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

by Charles Oman

One more section, a most shameful one, must be added to the narrative of the fall of Badajoz. We have already had to tell of the grave disorders which two months before had followed the storm of Ciudad Rodrigo. These were but trifling and venial compared with the offences which were committed by the men who had just gone through the terrible experiences of the night of April 6th. At Rodrigo there was much drunkenness, a good deal of plunder, and some wanton fire-raising: many houses had been sacked, a few inhabitants were maltreated, but none, it is believed, were mortally hurt. At Badajoz the outrages of all kinds passed belief; the looting was general and systematic, and rape and bloodshed were deplorably common. Explanatory excuses have been made, to the effect that the army had an old grudge against the inhabitants of the city, dating back to the time when several divisions were quartered in and about it, after Talavera. It was also said that all the patriotic inhabitants had fled long ago, and that those who had remained behind were mainly Afrancesados, traitors to the general cause. There was some measure of truth in both allegations: it was no doubt true that there had been quarrels in 1809, and that many loyalist families had evacuated the city after the French occupation, and had transferred themselves to other parts of Estremadura. The population at the time of the British storm was not two-thirds of the normal figure. But these excuses will not serve. There can be no doubt that the outrages were in no sense reasoned acts of retribution, but were a simple outburst of ruffianism.

Old military tradition in all the armies of Europe held that a garrison which refused to surrender when the breaches had become practicable was at the mercy of the conqueror for life and limb, and that a town resisting to extremity was the natural booty of the stormers. In the eighteenth century there were countless instances of a fortress, defended with courage up to the moment when an assault was possible, surrendering on the express plea that the lives of the garrison were forfeit if it held out, when resistance could no longer be successful. The attacking party held that all the lives which it lost after the place had become untenable were lost unnecessarily, because of the unreasonable obstinacy of the besieged: the latter therefore could expect no quarter. This was not an unnatural view when the circumstances are considered. The defender of a wall or a breach has an immense advantage over the stormer, till the moment when the latter has succeeded in closing, and in bringing his superior numbers to bear. In a curious hortatory address which Phillipon published to his garrison[271], the passage occurs, ‘realize thoroughly that a man mounting up a ladder cannot use his weapon unless he is left unmolested: the head comes up above the parapet unprotected, and a wary soldier can destroy in succession as many enemies as appear at the ladder-top.’ This is perfectly true: but Phillipon naturally avoided stating the logical conclusion, viz. that when the stormers finally succeed in crowning the ramparts, they will be particularly ill-disposed towards the garrison who have, till the last moment, been braining their comrades or shooting them through the head at small risk to themselves. When the assailant, after seeing several of his predecessors on the ladder deliberately butchered by a man under cover, gets by some special piece of luck on a level with his adversary, it will be useless for the latter to demand quarter. If it is a question of showing mercy, why did not the other side begin? Que messieurs les assassins commencent, as the French humorist remarked to the humanitarian, who protested against capital punishment for murderers. There is a grim story of a party of Tuscan soldiers of the 113th Line, who were pinned into a ravelin on the flank of the lesser breach at Rodrigo, and after firing to the last minute upon the flank of the Light Division, threw down their arms, when they saw themselves cut off, calling out that they were ‘poveros Italianos’—’So you’re not French but Italians are you—then here’s a shot for you,’ was the natural answer[272]:—reflections as to the absence of any national enmity towards the victors should have occurred to the vanquished before, and not after, the breach was carried. The same thing happened at the Castle of Badajoz to the companies, mainly Hessians, who so long held down the stormers of the 3rd Division. If the defenders of the breaches escaped summary massacre, it was because the breaches were not carried by force, and the main body of the French surrendered some time after the assault had ceased, and to troops of the 5th Division, who had not been personally engaged with them.

It was universally held in all armies during the wars of the early nineteenth century that the garrison which resisted to the last moment, after success had become impossible, had no rights. Ney wrote to the governor of Ciudad Rodrigo in 1810, ‘further resistance will force the Prince of Essling to treat you with all the rigour of the laws of war. You have to choose between honourable capitulation and the terrible vengeance of a victorious army[273].’ Suchet, in more brutal words, told the governor of Tortosa that he should put to the sword a garrison which resisted instead of capitulating ‘when the laws of war make it his duty to do so, large breaches being opened and the walls ruined[274].’ A very clear statement of this sanguinary theory is found in a passage in the Memoirs of Contreras, the unlucky governor of Tarragona in 1811[275]. ‘The day after the storm General Suchet had me brought before him on a stretcher [he was severely wounded] and in presence of his chief officers and of my own, told me in a loud voice that I was the cause of all the horrors which his troops had committed in Tarragona, because I had held out beyond the limit prescribed in the laws of war, and that those laws directed him to have me executed, for not capitulating when the breach was opened; that having taken the place by assault he had the right to slay and burn ad infinitum.’ I replied that ‘if it is true that the laws of war state that, if the besieger gets in, he may deliver to the sword and the flames town and garrison, and if they therefore suggest as a proper moment for capitulation that when an assault has become practicable, it is nevertheless true that they do not prohibit the besieged from resisting the assault, if he considers that he can beat it off: I had sufficient forces to hold my own, and should have done so if my orders had been properly carried out. Therefore I should have been called a coward if I had not tried to resist, and no law prohibited me from repulsing an assault if I could.’

But, as has been pointed out recently[276], Wellington himself may be quoted in favour of this theory. In a letter written to Canning in 1820 concerning quite another matter, he remarked, ‘I believe that it has always been understood that the defenders of a fortress stormed have no claim to quarter, and the practice which prevailed during the last century of surrendering fortresses when a breach was opened, and the counterscarp blown in, was founded on this understanding. Of late years the French availed themselves of the humanity of modern warfare, and made a new regulation that a breach should stand one assault at least. The consequence of this regulation of Bonaparte’s was the loss to me of the flower of my army, in the assaults on Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. I should have thought myself justified in putting both garrisons to the sword, and if I had done so at the first, it is probable that I should have saved 5,000 men at the second. I mention this to show you that the practice which refuses quarter to a garrison that stands an assault is not a useless effusion of blood.’

Comparatively few of the garrisons of Rodrigo and Badajoz were shot down, and those all in hot blood in the moment after the walls were carried. Suchet’s army was much more pitiless at Tarragona, where a great part of the Spanish garrison was deliberately hunted down and slaughtered. But there was, of course, a much more bitter feeling between French and Spaniards than between English and French.

The only reason for enlarging on this deplorable theme is that there was a close connexion in the minds of all soldiers of the early nineteenth century, from the highest to the lowest ranks, between the idea that an over-obstinate garrison had forfeited quarter, and the idea that the town they had defended was liable to sack. This may be found plainly stated in Lannes’s summons to Palafox at Saragossa in January 1809[277], in the capitulation-debate before the surrender of Badajoz in 1811, in Augereau’s address to the inhabitants of Gerona[278], in Leval’s summons to the governor of Tarifa[279], and with special emphasis in Suchet’s threatening epistle to Blake on the day before the fall of Valencia: ‘in a few hours a general assault will precipitate into your city the French columns: if you delay till this terrible moment, it will not be in my power to restrain the fury of the soldiery, and you alone will be responsible before God and man for the evils which will overwhelm Valencia. It is the desire to avert the complete destruction of a great town that determines me to offer you honourable terms of capitulation[280].’ It was hardly necessary in the Napoleonic era to enlarge on the connexion between storm and sack—it was presupposed. Every governor who capitulated used to put in his report to his own government a mention of his ‘desire to spare the unfortunate inhabitants the horrors of a storm.’

This idea, sad to say, was as deeply rooted in the minds of British as of French soldiers. It is frankly confessed in many a Peninsular diary. ‘The men were permitted to enjoy themselves (!) for the remainder of the day,’ says Kincaid in his narrative of the fall of Badajoz, ‘and the usual frightful scene of plunder commenced, which officers thought it prudent to avoid for the moment by retiring to the camp[281].’ ‘The troops were, of course, admitted to the immemorial privilege of tearing the town to pieces,’ says another writer on another occasion[282]. The man in the ranks regarded the connexion of storm and sack as so close that he could write, ‘the prisoners being secured and the gates opened, we were allowed to enter the town for the purpose of plundering it[283].’ But perhaps the most eye-opening sentence on the subject is Wellington’s official order of April 7, 1812, issued late in the day, and when the sack had already been going on for fifteen or eighteen hours, ‘It is now full time that the plunder of Badajoz should cease; an officer and six steady non-commissioned officers will be sent from each regiment, British and Portuguese, of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and Light Divisions into the town, at 5 a.m. to-morrow morning, to bring away any men still straggling there[284].’

It was unfortunately the fact that Badajoz was a Spanish and not a French town, and this adds a special shame to the lamentable outrages which were perpetrated in its streets for many hours after the storm. It is comparatively seldom in war that an army takes by assault a town which does not belong to the hostile power. The only parallel of recent years to the sack of Badajoz had been that of Lübeck in November 1806. Blücher’s Prussian corps, retiring before the pursuing French, trespassed on neutral territory by seizing on the old Hanseatic city, which lay in its way, and endeavouring to defend it. The magistrates protested, but were powerless, as they had no armed force at their disposition. Then the French came upon the scene, and, after a fierce fight, won their way over wall and ditch and took the place. They sacked it from end to end with every circumstance of atrocity[285]: Marshal Bernadotte, when importuned by the Burgomaster to stay the horrors, said that he was sorry, but that his troops only recognized the fact that they were in a stormed town—he and his officers could only succeed in calling them off after the city had been half destroyed. This was sufficiently horrible; but to sack a town belonging to a friendly nation is a shade worse than to sack a neutral place—and this the British troops did.