Rifles - Mark Urban [99]
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 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 – wooden frames with sword blades