The external causes of the raising of the siege will be dealt with in their proper place—the strategical narrative of the general condition of affairs in both the Castiles which opens the next chapter. Here it remains only to recapitulate the various reasons which made the siege itself a failure. They have been summed up by several writers of weight and experience—John Jones, the official historian of the sieges of Spain, John Burgoyne the commanding engineer, William Napier, and Belmas the French author, who (using Jones as a primary authority) told its story from the side of the besieged. Comparing all their views with the detailed chronicle of the operations of those thirty-five eventful days, the following results seem to emerge.
(1) Burgos would not have been a strong fortress against an army provided with a proper battering-train, such as that which dealt with Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz. But Wellington—by his own fault as it turned out in the end—had practically no such train at all: three 18-pound heavy guns were an absurd provision for the siege of a place of even third-rate strength. If Wellington had realized on September 20 that the siege was to last till October 21, he might have had almost as many guns as he pleased. But the strength of Burgos was underrated at the first; and by the time that it was realized, Wellington considered (wrongly, as it turned out) that it was too late to get the necessary ordnance from the distant places where it lay.
(2) Encouraged by the experience of Badajoz and Almaraz, Wellington and his staff considered that an imperfect fortification like the Castle of Burgos might be dealt with by escalade without artillery preparation. The Hornwork of San Miguel was taken on this irregular system; but the attempts against the enceintes of the Castle failed. Burgoyne is probably right in maintaining that the repeated failures were largely due to the general’s reluctance to put in large masses of men at once, owing to his wish to spare the lives in units already worked down to a low strength by long campaigning. The principle ‘if we fail we can’t lose many men’ was ruinous. On October 18 the place must have fallen if 3,000 instead of 600 men had been told off for the assault.
(3) Notwithstanding the lack of artillery, Burgos might have been taken if Wellington had owned a large and efficient body of engineers. But (as at Badajoz, where he had made bitter complaints on this subject[61]) the provision of trained men was ludicrously small—there were just five officers of Royal Engineers[62] with the army, and eight ‘Royal Military Artificers’. The volunteers from the Line, both officers and men, used as auxiliaries, were not up to the work required of them. It was a misfortune that none of the divisions before Burgos had experience of siege-work, like that which the Light, 3rd, and 4th Divisions (all left at Madrid) had been through.
(4) After the heavy losses in the early assaults the rank and file, both the British and still more the Portuguese, were much discouraged. As Burgoyne says, ‘the place might have been, and ought to have been, taken if every one had done his duty[63].’ In the actual assaults splendid courage was often displayed, but in the trench-work there was much sulkiness, apathy, and even shirking. ‘Our undertaking, every night that we broke ground, appeared most pitiful: there was scarcely a single instance where at least double the work was not projected, with sufficient men and tools collected, that was afterwards executed, owing to the neglect and misconduct of the working parties. It was seldom that the men could be induced to take out their gabions and set to work, and I myself placed at different times hundreds of gabions with my own hands, and then entreated the men to go and fill them, to no purpose. The engineers blamed the men—the men blamed the engineers, who, as they grumbled, were by unskilful direction ‘sending them out to be butchered[64].’ All this, in the end, was due to the want of artillery for proper preparation, and of trained sappers.
(5) Burgoyne, D’Urban, and other observers are probably right in saying that the failure of the assaults was partly due to the bad principle of composing the storming-parties of drafts from many different corps, collected, under officers whom they did not personally know, from the units that chanced to be on duty that day. The one case where a brilliant success was scored with small loss, was seen when a whole battalion, the 2/24th, carried the outer enceinte on October 4.
(6) Wellington’s doubts, expressed almost from the first, as to the practicability of the affair that he had taken in hand, were known to many officers, and affected the general morale.
(7) Dubreton deserves unstinted praise. A general of more ordinary type, such as Barrois at Ciudad Rodrigo, would have lost Burgos for want of the extraordinary resourcefulness, determination, and quick decision shown by this admirable governor. His garrison must share his glory: the French 34th certainly got in this siege a good revanche for their last military experience, the surprise of Arroyo dos Molinos.
SECTION XXXIV: CHAPTER III
WELLINGTON’S RETREAT FROM BURGOS: OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1812. (1) FROM THE ARLANZON TO THE DOURO: OCTOBER 22-OCTOBER 30