Chapter 1

Badajoz

April 1812

On 7 April 1812, Badajoz, the proud and elegant Spanish city, which dominated the route from southern Portugal into Spain, lay in smoking ruins. Wellington’s army had besieged the town for three weeks and during the final assault which started at 10.00pm the previous evening, they had lost over 2,000 men killed and wounded. At that time, when a city was besieged, it was the convention that on its capture, the attacking troops were given a free hand. The infuriated British soldiers, who had suffered weeks of privation and hardship in the siege and who had seen hundreds of their comrades killed in the attack, went berserk. Wellington himself could not stop them. Although he erected a gallows in the town, not a man was hanged. This is astonishing given Wellington’s reputation as a hard disciplinarian. Maybe it was that he understood so well what his men had been through. Indeed, he wrote, ‘The storming of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed. But I greatly hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as that to which they were put last night.’

Among Wellington’s staff were a number of articulate and literate men, and the capture of Badajoz – the greatest atrocity committed by the British Army since the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 – is well documented. Two young captains, Johnny Kincaid and Harry Smith, hardened veterans of Britain’s Peninsula battles, who had led their men in the attack, and whose uniforms were torn by musket balls, both described the ghastly scenes.

Later, Captain Smith, wrote in his autobiography: ‘It was appalling. Heaps on heaps of slain – in one spot lay nine officers.’ Smith continued:

Now comes a scene of horror I would willingly bury in oblivion. The atrocities committed by our soldiers on the poor innocent and defenceless inhabitants of the city no words suffice to depict. Civilised man, when let loose and the bonds of morality relaxed, is a far greater beast than the savage, more refined in his cruelty, more fiend-like in his every act.

As the marauding troops spread through the town, they ransacked every house, they desecrated every church and cathedral, and from the convents they dragged the nuns by their habits and raped them. Every store of liquor was quickly smashed, and then every man, woman and child became victims of wild drunken excess. Drink-crazed men staggered along clutching priceless artefacts, until a stronger man seized them or until they all collapsed in a drunken stupor. Through the day and into the night, smoke and flames added a lurid glow to the scenes of devastation.

Johnny Kincaid in Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, published in 1830, described in great detail how he was standing outside their tents with his friend Harry Smith, observing with horror the mayhem and the drunken debauchery, when two Spanish ladies approached them and begged for protection. The older woman explained in a confident and haughty manner that they belonged to an old and honourable Spanish family, and, after the Battle of Talavera in 1809, a senior British officer, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, had lived in their house, which had now been burnt and destroyed by marauding bands of drunken soldiers. As she spoke, blood was running down the necks of this woman and her younger sister, because soldiers had torn out their earrings. Some officers had lost their lives that day in trying to protect Spanish women from drunken attack, but this encounter was to have a happier outcome.

Kincaid then described the woman’s younger sister, Juana, who was in a state of collapse. He wrote: ‘A being more transcendingly lovely I had never before seen … her face was so irresistibly attractive, surmounting a figure cast in nature’s fairest mould, that to look at her was to love her. I did love her, but never told my love, and in the meantime another and more impudent fellow stepped in and won her.’ The impudent fellow was his fellow officer and lifelong friend Harry Smith.

Harry was twenty-four, Juana fourteen. He was known throughout Wellington’s army as the most impetuous, eager and energetic officer, always anxious to shine whether in riding, hunting or leading from the front in battle. He also spoke fluent Spanish. When he first even mentioned the idea of marrying Juana, all his friends were absolutely aghast. Harry, considered by all to have an outstanding and successful career ahead of him, was warned not to throw away such dazzling prospects. How could marriage possibly succeed when he was out campaigning for days at a time, when he was always in the thick of the fighting and when the living conditions even for officers were appalling? He was reminded that he was a staunch Protestant and she was a devout Roman Catholic, who had only recently emerged from the stultifying regime of a Spanish convent. How could such a sheltered young girl adapt to the rigours and hardships of campaigning life when, in Wellington’s phrase, she would be surrounded night and day by the scum of the earth?

Harry replied to his critics that he would be a better officer because he would be inspired by her love, and she would understand that all his efforts would be for her. He added, ‘Although both of us were of the quickest tempers, we were both ready to forgive, and both intoxicated in happiness.’

Having brushed aside the warnings of his friends, Harry obtained Wellington’s permission to marry, and the Duke, renowned for his disapproval of having women in his headquarters, even agreed to give away the bride. A drumhead service was quickly arranged, and on 20 April the Roman Catholic chaplain of the 88th (later the Connaught Rangers) married the pair. There was no time for even the briefest honeymoon because the army was already on the move – Harry quipping that, like Wellington, he never took leave. Juana, a sheltered child reared in upper-class luxury, and educated in a convent, was instantly bundled into the life of an army wife during a long and arduous campaign. Even allowing for the hyperbole of two old friends, Harry and Johnny Kincaid, later looking back and describing their dramatic day in Badajoz, there is no doubt that Juana was the most captivating young woman. Her later portraits do not suggest outstanding beauty, yet evidence abounds of her physical attractiveness, and her positive and joyful personality. She came from a large family but, sadly, we know virtually nothing about them. This was not helped by the fact that most Spaniards considered Harry and most of Wellington’s forces as heretics. She was a descendant of the Ponce de Leon, the Knight of Romance, a Spanish adventurer and explorer. Her full name, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon, illustrates her Hidalgo bloodline, belonging to one of the oldest Spanish, rather than Moorish, families. The family’s considerable affluence derived from their olive groves, but this severely reduced as the French cut down the trees.

The background to Harry’s fateful meeting with Juana in Badajoz lay in Wellington’s campaign. Since the start of what we now call the Napoleonic Wars in 1793, Napoleon had conquered most of Europe, but in Spain, where his forces – divided between his brother, whom he had appointed king, and several bickering marshals – had been undermined by effective Spanish guerrilla activity. This had prompted the British to send an expedition to Lisbon. From here, Wellington was able to drive north-east, from his base behind the Torres Vedras lines, a series of natural and man-made barriers which stretched across the Lisbon peninsula between the Tagus and the Atlantic. Badajoz and further north, Ciudad Rodrigo, had been fought over by Wellington and the French Marshals Marmont, Junot and Soult during the previous two years. The two towns, which lay in the passes in mountainous and forested country, and which were crucial to Wellington’s lines of communication, posed grave problems for large-scale troop movements, and were vital to the security of the whole area. In 1811, after fierce fighting, a British attack on Badajoz had been bloodily repulsed, leaving the town in the hands of the jubilant French defenders.

During the following year the Allies gained the advantage when French forces in Spain were weakened by the demands of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Many seasoned troops were withdrawn to the eastern front and replaced by inexperienced conscripts, and increasingly powerful Spanish guerrilla attacks tied down French forces which should have been available to face Wellington. When several thousand French troops from the Ciudad Rodrigo area withdrew, he seized the initiative and, despite appalling weather conditions, moved against both Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. In January 1812, Wellington took Ciudad Rodrigo after a brief siege, but with severe losses, including one of his best commanders, General ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd, with whom Harry Smith had been briefly imprisoned after the Buenos Aires debacle in 1807 (as will be described in the next chapter). Wellington was then able to turn his attention to Badajoz.

To put an operation of this nature into context, the Army had not taken part in sieges of this magnitude for many years. Siege work was dangerous and despised by infantrymen who had to do much of the hard navvying work due to a lack of Royal Engineers, and Sappers and Miners. Indeed, William Napier in his History of the War in the Peninsula wrote:

The sieges carried on by the British in Spain were a series of butcheries, because the commonest materials and means necessary for their art were denied to the engineers … It was strange and culpable that the British Government should send an engineer corps into the field so ill-organised and equipped that all the officers’ bravery and zeal would not render it efficient.

Tools were in short supply as were the essential 24-pounder guns, so vital to battering breaches in the substantial defences. Troops were exposed to the cold and freezing rain, together with accurate enemy fire and the occasional swift sally from the fort. Kincaid described siege warfare as ‘the double calling of grave-digger and game-keeper [with] ample employment for both the spade and the rifle.’ Command and control was difficult because as many men as possible had to be thrown into the breaches, creating muddled communication, only solved by officers leading from the front with the inevitable casualties. The inhabitants of Badajoz had the unfortunate reputation of being pro-French due to the suspicion that they had helped the defence on the two previous abortive attacks by the British in 1811, and had not treated British wounded well after the nearby Battle of Talavera in 1809. Orders for what should happen after the town was captured were sketchy, as officers simply had not faced this situation before.

General Amand Phillippon, a very brave and resourceful soldier who had risen through the ranks, with substantial campaign experience at Austerlitz, Talavera and Cadiz, commanded the French garrison of Badajoz. He was, however, a realist and knew that he could not hold out indefinitely, but he hoped Marshal Marmont, concentrating at Salamanca, or Soult in the south, would relieve him within three or four weeks. He and his chief engineer, Colonel Lamare, set out to make Badajoz, with its natural defensive position and man-made obstacles, a very much tougher nut to crack than Ciudad Rodrigo.

The fortification of Badajoz was typical of the style of the brilliant military architect, Vauban, with its nine bastions, mutually supporting, and connected by huge walls. The river Guadiana to the north, and the smaller river Rivellas to the east, gave added protection and created problems for the attackers. Man-made defences of ditches and palisades, with mines and accurately sited angles of fire support, would seriously worry a soldier of today, let alone Wellington’s troops, unassisted by twenty-first-century technology. The chevaux-de-frise, large pieces of wood embedded with spikes, sword blades, bayonets and long nails, which could be bolted into position or pulled across a gap at the last moment, make today’s barbed-wire entanglements look comparatively tame. Wellington’s men knew it but, being well aware of the time-frame and a desire to finish a thoroughly unpleasant job, coupled with a grudge against the inhabitants and thoughts of plunder, were keen to press on.

In simple terms, siege operations amounted to trenches or parallels being dug, along which guns could be brought up to battery positions from where they could engage the enemy and pound the defences. This would, hopefully, produce a breach through which the infantry could assault. An alternative, more medieval way was to climb the walls by ladder, or ‘escalade’. This was easier said than done against strong outposts. Well-led cavalry sallies from the garrison against those digging the trenches and battery positions, and accurate defensive fire, caused delay and heavy casualties.

Wellington had available the 3rd, 4th and 5th Divisions, each of two brigades, a brigade consisting of three or four infantry battalions. He also had the famed Light Division which included two battalions of Harry Smith’s 95th Rifles (later to become the Rifle Brigade). Thus, twenty-three British infantry battalions and nine Portuguese faced Phillippon’s 5,000 Frenchmen. However, the significance of the old military maxim that the defender has a three-to-one advantage over the attacker would not have been lost on either side.