But in the spring of the year 1811 it became clear that a defensive war may have offensive episodes. After Masséna’s retreat from before the Lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington had to protect the frontiers of Portugal; and to guard them efficiently he needed possession of Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz, which had all been in the hands of the allies in the summer of 1810, but were now French fortresses. To subdue these three places he required a large battering-train, properly equipped for movement, and such a thing was not at his disposition. There were a number of heavy guns mounted on the Lines of Torres Vedras, and on the ramparts of Elvas, Abrantes, and Peniche. There were also many companies of Portuguese gunners attached to those guns, and a lesser number of British companies which had been immobilized in the Lisbon lines. But heavy guns and gunners combined do not complete a battering train. An immense amount of transport was required, and in the spring of 1811 it was not at Wellington’s disposition. Well-nigh every available ox-cart and mule in Portugal was already employed in carrying the provisions and baggage of the field army. And water transport, which would have been very valuable, could only be used for a few miles of the lower courses of the Tagus and Douro. To begin a regular siege of Almeida in April, 1811, was absolutely impossible, not because there were not guns or gunners in Portugal, but because there were no means of moving them at the time. Wellington did not even attempt it, contenting himself with a mere blockade. On the other flank an endeavour was made to besiege Badajoz, but this was only possible because within a few miles of that city lay the Portuguese fortress of Elvas, from whose walls was borrowed the hastily improvised and imperfect battering-train with which the Spanish stronghold was attacked.
The first two sieges of Badajoz in 1811 were lamentable failures, precisely because this haphazard battering-train was wholly inadequate for the end to which it was applied. Alexander Dickson, the zealous and capable officer placed in charge of the artillery, was set an impossible task. He had about 400 Portuguese and 120 English gunners, all equally untrained in siege duty, to work a strange collection of antiquated and unserviceable cannon. The pieces borrowed from Elvas were of irregular calibre and ancient pattern. Almost incredible as it may appear, some of these long brass 24-pounders were nearly two hundred years old—observers noted on them the arms and cyphers not only of John IV. the first king of the Braganza dynasty, but of Philip III. and Philip IV. of Spain, the contemporaries of our James I. and Charles I.[286] Even the better guns were of obsolete eighteenth-century types. No two had the same bore, nor were the shot supplied for them uniform in size; it was necessary to cull and select a special heap of balls for each particular gun. The whole formed, indeed, a sort of artillery museum rather than an effective battering-train. The guns shot wildly and weakly, and their gunners were inexperienced. No wonder that their effect was poor.
But this was not all: indeed, the inefficiency of the guns was perhaps the secondary rather than the primary cause of the failure of the two early sieges of Badajoz. More important still was it that Wellington was as weak in the engineer as in the artillery arm. The number of trained officers of engineers with the Peninsular Army was very small—not much over thirty; but of rank and file to serve under them there were practically none. Of the corps called the “Royal Military Artificers,” the ancestors of the “Royal Sappers and Miners,” there were actually only thirty-four attached to the army in 1810, and it was far on in 1811 before their numbers reached a hundred. Many of them were with Wellington’s field army on the distant frontier of Beira, and before Badajoz, in May, there were little more than a score. For the trench-work of the siege untrained volunteers had to be borrowed from the line battalions, and to be instructed by the engineer officers actually under the fire of the French guns. Their teachers were almost all as ignorant of practical siege operations as themselves; the British Army, as has already been remarked, had done little work of the sort for many years.
The officers, it is true, were zealous and often clever; the men were recklessly brave, if unpractised in the simplest elements of siegecraft. But good-will could not atone for want of experience, and it seems clear that in these early sieges the plans were often unwise, and the execution unskilful. The points of attack selected at Badajoz were the strongest and least accessible points of the fortress, not those against which the French had operated in their earlier siege in February with success. This choice had been made because the British were working “against time”; there were French armies collecting for the relief of Badajoz, and if the leaguer took many weeks, it was certain that an overwhelming force would be brought against the besiegers and compel them to depart. Hence the engineer officers, in both the unsuccessful sieges, tried to break in at points where victory would be decisive; they thought it would be useless to begin by capturing outworks, or by making a lodgment in the lower parts of the city, which would leave its stronger points intact and capable of further defence. They battered the high-lying fort of San Cristobal, and the citadel on its precipitous height, arguing that if they could capture either of them the whole fortress was at their mercy. Both the points assailed turned out to be too strong: the stony hill of San Cristobal proved impossible for trench work; desperate attempts to storm the fort that crowned it, by columns advancing across the open, were beaten off with heavy loss. The castle walls, after long battering, refused to crumble into practicable breaches. Before anything decisive had been accomplished, the French armies of succour came up. Beresford beat the first at Albuera in May and renewed the siege; the second (Soult and Marmont combined) was so strong that Wellington dared not face it, and withdrew from his abandoned trenches to within the Portuguese frontier in July.
Colonel Dickson’s Work
A great change for the better in Wellington’s position as regards sieges had been made by the autumn of 1811. He had at last received a number of good modern British iron guns, much superior to the old Portuguese brass 24-pounders. And with infinite trouble and delay he had at last created a battering-train that could move. This was the work of Alexander Dickson, already mentioned, who was occupied from July to November in accumulating at the obscure town of Villa da Ponte, behind Almeida, masses of waggon-transport and trains of mules and oxen, for the moving of the heavy cannon and the immense store of ammunition belonging to them. The guns were brought up the Douro to Lamego, where the river ceased to be navigable, and then dragged over the hills by oxen. Several companies of Portuguese and British gunners were attached to the park, and instructed, so far as was possible, in siege work. At the same time the military artificers—still far too few in numbers—were instructing volunteers from the line in the making of a great store of gabions, platforms, fascines, and other necessaries.
This long preparation, which was almost unsuspected by the French, because it was unostentatious and made at a great distance from the front, enabled Wellington to execute the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in January, 1812, with unexampled rapidity and success. The fortress was not one of the first class, the garrison was rather weak, the battering-train was now ample for the task required of it, and, to the surprise and dismay of Marmont, Rodrigo fell after a siege of only twelve days at midwinter (January 7–19) long before he could collect his scattered divisions for its relief.
The third attack on Badajoz, in March-April, 1812, turned out a much less satisfactory business, though it ended in a triumphant success. Like the two sieges of the preceding year, it was conducted “against time”; Wellington being fully aware that if it went on too long the relieving armies would be upon him. The means employed were more adequate than those of 1811, though only a part of the battering-train that had subdued Ciudad Rodrigo could be brought across the hills from the distant frontier of Beira. The remainder was composed of ship-guns borrowed from Lisbon. But though the artillery was not inadequate, and the walls were thoroughly well breached, both the trench-work and the storm cost over-many lives. Indeed, the main assault on the breaches failed, and the town fell because two subsidiary attacks by escalade, one carried out by Picton, the other by General Walker with a brigade of the 5th Division, were both triumphantly successful. Wellington laid the blame of the fearful loss of life upon the fact that his engineers had no trained sappers to help them, and were unskilled in siegecraft. They had attacked a point of the defences far more promising than those battered in 1811, and had opened up immense gaps in the defences, but nevertheless he was not satisfied with their direction. In a private letter to Lord Liverpool, which is not printed in either of the two series of his dispatches, he wrote:—
PLATE VII.
