Harry Smith, recuperating from his own wounds, remembered the last thing the captain had said to him before the storm on the 19th, a reminder that, as senior lieutenant, Smith would probably be a captain by morning. 'Little, poor fellow, did he think he was to make the vacancy,' wrote Smith. That was the essence of their business, a highly risky game in which the advancement the officers craved could often be gained only at the expense of comrades. As for Uniacke's mother Eliza, her situation became quite miserable, and she ended up petitioning for charity, seeking a Royal Bounty or pension to make up for the lost remittances from her dead son.
For some days after the storm, the British troops made new discoveries of deserters in Rodrigo. There had been around two dozen turncoats serving the French garrison there, sixteen of whom were now prisoners. Some were doubtless killed during the siege or storm, and Almond at least had escaped. One of the five men of the 1st/95th who'd deserted the previous autumn, William MacFarlane, having entered Rodrigo before the others, was apparently able to escape with the last French relief column the previous November and to soldier on as a turncoat. As far as his former messmates knew, though, he might well have been slung into a mass grave with the other dead.
On 12 February the captured deserters were marched into a makeshift military courtroom, a hall in the village of Nava de Haver, a place familiar enough to the Light Division men as it was very near where they'd fought on 5 May the previous year. In a garrison, courts martial might have several members, particularly when hearing a capital case. In the field, though, a major general sat in judgement as the president and a captain, the deputy judge advocate, put the case for the prosecution. The men were entitled to speak in their own defence, but much of the first day was taken up with the lengthy reading of charges detailing when they had deserted and the circumstances of their capture.
For those among the prisoners who still dared to hope, there was the consolation that even serious cases of desertion were only punished in England by transportation for life to some dingy Australian colony. As for killing your fellow soldiers, why, Murphy of the 95th had been sentenced to six months' incarceration for that just before the siege. On the other hand, there had been evidence aplenty in the execution of the Brunswick deserters and some others during the previous two years that Lord Wellington was determined to make a severe example of any men who deserted in the face of the enemy and those fellows had not even served the French.
When asked why they had all pleaded not guilty, the soldiers spoke of the privations of the previous autumn. They argued they had been driven to desertion by hunger and suffering.
General Kempt gave his verdict on 13 February, the business having lasted a day and a half from beginning to end. 'The court having considered the evidence adduced on the prosecution against the prisoners, together with what they have severally offered in their defence, are of opinion that they are guilty of the charge preferred against them,' the official verdict read, 'and do thereby sentence them, the prisoners [all named] to be shot to death, at such time and place as his Excellency the Commander of Forces may be pleased to direct. Which sentence has been confirmed by his Excellency the Commander of the Forces.' It was to become quite evident that Wellington wanted examples made of these men.
Confirmed or not, there was still time for some last intercession by the men's commanding officers. Miles Hodgson of the 95th was among those saved from the firing squad by his superiors, presumably because of the notion that he had been a good soldier in most respects prior to his desertion. Hearing of this in their bivouac, the injustice was not lost on the riflemen, some of whom blamed Hodgson for persuading McInnes of the Highland Company to desert in the first place.
It was not that the others held McInnes entirely innocent in the matter rather that they would have preferred to see Hodgson share his punishment. As they discussed the condemned men's fate around the campfire, everyone was pretty much agreed that they would get what was due to them. Some held that the deserters had fought twice as well as any Frenchers and that they had even called out in English as the storm began, 'Now here comes the Light Division; let us give it them, the rascals!'
McInnes and nine others were duly taken to a clearing in the upland forest one week after their sentence was passed. In order that the lesson not be lost on their comrades, the Light Division was paraded to witness the punishment, and the firing party made up from contingents of its battalions. Each of the prisoners would be shot by members of his own regiment. 'They soon after appeared, poor wretches, moving towards the square, with faces pale and wan, and all with the dejection such a situation is calculated to produce,' one witness remembered. The provost marshal and Lieutenant Harry Smith, as major of brigade, supervised proceedings.
Graves had been dug for the prisoners, each being stopped in front of his own last resting place. They then kneeled with their backs to the grave and facing their old regiments. Blindfolds were fastened and they were 'left for a few moments to their own reflections or prayers, the Provost Marshal proceeded to the firing party'. At the order, the firing squad levelled its weapons and fired.
The smoke from the volley cleared to reveal two men still upright. One, a rifleman, was wounded. The other, Cameron of the Royal Horse Artillery, was untouched, for in a piece of sad incompetence, the provost marshal had forgotten to include members of his regiment in the firing squad.
Harry Smith recalled what happened next: '"Oh, Mr Smith, put me out of my misery," called the wounded rifleman, and I literally ordered the firing party, when reloaded, to run up and shoot the poor wretches. It was an awful scene.' The provost marshal walked up and finished off each man with a shot to the head.
The regiments of the Light Division filed away from the execution ground. They had seen plenty of death in battle, but there was something deeply disturbing about what they had just witnessed. Quarter Master William Surtees wrote: I cannot describe the uncomfortable feelings this spectacle produced in my mind nay, not only there, but in my body also for I felt sick at heart; a sort of loathing ensued; and from the recollection of what I then suffered, I could not easily be persuaded to witness such another scene, if I had the option of staying away. I cannot describe the uncomfortable feelings this spectacle produced in my mind nay, not only there, but in my body also for I felt sick at heart; a sort of loathing ensued; and from the recollection of what I then suffered, I could not easily be persuaded to witness such another scene, if I had the option of staying away.
Following the execution of its former members, the Light Division was soon under way again, marching south for an appointment with another siege. Badajoz, the last remaining border fortress still in French hands, was their objective, Wellington having resolved to take it as quickly as possible so that he might press on with the campaign of 1812, deeper into Spain. The 95th and its brother regiments faced a series of marches, down through the Sierra d'Estrella mountains to the plains of Alemtejo (where they had suffered such sickness before) and across the Guadiana into Spain.
The columns moving south were commanded under improvised arrangements. Craufurd was dead, Colborne of the 52nd seriously wounded. Others accompanied the column in a state of fragile health, either through wounds or sickness, drifting in and out of their posts as each bout of delirium subsided or rose. Among these officers were: Colonel Beckwith, who had returned from England, in theory to resume command of the 1st Brigade, though in fact he was never well enough to do so; Major General John Vandeleur, the 2nd Brigade chief who now coveted the command of the entire division but had also been wounded at Rodrigo; and Major O'Hare, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Rifles, who had been laid low by a series of fevers. So it was a time of acting commands throughout: lieutenants led companies; Cameron, a brevet major but technically still a captain, commanded the 1st/95th; majors from the 43rd and 52nd ran the brigades; and Lieutenant Colonel Barnard, having arrived less than a year before, was in charge of the entire Light Division.
It was in this atmosphere, in which nobody exactly felt confident of his place, that a grubby prisoner was taken swiftly down the division's march route and delivered to its provost. Shortly after the previous executions, Joseph Almond had been captured by a patrol of Spanish guerrillas while trying to make his way through to Salamanca. The forests and byways between Rodrigo and that city were intensively patrolled by Don Julian's men, who were always on the lookout for Spanish collaborators or spies carrying messages. Anyone who seemed out of place soon attracted their attention.
Almond's former comrades were quickly aware of his capture because he had to join their daily marches, manacled, at the rear of the column. February's executions had, for many of the men, righted the wrong caused by the deserters' defection to the French accounts had been settled. Quite a few of them had been disgusted by the spectacle of the firing squads too. So when it came to Almond, there was a general feeling that they did not want to see another capital trial.
Since the division was marching, it was not possible to convene even the semblance of a general court martial, as had been done the previous month. Instead, the recuperating General Vandeleur would act as president and his staff officer or major of brigade, Harry Smith, would be given the prosecuting role of acting deputy advocate general. The 'court' was convened in Castello Branco on 4 March and its proceedings would last but an hour or two. Almond, like the others, pleaded not guilty on the grounds of the sufferings he had faced the previous November.
Smith and Vandeleur did what they believed Headquarters expected of them: The Court having duly considered the evidence on the part of the prosecution, as well as what the Prisoner has stated in his defence, are of the opinion that he is Guilty of the crime laid to his charge, and do therefore sentence him the Prisoner Joseph Allman [ The Court having duly considered the evidence on the part of the prosecution, as well as what the Prisoner has stated in his defence, are of the opinion that he is Guilty of the crime laid to his charge, and do therefore sentence him the Prisoner Joseph Allman [sic] to be shot to death at such time and place as His Excellency the Commander of the Forces may deem fit.
'The fate of this man excited much commiseration,' according to Costello. 'Because of his previous good character, and the fact that he had marched as a prisoner for many days, it was commonly thought he would be pardoned.' Everybody had learnt the lesson that they were intended to learn from February's firing squad. Surely someone would step forward and say a few good words for Almond, saving him as Hodgson had been saved but who? At the time of his desertion, his company had been under the command of George Simmons, a junior lieutenant. As for O'Hare or Cameron, they were hard men all right, but they lacked the connections to feel confident about putting their heads above the parapet in such a situation. Only someone with the stature of a Beckwith could have saved Almond, and he was confined to a sickbed.
On 9 March, the division halted in Castello de Vide, a little hillside spa town in the northern part of Alemtejo Province. Almond's execution had been fixed by the court martial for the next day. Costello found himself, with several comrades, guarding the prisoner. They were playing cards and chatting among themselves when the provost arrived. There was to be no pardon: the sentence would be carried out the following morning at ten.
Almond sent for the 5th Company pay sergeant and asked for his arrears. Indeed, the prisoner was insistent on the point that the execution could not be carried out until these several pounds had been received. These were made over, one of the guards being sent out to buy some good wine with it. What remained was signed over to Almond's mother. The prisoner then noticed that one of his keepers had worn-out shoes, so he swapped his own with him, saying, 'They will last me as long as I shall require them.'
The following morning, 10 March, the Light Division was drawn up as ordered, to witness another execution. A muffled drum was beaten and the band played the Dead March as the prisoner was led out. It was raining a typical, damnable Portuguese winter's rain, and the grave that had been dug for Almond was soon waterlogged. The prisoner marched up, looked into it and said, 'Although a watery one, I shall sleep sound enough in it.' He seemed completely composed, showing no signs of fear either in his step or in the timbre of his voice.
Almond knelt and declined the blindfold with the words, 'There is no occasion, I shall not flinch.' The provost, embarrassed, explained that these were the rules. As the firing party made ready, he called out to his guards of the previous night, giving each of them a word and a farewell. 'As I nodded to him in return,' wrote Costello, 'I fancied it was to a dead man. And in two minutes, he was no more. The intrepid and cool manner in which he met his fate drew forth a general feeling of admiration.' The blindfold went on at last, rifles were presented at their mark, and the damp stillness was shattered by a volley. Almond tipped back into his grave and sploshed into the muddy water like a sack of butcher's scraps.
SIXTEEN.
Badajoz
MarchApril 1812
The French gun captain peering down the barrel of his great beast of a cannon could see enemy soldiers running across a trench, on the ridge five hundred yards or so from his position. Several nights before, the enemy had thrown up this earthen defence on the gentle rise overlooking Badajoz's eastern wall. It was the first parallel of their siege works. Every day the gun captain and his company had been hurling heavy shot at it, trying from their platform on the city's massive walls to flatten the insolent work of men with shovels. He watched the running figures, three of them. You could not lead running soldiers with a massive great gun in the way you did with a rifle. Instead you aimed for your target the trench and if you caught some member of the working parties in the process, then ca ira ca ira! But an experienced gun captain using the mental mechanism honed by years of practice and thousands of shots could judge very precisely the time required for the flight of his ball to a known range, add to it the moment's delay of the powder burning from the touch hole through to the main charge and subtract from this the instant it would take running men to cover a given distance. The gun went off with an almighty thump.
Private Costello was aware of the whoosh of air just behind him and the splash of something on his jacket. He jumped down into the trench and turned around, 'and beheld the body of Brooks, headless, but quivering with life for a few seconds before it fell ... the shot had smashed and carried away the whole of his head. My jacket was bespattered with the brains.' Costello and Tom Treacy had made it, James Brooks had not. Another man who had sailed in May 1809 with the 3rd Company was dead. Brooks was one of the many captured on the Coa in July 1810, but he had managed to escape the French. In the days before his death, he had told Costello several times that he had dreamt of a headless corpse.
The siege of Badajoz was already proving something harder fought and more desperate for the Rifles than their action at Rodrigo three months earlier. There were three times the number of French in Badajoz for one thing and it was thrice the fortress for another, having thicker walls, deeper ditches, the works.
On 22 March, the day after Brooks was killed, another party of riflemen was sent forward on a hazardous duty. Some French guns across the Guadiana River to their north had been playing havoc on Wellington's first parallel. That trench ran atop the San Miguel ridge from north to south and the French on the other side of the river were able to send flanking shots right along it. The riflemen got themselves settled and waited in cover for daybreak.
As it became lighter, they chose their targets. The sentry walking along the walls, appearing now and then in the gun embrasures. The gunner preparing one of the twenty-four-pounders for the day's work ahead. Once the word was given, the 95th began picking off anyone who showed himself near the guns. It was long-range shooting two hundred or more yards much further than Gairdner and his party had been firing at Rodrigo. But with careful adjustment for distance, they soon began claiming victims, one officer noting, 'This had the desired effect; and the field pieces were withdrawn into the fort, after some of the gunners had bitten the dust.'
There were several more missions like this in the following days. Moving close to the city's walls under cover of darkness, riflemen would dig pits for themselves and wait for dawn when any Frenchman on the ramparts was fair game. They tried to concentrate on the gun crews and this led the enemy to close up the embrasures in front of the cannon with planks or gabbions until just before the moment of firing. One French officer tried to counter the sniping by waving his hat on a stick to draw British fire and then having a party of picked shots try to kill the marksmen. This contest went on for a whole day before the French officer himself dropped, believed to be killed by a ball from the 95th. Lieutenant Simmons, who commanded such a party, wrote in his journal, 'I was so delighted with the good practice I was making against Johnny that I kept it up from daylight till dark with forty as prime fellows who ever pulled a trigger.'
There was another obstacle to the British plans: a strong redoubt on the San Miguel ridge called La Picurina. The task of storming it was set for the evening of 25 March and given to a brigade of the 3rd Division, but all manner of volunteers went along.
Robert Fairfoot was one of them. He'd developed a thirst for action that, on that very day, got him promoted to sergeant. Evidently there was no need for him to go. If Fairfoot kept volunteering, he'd soon be a dead sergeant. But why should a man who'd just been made up hold back and let others take the risk? That was the way they saw it. William Brotherwood, Kincaid's old confederate in the bating of Tommy Sarsfield, went too. Four months before, he'd been promoted to corporal and, like Fairfoot, he was not a man to rest on his laurels.
The storm of the Picurina was a desperate business much less easy than the San Francisco redoubt on 8 January for the defenders had been able to pour fire on the British as they struggled to break in to the fort, killing or wounding half of the five hundred attackers. The surviving stormers returned to their camps in the early hours to regale their expectant messmates with the horrific tale of that night's storm.
Sergeant Fairfoot and Corporal Brotherwood both survived. The latter, already well known to his fellow riflemen as a wag, furnished those who had not been there with a good yarn about how the Green Jacket put the redcoat in his place. Some of the 3rd Division stormers, knowing the Picurina business to be theirs, were evidently furious at the arrival of the Rifles 'volunteers'. One of them had shouted at the riflemen to place their ladders and get out of the way. 'Damn your eyes!' Brotherwood had bellowed back above the din. 'Do you think we Light Division fetch ladders for such chaps as you to climb up? Follow us.' That was putting the lobsters down, and it was repeated among many of the 95th.
The desperate business of grinding down the city's defences continued from one day to the next, the incessant banging of cannon filling the waking hours, giving way at night to mortars with their distinctive double bangs. There was an almost febrile air of anticipation among the British troops. Some regretted holding back at Rodrigo; the losses had not been so great and the stormers got drunk for a month on the proceeds. Others wanted to get Badajoz over with. Some officers may have thought a coming war with Russia might shorten the Iberian conflict. Alexander Cameron read in a letter from a friend in England that 'the Russian army is 400 thousand strong on the frontiers ... war commences, Boney will have too much to do to think of the Peninsula.'
It was in this atmosphere that a party of hospital convalescents marched up to the 95th's bivouac one morning. Major O'Hare, back in good health, was in acting command of the battalion and greeted the returnees, including Sergeant Esau Jackson, who'd spent almost two years as an orderly at Belem. 'We anticipated a scene,' said Costello, 'we were not deceived.'
O'Hare spotted his man: 'Is that you, Mr Sergeant Jackson? And pray where, in God's name, have you been for the past two years? The company have seen a little fighting during that period.'
Jackson, aware no doubt that the eyes of all were now trained on him, replied, 'The doctors wouldn't allow me to leave the hospital, sir.'
O'Hare looked hard at him, 'I'm sorry for that, because all I can do is give you the choice of a court martial for absenting yourself from duty without leave, or I can have your stripes taken off.'
Jackson knew he had no choice but to surrender the sash around his waist and the stripes on his shoulder, the symbols of his rank. O'Hare turned and said loud enough for all his soldiers to hear, 'By God, I will not have these brave fellows commanded by skulkers.' Corporal George Ballard, another 3rd Company man, was promoted in his stead.
Had Jackson's desire for redemption exceeded his zeal for selfpreservation, he could have volunteered for the storming party. Many of those who went were soldiers who chanced their lives because they were desperate to gain resurrection in the eyes of their comrades. Private Thomas Mayberry was one of those readying himself for the moment when men were called to assault Badajoz. Mayberry, too, had been a sergeant once, but he had been broken and flogged back in England for defrauding his company's paybooks in order to pay off gambling debts. 'Mayberry was held in contempt by his fellow soldiers, and ill thought of by the officers,' according to one private. He was fed up with the taunts and abuse of messmates and superiors alike it was not a life he wanted to carry on living.
Private James Burke was another determined to volunteer. He had been on the Forlorn Hope at Rodrigo with Fairfoot, but had neither that man's intellect nor Mayberry's contrition. Burke, an illiterate labourer from Kilkenny, personified the hard-fighting, fatalistic Irish in the 95th's ranks. He was, in the damning words of one of his officers, 'one of those wild untamable animals that, the moment the place was carried, would run to every species of excess'. In short, Burke was bound to volunteer because he had learned it was the best way to get the fight of his life, with a fuck and the devil of a good drink at the end of it.
Among the officers, too, there were many who wanted to put themselves forward. The chances of promotion were one factor, but like the men, many of them had become convinced of the doctrine, 'The more the danger, the more the honour.'
All of this meant that when the volunteers were finally called for, 'so great was the rage for passports to eternity in our battalion, on that occasion, that even the officers' servants insisted on taking their place in the ranks; and I was obliged to leave my baggage in charge of a man who had been wounded some days before.'
On 5 April, Wellington's engineers told him that their battering of the two bastions at the south-east corner of the defences, Santa Maria and La Trinidad, had shattered them to the point where they were vulnerable to assault. Fearing the approach of a relieving French column, he gave orders for the attack, but at the last minute, concerned about the height of the rampart in front of those broken works, he postponed it for twenty-four hours. The extra time would allow the gunners to pound away, to see if they could do anything to blow away this rampart in order to make the job a little easier.
The postponement of the assault meant that the picked men waited throughout 6 April, knowing their trial would come that night. Sergeant Fairfoot, having volunteered for his fourth storm in as many months, would be part of the Forlorn Hope so would Private Burke and Ned Costello. Major O'Hare had been given the command of the storming party, to be made up of three hundred men. Esau Jackson was not among the volunteers.
Such was the zeal to take part that some curious deals had been done between Colonel Barnard and the officers of his division. Lieutenant Willie Johnston would not be put off, so a task had been invented for him, in command of a 'rope party' to advance with the Forlorn Hope and pull down some defences the French had erected on top of the breach. The command of that Forlorn Hope was ultimately given to Lieutenant Horatio Harvest of the 43rd on the basis of seniority alone precisely the nonsensical solution rejected by Craufurd in January. 'He insisted on his right as going as senior lieutenant; so over-scrupulous was he that his permitting a junior officer to occupy this post might be construed to the detriment of his honour,' one officer of the 95th wrote years later, evidently still angry. 'He went, and ... by his too refined sense of honour deprived another officer, probably, of that promotion which would have been the consequence of going on this duty had he survived.'
The volunteers were excused normal duties on the 6th. 'I went to the river and had a good bathe,' wrote Bugler Green, who joined Fairfoot in the Forlorn Hope. 'I thought I would have a clean skin whether killed or wounded.' It was a sunny day, one in which the soldiers were able to lie about and reflect on the trials ahead. One subaltern of the 43rd chanced upon Horatio Harvest, sitting on a bank, sucking an orange. 'My mind is made up. I am sure to be killed,' said Harvest, without apparent emotion.
This lull before the storm played very badly with Lieutenant Thomas Bell. He had joined the 1st/95th in February, just after Rodrigo, with two other subalterns sent out from England to replace casualties. Bell was an old acquaintance of George Simmons, having served with him in the Lincolnshire Militia they volunteered into the 95th on the same day back in April 1809. Bell had sat the war out in Shorncliffe so far. Although he had no experience of fighting whatsoever, he arrived in the regiment with a more senior rank than a hardened warrior like John Kincaid.
Sympathetic voices would have told Bell that he would have every chance to prove himself soon, just as Gairdner had quickly shown his mettle at Rodrigo. But the gallows humour and fatalistic resignation of the 95th's soldiers only made Bell more anxious. As the siege of Badajoz wore on, Bell's feelings of turmoil grew unbearable.
The day also gave way to some uncomfortable meditations for O'Hare. He had been wounded before, in south America, but had somehow gone through the current Peninsular campaign with only one slight wound (at Fuentes). Did that give him the mysterious aura of a survivor, or had he already pushed his luck too far?
At around 8 p.m. the stormers fell in, prior to being given a last-minute pep talk by their officers. Lieutenant Bell chose this moment to complain of feeling sick, and to abandon his men, heading back towards his tent. A double allowance of grog was doled out to each soldier, to numb them for the business ahead. O'Hare was ill at ease. Captain Jones, of the 52nd, asked him, 'Well O'Hare what do you think of tonight's work?'
'I don't know, tonight, I think, will be my last,' said O'Hare.
'Tut tut man! I have the same sort of feeling, but I keep it down with a drop of this.' Jones handed O'Hare his calabash and the old Irish major took a good draught of brandy. The Light Division stormers had formed up in some quarries about a third of a mile from the Santa Maria breach. They waited a while longer, for they were not due to move forward until 10 p.m. One more chance to peer into the gloom and talk over the objective.
The Santa Maria and Trinidad bastions had their tops shattered by the incessant artillery fire. The sloped stonework bases remained intact, having been protected such was the design of a fortress by the earthen rampart around it. Heavy damage to the bastions, though, meant that the batteries located in them at the start of the siege had been largely disabled. Great chunks of the wall stretching about 150 yards between these two targets had also collapsed under the bombardment, being only partially screened by the ravelin that sat between the two bastions and the edge of the great ditch in front of them.
For the stormers, the line of assault would take them almost due north from the quarry for about four hundred yards until the gentle rise of the surrounding escarpment began. Another fifty or sixty yards would bring them to the top of that feature, where the ground fell away vertically in front of them, dropping about twenty feet to the floor of the ditch. There was every chance that a man jumping down into it would break his legs, so ladders and haybags would be used to help them down. The Light Division men would then have to bear slightly left and travel another ten or twenty yards, circumventing the ravelin (lest they assault it by mistake in the chaos, as Kincaid had at Rodrigo) in order to get their ladders onto the wall of the Santa Maria bastion itself. The Trinidad bastion would be attacked by stormers from the 4th Division. Simultaneously, Picton's 3rd Division would approach the medieval castle walls at Badajoz's north-east corner and escalade them with long ladders. The 5th Division would make a diversionary attack on the western side of the town.
General Phillipon, the governor, had made elaborate precautions to turn Wellington's planned attacks into a bloody fiasco. Where sections of the main enciente enciente or wall had collapsed between the bastions, a retrenchment had been thrown up, a makeshift wall made from piled-up debris to form a new obstacle right behind the old one. Along this breach and on the bastions, or wall had collapsed between the bastions, a retrenchment had been thrown up, a makeshift wall made from piled-up debris to form a new obstacle right behind the old one. Along this breach and on the bastions, chevaux de frises chevaux de frises wooden frames with sword blades and bayonets attached formed a prickly last line of defence. The engineers had partly flooded the ditch between the wall and outer rampart; calculating where the troops would have to go to avoid the water, they placed mines and planks with nails driven through. The men atop the ramparts would have piles of loaded muskets, grenades and stones to throw down. wooden frames with sword blades and bayonets attached formed a prickly last line of defence. The engineers had partly flooded the ditch between the wall and outer rampart; calculating where the troops would have to go to avoid the water, they placed mines and planks with nails driven through. The men atop the ramparts would have piles of loaded muskets, grenades and stones to throw down.
The stormers moved up, with a couple of hundred riflemen of Right Wing who would provide a covering fire. O'Hare caught sight of George Simmons, the subaltern he had tutored, now one of the battalion's most experienced officers. The men shook hands, and as he turned to part, the major told Simmons: 'A lieutenant colonel or cold meat in a few hours.'
Shortly before 10 p.m., the four companies of the 95th's Right Wing, under the commandof Major Alexander Cameron, began trotting forward. They were going to line the protective slope around the walls, to provide a covering fire for the stormers. Some British cannon had kept up a fire of blanks in order to deceive the garrison, but as the riflemen crawled into position on top of the escarpment, many felt sure they could see the defenders watching them and doing nothing. Both sides were holding their fire.
The rope party and Forlorn Hope came forward too now, dozens of men trotting up the incline, many carrying ladders or haybags in order to break the fall into the ditch ahead. As they came to the top of the slope, silhouetted against the sky, a couple of carcasses were thrown down by the defenders, burning with a furious intensity and illuminating walls and men alike with an unearthly flickering pink light.
'Instantly a volley of grape-shot, canister, and small arms poured in among us as we stood on the glacis about thirty yards from the walls,' one officer recalled. Men dropped all around as Cameron's riflemen tried to answer the French fire. 'What a sight! The enemy crowding the ramparts, with the French soldiers standing on the parapets ... a tremendous firing now opened on us and for a moment we were stationary.'
'I was in the act of throwing my bag when a ball went through the thick part of my thigh, and having my bugle in my left hand, it entered my left wrist and I dropped,' wrote William Green. 'When it entered my wrist, it was more like a six-pounder than a musket ball! It smashed the bone and cut the guides, and the blood was pouring from both wounds, I began to feel very faint.'
Sergeant Fairfoot heard Green's cries and asked him, 'Bill, are you wounded?' He gave Green his flask, which still held some rum, and bid him, 'Drink it, but I cannot assist to carry you out of the reach of shot.' Fairfoot knew the attack would instantly falter if they stopped to help the wounded.
Some men endured the first moments of this hail of fire lying flat, and as it slackened a little, the first ladders were tipped down into the ditch where some intrepid stormers, including Ned Costello, climbed onto them. Almost as soon as he was down, Costello was flattened by the body of another who'd been shot on the ladder behind him. The group in the ditch built to a few score. They were floundering about, discovering the water, several feet deep in places they had not expected, treading on rusty nails, flinching with the impact of splinters and mines that lacerated their flesh.
Many men were falling among the covering party and reserves gathered on the rampart, even though they had not been designated for the initial assault. Second Lieutenant James Gairdner fell on this slope, pierced in a breath by musket or canister balls in his right leg, left arm and through his chin.
Those in the ditch were looking about, confused, unable to gain their bearings or see the way ahead clearly. The Forlorn Hope commander, Lieutenant Harvest, was dead. Willie Johnston, the rope party commander, had fallen seriously wounded. It was down to the NCOs or anyone with a commanding manner to try to organise the men. Sergeant Fairfoot went forward and there was a sickening crack as the musket ball hit the peak of his cap, going through it into his left temple. He dropped like a felled tree. In this hellish chaos, just like at Rodrigo, some men assaulted the ravelin in error.
Seeing Private Mayberry had already taken several wounds, one of the officers told him to go back and find himself the dressing station. 'No going to the rear for me,' Mayberry shouted back, 'I'll restore myself to my comrades' opinion or make a finish of myself altogether.' He fell dead moments later.
Some time had passed, perhaps as much as forty minutes, before Major O'Hare and one or two other officers got enough men together in the ditch to place ladders against the correct walls and prosecute the final phase of the assault. O'Hare got onto one of the ladders and began to climb. A musket shot to the chest stopped him, and he dropped back to the ground. Costello went up the ladders too, only to get a blow from a musket butt or some such that sent him crashing down to the bottom again. Cooke of the 43rd tried his chances: 'Within a yard of the top, a blow deprived me of sensation and I fell. I recollect a soldier pulling me out of the water, where so many men had drowned.'
One solitary rifleman managed to get to the top of the ladders and was trying to get under the chevaux de frises chevaux de frises, when several Frenchmen set about him: 'Another man of ours (resolved to win or die) thrust himself beneath the chained sword blades, and there suffered the enemy to dash his brains out with the ends of their muskets.'
Those who had fallen, winded or wounded, like Costello and Cooke, now lay among piles of bodies, beaten. 'I had lost all the frenzy of courage that had first possessed me and felt weak, my spirit prostrate,' wrote Costello.
Among the dead and wounded bodies around me, I endeavoured to screen myself from the enemy's shot. While I lay in this position, the fire continued to blaze over me in all its horrors, accompanied by screams, groans and shouts, the crashing of stones and the falling of timbers. For the first time in many years, I uttered something like a prayer. Among the dead and wounded bodies around me, I endeavoured to screen myself from the enemy's shot. While I lay in this position, the fire continued to blaze over me in all its horrors, accompanied by screams, groans and shouts, the crashing of stones and the falling of timbers. For the first time in many years, I uttered something like a prayer.
Many of them, looking up at the flashes of musketry or grenades briefly lighting the dark walls and the devils who stood on top of them, recorded these grim sights and sounds as their last, as their blood pumped away into this filthy ditch and they drifted into their last sleep.
In that desperate battle of wills that was a storm, the defenders knew they were winning. 'French troops were standing upon the walls taunting and inviting our men to come up and try again,' wrote one British officer. The French called down in their broken English, 'Why don't you come into Badajoz?' They were not just savouring their triumph; it was also a way to persuade the British with any fight left in them to get up off the ground and show themselves, so they could pour another volley onto them.
At the rear of the division, down near the quarries, a handful of bandsmen were collecting the wounded and helping them back to a dressing station, where the surgeons laboured in a candlelit tent. Bugler Green peered in to find a terrifying scene of bones being sawed, discarded limbs and anguished screaming.
I stepped up to the doctor; he saw the blood trickling down my leg, and tore off a piece of my trousers to get at the wound, which left my leg and part of my thigh bare. He then made his finger and thumb meet in the hole the ball had made, and said, 'The ball is out, my lad!' He put in some lint and covered the wound with some strapping. I stepped up to the doctor; he saw the blood trickling down my leg, and tore off a piece of my trousers to get at the wound, which left my leg and part of my thigh bare. He then made his finger and thumb meet in the hole the ball had made, and said, 'The ball is out, my lad!' He put in some lint and covered the wound with some strapping.
Two or three hours after the initial attack, successive waves were still moving forward. All sense of the original grouping of storming party, reserve, and so on had been lost now, and it was just a matter of some intrepid or indeed foolish officer putting himself at the head of whoever wanted to follow. These men dropped down into the ditch, where they found hundreds of dead or dying comrades: In the awful charnel pit we were then traversing to reach the foot of the breach, the only sounds that disturbed the night were the moans of the dying with the occasional screech from others suffering under acute agony ... it was a heart-rending moment to be obliged to leave such appeals unheeded. In the awful charnel pit we were then traversing to reach the foot of the breach, the only sounds that disturbed the night were the moans of the dying with the occasional screech from others suffering under acute agony ... it was a heart-rending moment to be obliged to leave such appeals unheeded.
Half a mile away, near the city's castle, men of the 3rd Division had moved up to the walls. They faced a forty-foot climb, as these were far higher than those of the more modern defences on the Light Division's side. Here too men of different regiments became mingled and confused as the defenders poured fire on them. One gentleman volunteer noted in a letter home: The men were not so eager to go up the ladders as I expected them to be ... I went up the ladder and half way up I called out 'Here is the 94th!' and was glad to see the men begin to mount. In a short time they were all up and formed on a road just over the wall. The men were not so eager to go up the ladders as I expected them to be ... I went up the ladder and half way up I called out 'Here is the 94th!' and was glad to see the men begin to mount. In a short time they were all up and formed on a road just over the wall.
Picton's attack was succeeding.
The small group of officers that marked the Light Division's makeshift HQ stood disconsolately near the outer defensive rampart. The slaughter had gone on a good four hours before they had broken off their attack. Just then, Major FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington's military secretary, popped out of the darkness and accosted Captain Harry Smith. Where was Colonel Barnard? Lord Wellington wanted the Light and 4th Divisions to resume their attack. 'The devil!' said Smith in reply. 'Why, we have had enough; we are all knocked to pieces.' Somerset was adamant: 'I dare say, but you must try again.' Smith smiled and replied, 'If we could not succeed with two whole fresh and unscathed Divisions, we are likely to make a poor show of it now. But we will try again with all our might.'
Before the order could be passed, a ripple of shouts began spreading through the British ranks 'Blood and Wounds! the 3rd Division are in!' and as the rumour strengthened, the French fire slackened, for the defenders knew their enemies were now behind them and it was time to sauve qui peut sauve qui peut. Badajoz had fallen.
SEVENTEEN.