On the 3d, the Surveillante frigate and a sloop with some small craft arrived to blockade the harbour, yet the French vessels from St. Jean de Luz continued to enter by night. The same day the governor made a sally with eleven hundred men in three columns to obtain news, and after some hours’ skirmishing returned with a few prisoners.
The 6th some French vessels with a detachment of troops and a considerable convoy of provisions came from St. Jean de Luz.
The 7th Mendizabal tried, unsuccessfully, to set fire to the convent of San Bartolomeo.
On the 9th sir Thomas Graham arrived with a corps of British and Portuguese troops, and on the 13th the Spaniards marched, some to reinforce the force blockading Santona, the remainder to rejoin the fourth army on the Bidassoa.
At this time general Reille held the entrances to the Bastan by Vera and Echallar, but Wellington drove him thence on the 15th and established the seventh and light divisions there, thus covering the passes over the Peña de Haya by which the siege might have been interrupted.
Before general Graham arrived the French had constructed a redoubt on the heights of San Bartolomeo, and connected it with the convent of that name which they also fortified. These outworks were supported by posts in the ruined houses of the suburb of San Martin behind, and by a low circular redoubt, formed of casks on the main road, half-way between the convent and the horn-work. Hence to reduce the place, working along the isthmus, it was necessary to carry in succession three lines of defence covering the town, and a fourth at the foot of Monte Orgullo, before the castle of La Mota could be assailed. Seventy-six pieces of artillery were mounted upon these works and others were afterwards obtained from France by sea.
The besieging army consisted of the fifth division under general Oswald, and the independent Portuguese brigades of J. Wilson and Bradford reinforced by detachments from the first division. Thus, including the artillery-men some seamen commanded by lieutenant O’Reilly of the Surveillante and one hundred regular sappers and miners, now for the first time used in the sieges of the Peninsula, nearly ten thousand men were employed. The guns available for the attack, in the first instance, were a new battering train originally prepared for the siege of Burgos, consisting of fourteen iron twenty-fourJones’s Journal of British Sieges. pounders, six eight-inch brass howitzers, four sixty-eight-pound iron carronades, and four iron ten-inch mortars. To these were added six twenty-four pounders lent by the ships of war, and six eighteen pounders which had moved with the army from Portugal, making altogether forty pieces commanded by colonel Dickson. The distance from the depôt of siege at Passages to the Chofre sand-hills was one mile and a half of good road, and a pontoon bridge was laid over the Urumea river above the Chofres, but from thence to the height of Bartolomeo was more than five miles of very bad road.
Early in July the fortress had been twice closely examined by Major Smith, the engineer who had so ably defended Tarifa. He proposed a plan of siege founded upon the facility furnished by the Chofre hills to destroy the flanks, rake the principal front and form a breach with the same batteries, the works being at the same time secured, except at low water, by the Urumea. Counter-batteries, to be constructed on the left of that river, were to rake the line of defence in which the breach was to be formed; and against the castle and its outworks he relied principally upon vertical fire, instancing the reduction of Fort Bourbon in the West Indies in proof of its efficacy. This plan would probably have reduced San Sebastian in a reasonable time without any remarkable loss of men, and lord Wellington approving of it, though he doubted the efficacy of the vertical fire, ordered the siege to be commenced. He renewed his approval afterwards when he had examined the works in person, and all his orders were in the same spirit; but neither the plan nor his orders were followed, the siege, which should have been an ordinary event of war has obtained a mournful celebrity, and lord Wellington has been unjustly charged with a contempt for the maxims of the great masters of the art. Anxious he was no doubt to save time, yet he did not for that urge the engineer beyond the rules. Take the place in the quickest manner, yet do not from over speed fail to take it, was the sense of his instructions; but sir Thomas Graham, one of England’s best soldiers, appears to have been endowed with a genius for war intuitive rather than reflective; and this joined to his natural modesty and a certain easiness of temper, caused him at times to abandon his own correct conceptions, for the less judicious counsels of those about him who advised deviations from the original plan.
Active operations were commenced on the night of the 10th by the construction of two batteries against the convent and redoubt of San Bartolomeo. And on the night of the 13th four batteries to contain twenty of the heaviest guns and four eight-inch howitzers, were marked out on the Chofre sand-hills, at distances varying from six hundred to thirteen hundred yards from the eastern rampart of the town. The river was supposed to be unfordable, wherefore no parallel of support was made, yet good trenches of communications, and subsequently regular approaches were formed. Two attacks were thus established. One on the right bank of the Urumea entrusted to the unattached Portuguese brigades; one on the left bank to the fifth division; but most of the troops were at first encamped on the right bank to facilitate a junction with the covering army in the event of a general battle.