Hitherto the enemy had offered only a very feeble resistance, which the discharge of a few round shot was sufficient to overcome; but when the right column, commanded by Major-General Leveson Gower, arrived near the Coral de Miserere, the Spaniards displayed a formidable body of infantry and cavalry, supported by a brigade of guns, with others in reserve. Brigadier-General Craufurd, placing himself at the head of his brigade, consisting of the Ninety-Fifth Rifles and light battalion, immediately made a vigorous charge; drove the enemy back in confusion; captured nine guns and a howitzer; and, profiting by the panic which had seized his opponents, pursued them into the very suburbs of the city, where his career of victory terminated, and Major-General Leveson Gower ordered the troops, first to halt, and then to take up a position for the night about a mile in the rear, near the principal slaughtering-place of the town. During the advance into the town, Captain William Parker Carroll, with his company, took a tilted waggon loaded with bread, and an eight-pounder brass gun, on which Eighty-Eighth was immediately scored with the point of a soldier’s bayonet, to mark it as a regimental prize.
The troops remained under arms during the night, exposed to heavy and incessant torrents of rain. In the morning Lieutenant-General Whitelocke summoned the governor to surrender; the Spaniards, however, made an attack upon the piquets, in which the Eighty-Eighth, which had relieved the rifle corps, lost about twenty men killed and wounded. The assault of the town was now determined upon, and the morning of the 5th fixed for carrying it into execution. For this service the Eighty-Eighth regiment was divided into wings, the right being commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Duff, and the left by Major Vandeleur, who were directed to enter the town separately by two different streets, and, having gained the banks of the river on the opposite side of the city, to possess themselves of the houses and form on the flat roofs; but what further steps they were to take, or what they were to do after so forming, was not stated.
At half-past six o’clock on the morning of the 5th of July the attack commenced: the right wing of the Eighty-Eighth, formed in sections, advanced at a rapid pace through several streets unmolested, and indeed without encountering, or even seeing, a single human being. A death-like silence reigned throughout the town, or was interrupted only by the measured tread of those who were most at a loss to comprehend the meaning of the apparent solitude and desertion that surrounded them. At length a few detached shots seemed to give a prearranged signal, at which the entire population of a vast town was to burst from its concealment, and in an instant the flat roofs of the houses swarmed with a mass of musqueteers, who poured a deadly, and almost unerring, fire upon the British soldiers. Under any circumstances the combat between men exposed in an open street, and adversaries ensconced behind the parapets of the houses on each side, must have been an unequal one; but the British troops were for some time absolutely defenceless in the midst of their enemies, having been positively ordered to advance with unloaded arms.[2]
Lieutenant-Colonel Duff, however, penetrated as far as a church on the right-hand side of the street in which his column had been directed to establish itself; but the strength of the barricadoed doors defied all attempts to force an entrance. His situation now became desperate; to remain stationary was to expose himself and his little band to certain massacre, unmitigated even by the being able to sell their lives dearly; to advance was nearly as pregnant with destruction; and even returning, independent of the repugnance every British officer feels to the very idea of retreat, was “as bad as to go on.” Lieutenant-Colonel Duff’s resolution was as prompt as the necessity was urgent; he made up his mind, on the instant, to hazard every thing while there was the most distant chance of success, and determined to push on; a determination which was received by his men with shouts, and seconded by them as if every individual soldier had felt himself personally responsible for the issue of the contest. With the few brave companions that survived, he succeeded in making his way into a cross street, and forcing open two houses, the doors of which were not so ponderous, or so well secured as those of the church: the houses, however, were not carried till after a severe struggle, in which all the men that defended them were put to death: and even when taken they afforded the captors but little shelter, being lower than the surrounding buildings, and, consequently, commanded on every side. At length, after a vain and murderous contest of four hours’ duration, but not until the last round of ammunition was expended, Lieutenant-Colonel Duff and his few remaining men were reduced to the necessity of surrendering prisoners of war.
The left wing of the regiment, under Major Vandeleur, had been, in the mean time, engaged in a contest equally murderous, equally hopeless, and equally unfortunate. It had penetrated a considerable way into one of the main streets of the town before a single enemy appeared: two mounted videttes were at length observed retiring slowly, and, as they retired, constantly looking up to the tops of the houses, evidently giving directions to the armed men, who were as yet concealed behind the parapets. Major Vandeleur ordered his men to advance in double-quick time; a terrific shout now burst from behind the parapets, and, in an instant, a dreadful fire of musketry, accompanied by hand-grenades and other missiles, carried death through the British ranks. Revenge or even resistance was out of the question; nevertheless the men remained undismayed, and continued to press on. A deep trench with a parapet cut across the street stopped them but for a moment; they carried it at the point of the bayonet, though with immense loss, and, finally, surmounting every obstacle, succeeded in reaching the river, where they found themselves exposed to an enfilading fire from the guns of the citadel, at about three hundred yards’ distance: they broke open a house, but it afforded no protection, the yard being surrounded by other parapeted houses, from whence an incessant and destructive fire was poured upon them; artillery was brought against them, and a large body of troops surrounded them in a cul-de-sac, from which either advance or retreat was impracticable. For three hours and a half did this devoted little band protract the hopeless struggle, and not until they were nearly annihilated, and until the firing had ceased on every other point, and until, like their comrades under Colonel Duff, they had expended the last ball cartridge that could be found even in the pouches of their dead or dying companions, did they adopt the sad alternative of surrender.
Thus ended the fatal 5th of July, 1807, the first and only occasion on which the Eighty-Eighth sustained a defeat. They had the consolation, however, of knowing, that all that men could do they had done, and of reflecting on many individual acts of devoted bravery highly honourable to the corps. Lieutenant Robert Nickle (late Lieutenant-Colonel of the Thirty-Sixth) led the advance of Brigadier-General Craufurd’s division column into the town, and fell, dangerously wounded, after having given repeated proofs of cool intrepidity united with the most daring courage. Lieutenant William Mackie (now Major, and late Captain, in the Ninety-Fourth Regiment) was severely wounded in the thigh, but, although fainting from loss of blood, continued at the head of his men, until a second bullet struck him across the spine, and stretched him, to all appearance, dead upon the ground; contrary to every expectation, however, though to the unfeigned delight of his comrades in arms, he survived, to gather fresh laurels in the Peninsula. Lieutenant George Bury also distinguished himself by vanquishing, in single combat, a Spanish officer of grenadiers. Serjeant-Major William Bone, for his gallant conduct on the same occasion, was recommended by Lieutenant-Colonel Duff for an ensigncy, to which he was promoted, and died a Captain in the Royal African regiment.
When the regiment was ordered for embarkation, Captain Oates, who was doing duty with the first, though in fact belonging to the second battalion, volunteered and received the permission of his Royal Highness the Duke of York to accompany the regiment; being a supernumerary he was attached to the Thirty-Eighth, a company of which he commanded in the attack on the Plaza de Toros.
Some of the other divisions of the army had met with less opposition than this regiment; the Plaza de Toros, a strong post on the enemy’s right, and the Residencia, a good post on their left, were taken; at the same time part of the army had gained an advanced position opposite the enemy’s centre; but these advantages had cost two thousand five hundred men in killed, wounded, and prisoners.
The loss of the Eighty-Eighth on this occasion amounted to twenty officers, and two hundred and twenty non-commissioned officers and privates killed and wounded.
Officers killed.