Georgette Heyer: The Spanish Bride

‘My lord, I am ready to go.’

‘No. It is not your business to be running errands.’

A little commotion was heard; someone was urgently calling: ‘Where is Lord Wellington?’ ‘Here! here!’ shouted the group round his lordship.

A mounted Staff-officer pushed up to them through the surrounding gloom. ‘My lord, the Castle is your own!’

The grim jaw seemed to shorten. Wellington shot a question at the officer, who answered exultantly: ‘My lord, Sir Thomas Picton, and, I believe, the whole division are in possession!’ ‘Good God, is it possible?’ exclaimed the Prince of Orange.

‘Go back to Sir Thomas, and desire him to push down into the town!’ said Wellington. ‘The Light and 4th must assail the breaches once again. You, sir, get back to your division, and desire Colonel Barnard to make another attempt. Inform him that General Picton is in, and will go to his assistance through the town. Send for my horse, March, and for yours and the Prince’s too!’

The officer from the Light division saluted and wheeled his horse: as he rode off, he was joined by a Quartermaster of the 95th regiment, who had been standing all the time quite close to Wellington. Together they made their way back to where the Light division, withdrawn from the glacis, were lying beside their arms, officers and men together, in bitter silence.

The news that the 3rd division had taken the Castle was received with sullen disbelief. It was some minutes before Quartermaster Surtees could convince the soldiers of the famous Light division that the 3rd had succeeded where they had failed. To men who had tried so long and so unavailingly to fight their way past impregnable breaches, it seemed impossible that any troops could have entered Badajos. But a bugle-call, sounding within the town, corroborated the incredible tidings. Receiving the order to reform, and assail the breach again, the men, who had staggered exhausted down the glacis a short time before, leapt to their feet again with their weariness and their hurts forgotten, got into formation, and went forward with a will. They trod over their own dead, and mounted the breach, under a slackened fire. There was now very little resistance from the defenders; sounds of fierce fighting within the walls could be heard; the weakened Light and 4th divisions passed the breach almost unopposed, and established themselves upon the deserted ramparts. ‘By the living God, we’re in!” gasped Charlie Eeles, tattered, blood-stained, and reeling with fatigue.

It was soon discovered that the abandoning by the French of the breaches had been caused, not, as was at first supposed, by the advance of the 3rd division from the captured Castle, but by General Walker’s brigade of the 5th division. This scarcely-regarded force, whose assault upon the river-bastion of San Vincente had been planned, like an afterthought, at the last minute, had been an hour late in launching its attack, a mischance due to a mistake made by the officer detailed to bring up the scaling-ladders from the Park. But at midnight, after some very fierce fighting, the brigade had won the San Vincente bastion, and proceeding along the wall, had soon carried the San Jose as well. Penetrating to the next bastion, they had met with such a spirited resistance that they were swept back to the San Vincente, and seemed even in danger of being repulsed from the town. But a reserve force, left at the San Vincente, soon set matters to rights, and the brigade swept forward, the French, whose numbers were considerably depleted by the calling up of more and yet more reinforcements to repulse the attacks on the breaches, retreating before them. The western bastions fell, one after another; and while a part of the brigade occupied these, the rest went down into the town, and made their way through the deserted streets to where they could hear the pandemonium that raged at the breaches.

It was strange, after the racket and thunder of the struggle on the wall, to find the town so silent. Every fighting man seemed to have been drawn to the ramparts, or to the Castle, where Picton, finding every gate blocked but one small postern, was battling his way out of the fortress. The battle-noises could be heard, but seemed distant, no longer distinct, but merged into a kind of roar. No one was encountered in the streets, but lights glowed under door-sills, and between the chinks of shutters, and whispering sounds could be heard in the houses, so that the men who passed down the streets knew that they were being watched by unseen eyes.

They took the main defending-force in the rear. As the survivors of the Light and 4th divisions reached the top of the breach, the French, after a short, flurried skirmish with the 5th division, were throwing down their arms; while General Phillipon, with a few of his Staff-officers, was escaping to the protection of the San Cristobal fort, beyond the Guadiana.

Only a little isolated fighting took place after this. Lord Wellington, entering the town through the Santa Maria breach, from which the chevaux-de-frise of sword-blades had at last been dragged, passed between great mounds of red and green coats, and was saluted by ghastly figures that could manage still, in spite of their wounds, to drag themselves clear of the encumbering dead, and raise themselves on their elbows to give a faint cheer for his lordship. Wellington saluted stiffly, but the dawn-light showed the tears glinting on his cheeks.

The first battalion of the Light division was detailed for picket-duty in the town. Harry Smith, bruised in every limb, limping from a contusion on one thigh, his uniform cut to ribbons, came upon Kincaid, posting a picket, and hailed him in a cracked, hoarse voice. ‘Alive, Johnny?’

‘Oh, untouched!’ said Kincaid, whom nothing could shake from his lazy unconcern. ‘You look as though you had had enough. Hurt?’

‘Devil a bit!’ said Harry. He had worn his voice out with cheering on his men; a little tremor shook it. ‘But O’Hare-poor Croudace-Charlie Gray-M’Leod-God, what a night! I tell you, Johnny, the men are ripe for murder.’

‘Well, if it stops at murder I shall be surprised,’ said Kincaid coolly. ‘Cameron has our lot well in hand, but he’ll let ’em fall out to amuse themselves presently.’

‘Yes! and the whole division will go to the devil!’ said Harry, with a kind of weary violence. By ten o’clock in the morning, the garrison of Badajos was marched off under strong guard to Elvas, and the British troops were told to fall out. Lord Wellington had lost, he said, the flower of his army in the assault upon the town. The French had ignored the long-established rule of surrendering a town once practicable breaches had been made in its walls, just as they had done at Ciudad Rodrigo. ‘I should have thought myself justified in putting both garrisons to the sword,’ wrote Wellington to Lord Liverpool; ‘and if I had done so at the first it is probable that I should have saved 5,000 men at the second.’ So it was not to be supposed that his lordship had ever the least intention of denying his soldiers their immemorial right to sack a town that had resisted to the end.

The men swore that every Spaniard in Badajos was an Afrancesado, which was the term used for anyone in sympathy with the French. When the terrors of the night were done, and the French garrison made prisoners, and the order to fall out was given, men who had fought through the dark hours like demi-gods, rushed into the town like hyenas. By noon all semblance of order had disappeared; Badajos was a hell of misrule in which the horrors of the breaches were being fast surpassed.

Those who had censured the excesses committed by the troops after the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo were smitten to silence by the atrocities seen on all sides in Badajos. Murder, rapine, and rape were the orders of the day, and no efforts of the officers could quell the unleashed brutality of men who had shot their way into the wine-shops, and tapped the barrels in the streets.