Rifles - Mark Urban [101]
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, 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.
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.
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