Controversy with Lord Bathurst on general principles was only one of Wellington’s distractions during the middle weeks of July: he was at the same time carrying on an acrimonious correspondence with the Spanish Minister of War, concerning the removal of Castaños and Giron from their posts, and enduring many controversial letters from Sir John Murray regarding the Tarragona fiasco. Murray had realized the disgust which his wretched policy had roused, alike in the army and in the British public, and was endeavouring to justify himself to his commander-in-chief by long argumentative epistles. Wellington refused to commit himself to any judgement, and agreed with the ministers at home that a court martial would be required[778]. He suggested to the authorities at the Horse Guards that Murray should be charged firstly with making no proper arrangements to raise the siege of Tarragona or to bring off his guns, secondly with having disobeyed the clause of his instructions which bade him return at once to Alicante if he failed in Catalonia, and thirdly with having betrayed General Copons, by bringing him down to the coast and then absconding without giving any proper warning of his departure[779]. After mature reflection, however, he advised that the third charge should be dropped, not because it was unjustified, but because there would be great inconvenience in bringing Copons or his representatives to bear witness at a British court martial, when they were wanted in Catalonia.
But all this correspondence, and much more on less important subjects, did not prevent Wellington from paying his promised visit to General Graham, to inspect in person the allied positions on the lower Bidassoa, and to supervise the arrangements for the siege of St. Sebastian, which indeed required supervision, for already it was evident that things were not going so well as might have been hoped in this direction (July 12).
The first impression made on the observer by the fortress of St. Sebastian is that it is an extremely small place. This is true—though it is also true that its effect is somewhat dwarfed by its immense surroundings—the limitless expanse of the Ocean on one side, and the high and fantastic peaks of the Jaizquibel, the Peña de la Haya, and the Four Crowns, which have just been passed by the traveller coming from the side of Bayonne. The fortress consists of a lofty sandstone rock, as steep as Edinburgh Castle and 400 ft. high, beaten on three sides by the sea, and united to the land by a low sandy isthmus about 900 yards long. There was an old castle called La Mota, on the summit of the rock, which is named Monte Urgull, with three modern batteries on its southern or landward face[780], which is very steep and only accessible at two points by winding roads. But these were not the main defences of the place, which lay lower down. The town of St. Sebastian was built on the lower ground below the rock, extending from sea to sea and occupying about a third of the isthmus, the rest of which was broken sandy ground about 400 yards broad. At the southern neck of the isthmus was a hill crowned by the large monastery of San Bartolomé, which the French held as an outwork at the beginning of the siege. The space between this hill and the wall of the town, now thickly packed with the hotels and avenues of a fashionable seaside resort, was in 1813 waste ground dotted with a few isolated houses and gardens, which the governor was busily engaged in levelling when the blockading force arrived. At two points there was a sufficient accumulation of buildings to form a small suburb. One group was at the head of the bridge across the river Urumea, which joined the peninsula to the eastern mainland; this was named Santa Catalina, from a chapel of that saint which lay in it. The other, called (for a similar reason) San Martin, was immediately at the foot of the hill of San Bartolomé. The bridge had been blown up by the French when the Spaniards first appeared, and the suburbs set on fire, but their roofless and partly fallen houses still gave a good deal of cover.
The land-front of St. Sebastian was very formidable; it was only 400 yards broad and was composed of a very high curtain from which projected one large bastion in the centre and two demi-bastions overhanging the water on each flank, that of San Juan, above the estuary of the Urumea, that of Santiago on the western side nearest the harbour. In front of the bastions was a very broad hornwork, having outside it the usual counterscarp, covered-way, and glacis. Specialists, wise after the event, criticized the whole land-front: they found its trace defective, considered that the scarp of the hornwork ought to have been more than 23 feet high, and pointed out that in the rear line the two demi-bastions did not well protect the flanks, since they were not themselves covered by the hornwork, and had no ditch or glacis, because the salt water came up to their foot at high tide[781].
But as the land-front was never attacked, these objections were of comparatively little importance. The weak side of St. Sebastian was really its eastern water-front. The western water-front on the open bay was inaccessible; but on the opposite side, where the town wall ran along the estuary of the river Urumea, the conditions were peculiar. The Urumea is a tidal river—at high water it washes right up to the foot of the walls, but at low tide it recedes into a narrow channel and leaves exposed an expanse of rock and sand, ranging in breadth from 50 to 150 yards, all along the water-wall for a length of some 400 yards—half the east side of the town. The rampart here was a plain curtain, not very high and only 8 feet thick: of course it could have no ditch or other outer fittings, since the salt water reached right up to it for half the day. Its only salients, from which flank fire could be used, were one small bastion (St. Elmo) and two ancient round towers called Los Hornos and Amezqueta, which projected slightly from the straight curtain.
At high tide this water-front was unapproachable—at low tide it was weak and accessible, for the Urumea was fordable in many places, and shrank into a channel only 50 yards broad, meandering through a waste of shingle, rocks, and mud. On its eastern bank were rolling sandhills of some height, which commanded the isthmus and the southern half of the town, from a distance of no more than 700 or 800 yards. To the right of the sandhills, called Los Chofres, was a steep hill, the Monte Olia, facing the castle of St. Sebastian across the broader part of the estuary, and by no means out of gunshot of it, since not more than 1,000 or 1,100 yards of water lies between them.
Since it had been rebuilt as a fortress of the Vauban-Cohorn style in the last years of the seventeenth century, St. Sebastian had only once been besieged: for during the Revolutionary War of 1792-5 it surrendered without any resistance to the Jacobin armies, while in 1808 Napoleon had seized it by treachery and not by force. The one formal attack made on it was by the Duke of Berwick in 1719, when the armies of the Regent Orleans crossed the Bidassoa, in the short war provoked by the ambitions of Elizabeth Farnese and Cardinal Alberoni. Berwick had established his siege-batteries not on the isthmus, to batter the land-front, but on the Chofres sandhills, from whence he pounded the eastern sea-front to pieces. Several breaches having been made in it, and trenches on the isthmus having been pushed as far as the glacis of the hornwork, the governor very tamely surrendered, without waiting for an assault[782]. Unwarned by this revelation of the weakness of the defences along the Urumea, the engineers of Philip V made no improvements in them when they were reconstructed after the war, and the fortress was in 1813 little different from what it had been in 1719.
The easy success of Marshal Berwick turned out a very unhappy thing for the British army; for the history of the last siege being well remembered, Major Charles Smith, the senior engineer with Graham’s column, reported that Berwick’s plan was the right one[783], when the first survey of the place was made. And when the head-quarters staff came up, his superior officer, Sir Richard Fletcher, agreed with him, as did Colonel Dickson commanding the artillery. They all forgot that to make a breach with ease is not necessarily the same thing as to capture a fortress, and that the eighteenth-century slackness of the governor, who capitulated when his walls were once breached, gave no indication of what might be done by a very resourceful and resolute French officer, who had in his mind Napoleon’s edict of 1811 that every commandant who hauled down his flag before standing at least one assault should be sent before a court martial. Nor is there any doubt that Wellington himself must take his share of the responsibility, as he went round the place on July 12th and had a good look at it, in company with Charles Smith and Dickson, from Monte Olia and the Chofres sandhills. Dickson summed up the results of their discussion as follows:—‘The project is to effect a breach in the uncovered sea-wall forming an angle on the left of the land-front, between two towers [Los Hornos and Amezqueta], being the same spot the Duke of Berwick breached in 1719, when he took St. Sebastian. The convent of San Bartolomé, which the French have fortified and occupied in force, is absolutely necessary to take first, in order to be able to advance on the isthmus in support of our breaching operations from the Chofres. The plan of attack was the proposition of Major Smith[784].’
This, of course, was not the regular and orthodox way to attack such a fortress—as it involved the making of breaches only accessible at low tide, in a part of the wall to which no trenches could draw near, since its lower courses were six feet under water for half the hours of the day. There would have to be a long advance from the nearest dry ground on which approaches could be dug, across the tidal waste, in order to reach the spot selected for breaching. And this would undoubtedly be a very bloody business for the exposed storming troops. The advantages to be gained were rapid action and a quick end, without the necessity which an orthodox scheme would have involved of sapping up to the hornwork, storming it, and then tackling the lofty bastion behind it. The British engineer who wrote the history of the siege considered that ‘the operations against San Sebastian afford a most impressive lesson on the advantage of due attention to science and rule in the attack of fortified places: the effort then made to overcome and trample on such restrictions caused an easy and certain operation of eighteen or twenty days to extend over sixty days, and to cost the besiegers 3,500 men killed, wounded, or taken, bearing strong testimony to the truth of the maxim laid down by Marshal Vauban, that hurry in sieges does not lead to an early success, often delays it, and always makes it very bloody[785].’
St. Sebastian had been abandoned to its own resources on June 28, when, after the departure of Foy’s troops from Oyarzun, the Spaniards had closed in on the place, and established a blockade. The force employed was four battalions of Biscayan volunteers under Mendizabal, the remains of the bands which Foy had beaten in May, and which had taken part on June 26 along with the British 1st Division in the combat of Tolosa[786]. They were very irregular troops, and their indiscipline and incompetence shocked General Graham when he came to visit their lines on July 6th[787]. They had no notion of guarding themselves, and had suffered severely, first from an attempt to storm San Bartolomé on June 28th, and later from a French sortie on July 3, when Rey sent out two columns of 700 men from the Convent, which surprised their camp, took many prisoners, and drove them back for nearly two miles. Graham recommended that they should be replaced at once by solid troops, and at Wellington’s suggestion told off the British 5th Division and the unattached Portuguese brigade of Bradford for the siege[788]. Mendizabal’s men were sent off to join in the blockade of Santoña[789]. On July 7th the siege-troops arrived; the independent brigade established itself on the Chofres, the 5th Division—still under Oswald as at Vittoria—took post on the heights of Ayete, facing the hill and convent of San Bartolomé. From this moment the serious operations may be considered to have begun. A blockade of the seaside had been established, in a rather intermittent fashion, four days earlier, when Sir George Collier appeared in the bay with a frigate, the Surveillante, a corvette, and two brigs, all the force that he could collect for the moment in response to Wellington’s appeals to the Admiralty. The amount was wholly inadequate, even when supplemented by some local fishing craft and pinnaces, which were manned by the battalion of marines from Giron’s Galician army. All through the siege French trincadores and luggers from Bayonne and St. Jean de Luz ran the blockade at night, bringing in food, munitions, and reinforcements. For Rey having asked for more gunners, he was sent several detachments of them, who all arrived in safety, while he got rid of many of his wounded by the returning vessels. Wellington was full of justifiable wrath at the miserable help given him—his objurgations brought from Lord Melville an unsatisfactory reply, to the effect that the operations in the Baltic and the American War absorbed many of the British light craft which would have been available in earlier years, and that the Admiralty had not been warned in the spring that any large fighting force would be wanted on the Biscay coast in July. ‘Neither from you, nor from any other person at your suggestion, did we ever receive the slightest intimation that more was expected than the protection of your convoys, till the actual arrival of Sir Thomas Graham on the coast after the battle of Vittoria.’ Melville then proceeded to write lengthy observations on the dangerous nature of the coast of Northern Spain, ‘where ships cannot anchor without extreme risk, and are exposed to almost certain destruction in a gale, when from its direction they can neither haul off shore nor run for shelter into a port. If you will ensure the ships a continuance of east winds, they could remain with you, but not otherwise. All the small craft in the British navy could not prevent the occasional entry of small boats by night into San Sebastian’s, though it may be rendered more difficult and uncertain.’ Melville then proceeded to tax Wellington with grave professional irregularity, for having written to Sir George Collier, and other naval officers, letters taxing the Admiralty with neglect and incompetence. ‘Appeals to subordinate officers against their superiors are not customary in any branch of the service, and must be injurious to the public interest[790].’