A slight sally was this day repulsed, and a shoulder was given to the right of the parallel to cover that flank; in good time, for next day two field-pieces placed on the right bank of the Guadiana, tried to rake the trenches and were baffled by this shoulder. Indications of a similar design against the left flank, from the Pardaleras hill, were then observed, and three hundred men with two guns were posted on that side in some broken ground.
In the night, though the works went on, rain again impeded progress, and the besiegers, failing to drain the lower parts of the parallel by cuts, made an artificial bottom of sand-bags. On the other hand the besieged, thinking the curtain adjoining the castle was the object of attack, threw up earth in front and removed the houses behind; they also made a covered communication from the Trinidad gate to the San Roque, to take this supposed attack in reverse; and as the labour of digging was great, hung up brown cloth which appeared like earth, by which ingenious expedient they passed unseen between those points.
Vauban’s maxim, that a perfect investment is the first requisite in a siege, had been neglected to spare labour, yet the great master’s art was soon vindicated by his countryman. Phillipon, finding the right bank of the Guadiana free, made a battery in the night for three field-pieces, which at daylight raked the trenches, the shots sweeping the parallel destructively; the loss was great and would have been greater but for the soft ground, which prevented the touch and bound of the bullets. Orders were therefore sent to the fifth division, then at Campo Mayor, to invest the place on the other bank, but those troops were distant and misfortunes accumulated. Heavy rain filled the trenches, the Guadiana run the fixed bridge under water, sunk twelve pontoons, and broke the tackle of the flying bridges; the provisions of the army could not be brought over, the battering-guns and ammunition were still on the right bank, and the siege was on the point of being raised. In a few days however the river subsided, some Portuguese craft were brought up to form another flying bridge, the pontoons saved were employed as row-boats, and the communication thus secured for the rest of the siege.
On the 23rd rain again filled the trenches, the works crumbled and the attack was entirely suspended. Next day the fifth division invested the place on the right bank, the weather cleared, and the batteries, armed with twenty-one guns and seven five-and-a-half-inch howitzers, opened on the 25th, but were so vigorously answered, that one howitzer was dismounted, and several artillery and engineer officers killed. Nevertheless the San Roque was silenced, the garrison of the Picurina so galled by marksmen that none dared look over the parapet, and as the external appearance of that fort did not indicate much strength General Kempt was charged to assault it in the night.
This outward seeming of the Picurina was fallacious; it was very strong. The fronts were well covered by the glacis, the flanks deep, the rampart, fourteen feet perpendicular from the bottom of the ditch, was guarded with slanting pales above, and from thence to the top was an earthen slope of sixteen feet. A few palings had been knocked off at the covered way, and the parapet, slightly damaged, was repaired with sand-bags, but the ditch was deep, narrow at the bottom, and flanked by four splinter-proof casemates. Seven guns were mounted. The entrance in the rear was protected with three rows of thick paling, the garrison was above two hundred strong, and every man had two muskets; the top of the rampart was garnished with loaded shells, a retrenched guard-house formed a second internal defence, and small mines, with a loopholed gallery under the counterscarp to take the assailants in rear, were begun but not finished.
Five hundred men of the third division assembled for the attack. Two hundred under Major Rudd were to turn the fort on the left, an equal force under Major Shaw to turn it by the right, each being to detach half their force to seize the communication with San Roque and intercept succour coming from the town. The remainder were to attack Picurina by the gorge, leaving one hundred under Captain Powis as a reserve. The engineers, Holloway, Stanway, and Gipps, with twenty-four sappers bearing hatchets and ladders, guided these columns, and fifty men of the light division, likewise provided with axes, were to move out of the trenches at the moment of attack.
Assault of Picurina. (March, 1812.)
The night was fine and the stormers quickly reached the fort, which, black and silent before, then seemed a mass of fire, under which the stormers run up to the palisades in rear and endeavoured to break through; the destructive musketry and thickness of the pales rendered their efforts nugatory, wherefore, turning against the sides of the work they strove to get in there, but the depth of the ditch and the slanting stakes at the top of the brickwork again baffled them. At this time, the French shooting fast and dangerously, the crisis appeared so imminent that Kempt sent the reserve headlong against the front. The fight was thus supported and the carnage terrible. A battalion which came from the town to succour the fort was beaten back by the men in the communication, the guns from the town and castle then opened, the guard of the trenches replied with musketry, rockets were thrown up by the besieged, and the shrill sound of alarm-bells mixing with the shouts of the combatants increased the tumult.
Still the Picurina sent out streams of fire, by the light of which dark figures were seen furiously struggling on the ramparts; for Powis had escaladed in front where the artillery had broken the pales; and the other assailants, throwing their ladders in the manner of bridges from the brink of the ditch to the slanting stakes thus passed, and all were fighting hand to hand with the enemy. Meanwhile the axemen of the light division, compassing the fort like prowling wolves, discovered the gate, and hewing it down broke in by the rear. Nevertheless the struggle continued. Powis, Holloway, Gipps, and Oates fell wounded on or beyond the rampart, Nixon of the 52nd was shot two yards within the gate, Shaw, Rudd, and nearly all the other officers of the 79th had fallen outside, and it was not until half the garrison were killed, that Gaspar Thiery, the commandant, surrendered with eighty-six men, while others, not many, rushing out of the gate endeavoured to cross the inundation and were drowned.
Phillipon had thought to delay the siege five or six days by the resistance of Picurina, and one day later this would have happened; for the mines and loop-holed gallery in the counterscarp would have been completed, and the work was too well covered by the glacis to be quickly ruined by fire. His calculations were baffled by this heroic assault, which, lasting only an hour, cost four officers and fifty men killed, fifteen officers and two hundred and fifty men wounded; and so vehement was the fight throughout, that the garrison forgot or had no time to roll over the shells and combustibles on the ramparts. Phillipon did not conceal the danger accruing to Badajos from the loss of the Picurina, but he stimulated his soldiers’ courage, by calling to their recollection, how infinitely worse than death it was to be the inmate of an English prison-hulk—an appeal which must have been deeply felt, for the annals of civilized nations furnish nothing more inhuman towards captives of war than the prison-ships of England.