Chapter 6

1812 – Taking the Frontier

Whilst the end of 1811 was quiet, 1812 started with a bang, literally, with Wellington besieging and taking Ciudad Rodrigo, almost before the French knew it was happening. It had taken several months to plan and to move the new battering train into position. Bizarrely, whilst Ciudad Rodrigo is seen as being the best-organised and most successful of Wellington’s sieges, the engineers had many misgivings. Captain George Ross commented:

I am now on the eve of being very differently employed…. Lord Wellington is anxious to break ground tomorrow night for which he has not afforded the means … I expect his lordship will have another lesson in the school of sieges … as far as a loss of men goes … he expects to take the same places from the French in a few days which cost them [the French] 30 or 40 to take from the Spaniards. Can anything but chance prevent his being disappointed?¹

Two days later Ross was dead, hit by a cannon ball whilst directing troops in the trenches.

The siege of Ciudad Rodrigo was probably the only British siege during the Peninsular War that was successfully planned and executed. Unlike the two earlier sieges of Badajoz, Wellington knew this siege was inevitable so could plan when to begin it as part of his overall strategy. The operation started a full eight months before the siege itself, when Wellington gave orders in May 1811 for the new British siege train which was lying in transports at Lisbon to be moved north by sea to Oporto.²

The scale of the planning and the time required to move this siege train reinforces the reasons why it was not possible to arrange something similar at short notice for the previous sieges of Badajoz. The siege train was made up of thirty-eight guns, eighteen mortars and twenty-two howitzers, totalling seventy-eight pieces of ordnance. Wellington’s memorandum of 19 July 1811 details 1,092 carts and an additional 768 bullocks to move the train and supplies from Oporto.³ Even with this large number of carts, they had to make two trips. One hundred and fifty boats were also needed for the river passage of the siege guns.⁴ Collecting this amount of transport together was a major task and keeping the carts and bullocks together for an extended period leading up to the siege was even more difficult. In his autobiography, John Jones described the Iberian ox-cart:

The peasant clad in wooden shoes, carrying a ten-feet staff in his hand, and goading on his oxen whilst they pushed forward their rude cars, the wheels of which, formed of one solid piece, sent forth a loud noise, lugubrious, and startling. Trains of these cars were frequently passed, their music having been heard for miles before they appeared.

The siege train was ordered forward to Almeida in mid-November 1811⁵ and work started on preparing materials for a bridge to be used to cross the river Agueda at the same time.⁶ The troops to undertake the siege had been in the vicinity for many weeks and they were ordered to start preparing the siege materials on 18 December. In freezing winter weather, the Royal Staff Corps built a trestle bridge across the river Agueda to allow the gun carriages and stores to approach the town.