Private of Heavy Dragoons.
1809.
Officer of Field Artillery.
1809.
“The capture of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I anxiously hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as that to which they were put last night. I assure your lordship that it is quite impossible to carry fortified places by ‘vive force’ without incurring great 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 consequence 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 it is impossible, in our service, to perform. They think 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 recommend to your lordship to have a corps of sappers and miners formed without loss of time.”[287]
Wellington and His Engineers
The slaughter of Badajoz, then, in Wellington’s estimation, was due partly to the fact that the British Army, unlike all other armies, lacked regular companies of sappers and miners, and partly to the inexperience of the engineer officers in carrying out the last stages of a siege—the advance towards the glacis and the ditch by scientific trench-work. They did not, he says, “turn their mind” towards such operations, because they had never been furnished with skilled workmen to carry them out. That sappers and miners did not exist as yet was not the fault of Wellington, nor of the ministers, but of the professional advisers of the administration, who should long ago have pointed out that such a corps was wanted. That the Liverpool ministry was not slow to take advice was shown by the fact that they at once converted the already existing “Military Artificers” into sappers. On April 23, less than three weeks after Badajoz fell, a warrant was issued for instructing the corps in military field works, and shortly after six companies were ordered to be sent to the Peninsula the moment that they should have received such training. On August 4 the name of the whole corps was changed from Royal Military Artificers to Royal Sappers and Miners.[288] It was not, of course, till very late in the year that the first of the new sapper companies joined Wellington, but by the next spring he had 300 trained men with him.
Meanwhile they had of course arrived too late for the siege of Burgos, the most unhappy of all Wellington’s leaguers, where the whole trench-work was conducted by volunteers from the line directed by precisely eight of the old artificers—of whom one was killed and the remaining seven wounded. The story of the Burgos operations reads like an exaggerated repetition of the first siege of Badajoz. The battering-train that took Badajoz had been left behind, and to attack Burgos (whose strength was undervalued) Wellington had with him no proper means. Only eight guns were brought up—because the transport with the army could only provide a few spare teams, and the whole of Castile had been swept clear of draught-beasts. This ridiculously weak train proved wholly insufficient for the work set it. “Had there been a siege establishment with the army even moderately efficient, so as to have admitted of the performance of the rudiments of the art, the attack (even with the inadequate artillery) might have been carried through,” writes the historian of the Peninsular sieges.[289] But there were only five engineer officers present, just eight artificers, no tools save regimental picks and shovels borrowed from line regiments, no material save wood requisitioned from the town of Burgos, and so little transport that the fire had sometimes to cease, to allow fresh ammunition to be brought up from the distant Madrid. Wellington ordered repeated assaults on the inadequately battered walls; they all failed, and he finally retired after thirty-two days of open trenches, and with the loss of nearly 2000 men, from before a “bicocque,” as the French called it, which could not have withstood a proper battering-train for a third of that time.
The Failure at Burgos
The fact is that Wellington had undervalued the strength of Burgos; he thought it would fall easily. If he had known that it would hold out for more than a month, he could have procured more guns from the captured French arsenal at Madrid, and might have requisitioned all the beasts of the army to draw them. But by the time that it began to be seen that Burgos was not about to yield to a mere demonstration, it was too late to get up the necessary means of reducing it. Finally, the French armies mustered for its relief, and the British had to retire. It may be added that the besieging troops, thoroughly disgusted with the inadequate means used to prepare the way for them, did not act with the same energy that had been shown at Rodrigo or Badajoz. Several of the assaults were not pushed well home, and the trench-work was slack. Wellington wrote, in his General Orders for October 3, a stiff rebuke, to the effect that “the officers and soldiers of this army should know that to work during a siege is as much a part of their duty as to engage the enemy in the field; and they may depend upon it that unless they perform the work allotted to them with due diligence, they cannot acquire the honour which their comrades have won in former sieges.... The Commander-in-Chief hopes he shall have no reason to complain in future.”[290]
The leaguer of San Sebastian, the last of Wellington’s sieges, bore a great likeness to the last siege of Badajoz. It was conducted in a time of considerable anxiety, while the army of Soult was making vigorous and repeated efforts to frustrate it. The place was strong by nature—a towering castle with the town at its foot joined to the mainland only by a narrow sandy spit; the defences of this isthmus were short, and reached from sea to sea: they were fully commanded by the castle behind. The first great assault (July 25, 1813) was made while the trenches were still far from the walls, and while the fire of the besieged had not been silenced. It failed with heavy loss. The second assault (August 31) was successful, but very bloody—2000 men were killed or wounded. The most authoritative commentator writes: “The operations against San Sebastian afford a most impressive lesson on the advantages of proceeding step by step, and with due attention to science and rule. The attempt there made to overcome or trample on such restrictions caused a certain operation of twenty days to extend to sixty. It bears strong testimony to the truth of the maxim laid down by Marshal Vauban: ‘La précipitation dans les sièges ne hâte point la prise des places, la retarde souvent, et ensanglante toujours la scène.’”[291]
Trench Work