was made to mount, with an officer at the head of each. But the fire was so heavy, that no man reached the last rungs alive, and the enemy overthrew all the ladders and broke several of them. One is said to have been pulled up by main force into the Castle! Meanwhile the besieged cast heavy stones and broken beams into the mass of men clustering along the foot of the wall, and slew many. But the 3rd Division was not spent—Kempt’s brigade had delivered the first rush—Champlemond’s Portuguese headed the second, when they had climbed the slope—but also to no effect. Lastly the rear brigade—Campbell’s—came up, and gave a new impetus to the attack. There was now a very large force, 4,000 men, striving all along the base of the wall, on a front of some 200 yards. Wherever footing could be found ladders were reared, now at considerable distances from each other. The garrison of the Castle was not large—two Hessian and one French company and the gunners, under 300 men, and when simultaneous attacks were delivered at many points, some of them were scantily opposed. Hence it came that in more places than one men at last scrambled to the crest of the wall. A private of the 45th is said to have been the first man whose body fell inside, not outside, the battlements—the second, we are told, was an ensign (McAlpin) of the 88th, who defended himself for a moment on the crest before he was shot. The third man to gain the summit was Colonel Ridge of the 5th Fusiliers, who found a point where an empty embrasure made the wall a little lower, entered it with two or three of his men, and held out long enough to allow more ladders to be planted behind him, and a nucleus to gather in his rear. He pushed on the moment that fifteen or twenty men had mounted, and the thin line of defenders being once pierced the resistance suddenly broke down—all the remaining ladders were planted, and the 3rd Division began to stream into the Castle. Picton was by this time again in command; he had recovered his strength, and had hobbled up the slope, relieving Kempt, who was by now also wounded. The time was about eleven o’clock, and the din at the breaches down below showed that they were still being defended.
It took some time to dislodge the remainder of the garrison from the Castle precinct; many took refuge in the keep, and defended it from stair to stair, till they were exterminated. But by 12 midnight all was over, and Picton would have debouched from the Castle, to sweep the ramparts, but for the fact that all its gates, save one postern, were found to have been bricked up—the French having intended to make it their last point of resistance if the town should fall. The one free postern being at last found, the division was preparing to break out, when the head of its column was attacked by the French general reserve, a battalion of the 88th, which Phillipon had sent up from the cathedral square, when he heard that the Castle had been forced. There was a sharp fight before the French were driven off, in which (most unhappily) Ridge, the hero of the escalade, was shot dead. By the time that this was over, Badajoz had been entered at another point, and Picton’s success was only part of the decisive stroke. But as he had captured in the Castle all the French ammunition reserve, and nearly all their food, the town must anyhow have fallen, because of his daring exploit. The loss of the division was not excessive considering the difficulties they had overcome, about 500 British and 200 Portuguese out of 4,000 men engaged.
Meanwhile, in the valley below the Castle, the guards of the trenches had stormed the lunette of San Roque, and were hard at work cutting the dam, so that in an hour or two the inundation was beginning to drain off rapidly. This also would have been a decisive success, if nothing else had been accomplished elsewhere.
The blow, however, which actually finished the business, and caused the French to fail at the breaches, was delivered by quite another force. It will be remembered that a brigade—Walker’s—of the 5th Division, had been directed to escalade the remote river-bastion of San Vincente. It was nearly an hour late, because of the tiresome mistake made by the officer charged with the bringing up of the ladders from the Park. And only at a few minutes past eleven did Leith, heading the column, arrive before the palisades of the covered way, near the Guadiana. Walker’s men were detected on the glacis, and a heavy artillery fire was opened on them from San Vincente and San José, but they threw down many of the palisades and began to descend into the ditch—a drop of 12 feet. There was a cut in the bottom, to which water from the Guadiana had been let in, and the wall in front was 30 feet high. Hence the first attempts to plant the ladders were unavailing, and many men fell. But coasting around the extreme north end of the bastion, close to the river, some officers found that the flank sloped down to a height of only 20 feet, where the bastion joined the waterside wall. Three or four ladders were successfully planted here, while the main attention of the garrison was distracted to the frontal attack, and a stream of men of the 4th, 30th, and 44th began to pour up them. The French broke before the flank attack: they were not numerous, for several companies had been drawn off to help at the breaches, and the bastion was won. As soon as a few hundred men were formed, General Walker led them along the ramparts, and carried the second bastion, that of San José. But the two French battalions holding the succeeding western bastions now massed together, and made a firm resistance in that of Santiago. The stormers were stopped, and an unhappy incident broke their impetus—some lighted port-fires thrown down by the French artillerymen were lying about—some one called out that they were the matches of mines. Thereupon the advancing column instinctively fell back some paces—the French charged and drove them in, and the whole retired fighting confusedly as far as San Vincente. Here General Leith had fortunately left a reserve battalion, the 2/38th, which, though only 230 strong, stopped the panic and broke the French advance. Walker’s brigade rallied and advanced again—though its commander was desperately wounded—and once more the enemy were swept all along the western bastions, which they lost one by one.
Some of the 5th Division descended into the streets of the town, and pushing for the rear of the great breaches, by a long détour through the silent streets, at last came in upon them, and opened a lively fire upon the backs of the enemy who were manning the retrenchments. The main body, however, driving before them the garrison of the southern bastions, hurtled in upon the flank of the Santa Maria. At this moment the 4th and Light Divisions, by Wellington’s orders, advanced again towards the ditch, where their dead or disabled comrades were lying so thick. They thought that they were going to certain death, not being aware of what had happened inside the city. But as they descended into the ditch only a few scattering shots greeted them. The French main body—for 2,000 men had been driven in together behind the breaches—had just thrown down their arms and surrendered to the 5th Division. Even when there was no resistance, the breaches proved hard to mount, and the obstructions at the top were by no means easy to remove.
The governor, Phillipon, had escaped into San Cristobal with a few hundred men, and surrendered there at dawn, having no food and little ammunition. But he first sent out the few horsemen of the garrison to run the gauntlet of the Portuguese pickets, and bear the evil news to Soult.
Thus fell Badajoz: the best summary of its fall is perhaps that of Leith Hay, who followed his relative, the commander of the 5th Division, in the assault on San Vincente:—
‘Had Lord Wellington relied on the storming of the breaches alone, the town would not have been taken. Had General Leith received his ladders punctually and escaladed at 10, as intended, he would have been equally successful, and the unfortunate divisions at the breaches would have been saved an hour of dreadful loss. If Leith had failed, Badajoz would still have fallen, in consequence of the 3rd Division carrying the Castle—but not till the following morning; and the enemy might have given further trouble. Had Picton failed, still the success of the 5th Division ensured the fall of the place.’ The moral would seem to be that precautions cannot be too numerous—it was the afterthoughts in this case, and not the main design, that were successful and saved the game.
Wellington himself, in a document—a letter to Lord Liverpool—that long escaped notice, and did not get printed in its right place in the ninth volume of his Dispatches[270], made a commentary on the perilous nature of the struggle and the greatness of the losses which must not be suppressed. He ascribed them to deficiencies in the engineering department. ‘The capture of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I greatly hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as they were put to last night. I assure your lordship that it is quite impossible to carry fortified places by vive force without incurring grave 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 consequences 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, in our service, it is impossible to perform. They think that 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 request your lordship to have a corps of sappers and miners formed without loss of time.’
The extraordinary fact that no trained corps of sappers and miners existed at this time was the fault neither of Wellington nor of the Liverpool ministry, but of the professional advisers of the cabinets that had borne office ever since the great French War broke out. The need had been as obvious during the sieges of 1793-4 in Flanders as in 1812. That the Liverpool ministry could see the point, and wished to do their duty, was shown by the fact that they at once proceeded to turn six companies of the existing corps of ‘Royal Military Artificers’ into sappers. On April 23, less than three weeks after Badajoz fell, a warrant was issued for instructing the whole corps in military field-works. On August 4 their name was changed from ‘Royal Military Artificers’ to ‘Royal Sappers and Miners.’ The transformation was much too late for the siege of Burgos, but by 1813 the companies were beginning to join the Peninsular Army, and at San Sebastian they were well to the front. An end was at last made to the system hitherto prevailing, by which the troops which should have formed the rank and file of the Royal Engineers were treated as skilled mechanics, mainly valuable for building and carpentering work at home stations.