On the 8th of August the attack there was renewed by sinking a shaft and driving a gallery to countermine the enemy, who was supposed to be working under the cask redoubt; but water rose to the height of twelve feet, the work was discontinued, and the siege itself was vexatiously delayed by the negligence of the English government in providing guns and stores, and by the astounding insulting refusal of the Admiralty to supply the necessary naval aid. To use Lord Wellington’s expression, “Since Great Britain had been a naval power, a British army had never before been left in such a situation at a most important moment.”
During this forced inactivity the garrison received supplies and reinforcements by sea, repaired the damaged works, raised new defences, filled the magazines, and put sixty-seven pieces of artillery in a condition to play. Eight hundred and fifty men had been killed and wounded since the commencement of the siege; but more than two thousand six hundred good soldiers, still under arms, celebrated the emperor’s birth-day by crowning the castle with a splendid illumination—encircling it with a fiery legend to his honour in characters so large as to be distinctly read by the besiegers.
On the 19th of August, a battering train demanded by Wellington three months before, did arrive from England, and in the night of the 22nd fifteen heavy pieces were placed in battery. A second battering train came on the 23rd, augmenting the number of pieces to a hundred and seventeen; but with characteristic official negligence, this enormous armament brought shot and shells for only one day’s consumption!
On the 24th the Chofre batteries were enlarged, and two batteries were begun on the heights of Bartolomeo, designed to breach the faces of the horn-work of St. John and the end of the high curtain, which rose in gradation one above another in the same line of shot. The approaches on the isthmus were pushed forward by the sap, but the old trenches were still imperfect, and at daylight on the 25th a sally from the horn-work swept the left of the parallel, injured the sap, and made some prisoners.
On the 26th fifty-seven pieces opened with a general salvo, and continued to play with astounding noise and rapidity until evening. The firing from the Chofres destroyed the revêtment of the demi-bastion of St. John, and nearly ruined the towers at the old breach, together with the wall connecting them; but from the isthmus, the batteries only injured the horn-work, and Wellington, who was present at this attack, ordered a new one of six guns to be constructed amongst some ruined houses on the right of the parallel, and only three hundred yards from the main front: two shafts were also sunk for driving galleries to protect this battery against the enemy’s mines.
In the morning of the 27th the boats of the squadron, carrying a hundred soldiers, put off to attack the island of Santa Clara, and landed with some difficulty under a heavy fire, yet took the island with a loss of twenty-eight men and officers, eighteen being seamen.
In the night of the 27th the French sallied against the new battery on the isthmus, but on the edge of the trenches the 9th Regiment met and checked them with the bayonet.
At daybreak the besiegers’ fire was extremely heavy, and the shrapnel shells were supposed to be destructive; the practice was however very uncertain, the shells frequently flew amongst the guards in the parallel, and one struck the field-officer of the day. To meet sallies the trenches were furnished with banquettes and parapets; yet the work was slow, because the Spanish authorities of Guipuscoa neglected to provide carts to convey materials from the woods, and this hard labour was performed by the Portuguese soldiers.
Lord Wellington again visited the works on the 28th, and in the night the advanced battery, which at the desire of the chief engineer Fletcher had been constructed for only four guns, was armed and opened the 29th; an accident kept back one gun, the enemy’s fire dismounted another, and thus only two instead of six guns, as Wellington had designed, smote St. John and the end of the high curtain. The general firing however damaged the castle and the town-works, their guns were nearly silenced, and as sixty-three pieces, of which twenty-nine threw shells or spherical case-shot, were now in play from the Chofres, the superiority of the besiegers was established.
At this time the Urumea was discovered to be fordable by Captain Alexander Macdonald of the artillery, who had voluntarily waded across in the night, passed close under the works to the breach and returned. Hence, as a few minutes would suffice to bring the enemy into the Chofre batteries, to save the guns from being spiked their vents were covered with iron plates fastened by chains; and this was also done at the advanced battery on the isthmus. The materials for a battery to take the defences of the Monte Orgullo in reverse were now sent to the island of Santa Clara, and some pieces on the Chofres were turned against the retaining wall of the horn-work, in the hope of shaking down any mines there without destroying the wall itself, which offered cover for the troops advancing to the assault.