Wellington’s Engineers: Military Engineering on the Peninsular War 1808-1814 (21 page)

The bridge over the Agueda at Ciudad Rodrigo
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On 1 January 1812, Wellington saw an opportunity to attack the fortress and ordered it to be invested on the 6th. Due to the shortage of transport he decided not to wait for the howitzer ammunition to be delivered and attacked the fortress with guns only.
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Edward Charles Cocks, who was a great favourite of Wellington, said that he did not like using mortars.
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This may have come from his witnessing the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 and the terrible effect it had on the civilian population. The use of mortars against San Sebastian in 1813 would cause great anger amongst the Spanish due the damage and civilian casualties they caused.

Engineer resources for the attack comprised of Fletcher in overall command with eighteen other officers
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and eighteen men from the Royal Military Artificers. A company of Royal Military Artificers had been ordered up from Lisbon on 18 December 1811, but they had not yet arrived.
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Burgoyne and Ross were assigned as siege directors, taking 24-hour shifts in turn. Additional support was made up of twelve assistant engineers and 180 soldiers, all from the 3rd Division. These were the men who had been given basic training under Burgoyne in the preceding months.

Heavy snow delayed the investment due to the difficulty in bringing the stores forward. The fortress was finally invested on 8 January and on the same night the Reynaud redoubt was stormed by troops under the command of Colonel John Colborne.
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Work started on the trenches immediately and the following night the breaching batteries were started. The plan was to place the first breaching batteries on the Great Teson hill and then move nearer to build a second one on the Little Teson.
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George Ross, one of the siege directors, was killed early on the night of the 9th and was replaced by Charles Ellicombe, an officer with less experience.

On 10 January, one of the batteries being constructed was found to be partially masked by the Reynaud redoubt and some of the guns had to be moved to another battery. Jones remarked, with some irony, ‘that it was thought less labour to remove five of the guns [to another battery] … than to cut away the redoubt’.
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Overall progress was good, but the troops were suffering due to the freezing weather and because they had to march from their camp that was ten to twelve miles away.
En route
they had to ford a river so they spent most of their 24-hour shift cold and wet.

There was a change of plan on 13 January, when Wellington asked Fletcher if the second, closer, set of breaching batteries could be dispensed with as he had received news that Marmont was moving to relieve the fortress. This was agreed, although work continued on the trenches to keep Wellington’s options open if Marmont did not advance. That night the convent of Santa Cruz was stormed as it directly threatened the second parallel. On the morning of the 14th, the French made a sortie from the fortress and briefly took control of the trenches, but only limited damage was done and the breaching batteries opened later that day. Burgoyne described it as follows:

On the evening of the 14th, our batteries opened and made an hour’s very bad practice, partly however from opening the embrasures in a hurry. In this operation, while standing on the parapet, poor Skelton [Lieutenant Thomas Skelton RE] received a mortal wound, a round shot taking his hip and the hand he had upon it … On the same night Mulcaster received a musket ball through the fleshy part of his thigh (of little consequence, but disables him for the present) while superintending the zig zags on the right, on which they keep up a constant fire of musketry and occasionally grape.
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There was another error in the siting of the guns, as it was now found that two 18-pounders could not see the foot of the wall of the convent of San Francisco which they were supposed to attack. Two new batteries were started to create a second breach in the wall and these opened fire on the 18th. The new guns had an immediate impact and the next day the wall collapsed, creating the second practicable breach. Wellington inspected the breaches and wrote orders for an assault that night. The 3rd Division was to storm the main breach and the Light Division the second breach. The storming parties were led to the breaches by Major Sturgeon, Royal Staff Corps, Captain Ellicombe RE and Lieutenant Wright RE.
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The assault was planned for 7 p.m. that evening and both attacks succeeded, the troops then dissolving into a disorderly mob to ransack the town. Order was restored by the morning and work commenced at once to restore the fortress to a defensible state.

This siege was generally seen as being very successful, both at the time and by later writers, with the fortress falling in twelve days. However, there are circumstances that need further evaluation. Wellington’s decision to attack on 1 January 1812 was a consequence of intercepting orders from Napoleon reorganising the French command structure and simultaneously detaching troops to the east coast of Spain,
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the result being that the French forces covering Ciudad Rodrigo were reduced in numbers and moved further away, thereby increasing their response time to any actions by Wellington. The assault on Ciudad Rodrigo was clearly a snap decision, as on 30 December 1811, Dickson wrote ‘Wellington thinks in about a fortnight we shall have sufficient [ammunition] here to commence operations’.
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Two days later, he wrote that the ‘operation will be undertaken immediately … and … the trenches will be open in six or seven days’.
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Dickson, who was many miles away, was slightly behind with the decision-making. John Jones noted in his diary on 28 December 1811 that ‘Wellington determined to start the siege instantly he could get up the smallest possible proportion of stores and ammunition’.
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Once again Wellington was starting a siege with a very small window of opportunity, which meant that the normal rules of sieges had to be ignored. The weather was atrocious and the stores were not ready. One engineer remarked ‘Lord W is anxious to break ground tomorrow night, for which he has not afforded the means’.
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This quick decision meant that there was no transport to deliver the howitzer ammunition and Wellington took the risk of starting the siege with only a limited ability to carry out counter-battery fire. This would explain why there was no attempt to silence the French guns until the day of the assault. After the siege, Wellington appeared to justify this decision as a new tactic: ‘We proceeded at Ciudad Rodrigo on quite a new principle of sieges. The whole object of our fire was to lay open the walls’.
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The disadvantage of this principle was that many more Allied troops were injured through the consistently effective fire from the numerous French guns. The French were certainly surprised by the lack of counter-battery fire.
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Colville, commanding the 4th Division, commented that Fletcher had requested counter-battery fire on 18 January and that when the guns were directed at the French batteries just prior to the assault they had an immediate effect. Colville also noted that whilst he thought counter-battery fire was necessary, Wellington did not.
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One of the main reasons why Ciudad Rodrigo was taken so quickly was because it was a second-rate fortress with nothing like the strength of Badajoz. Burgoyne, after a visit to the fortress in 1808, described it as ‘incapable of defence … its works … possessing nearly every fault a fortification can have’.
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In 1810, Squire described Ciudad Rodrigo as ‘merely a walled town’,
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and after it was taken, wrote to Charles Pasley: ‘We succeeded in taking the place more from its own weakness, than from any means we possessed’.
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Wellington took full advantage of this weakness and was able to breach the walls from the position of the first batteries. The governor and the garrison were similarly weak. Barrie, the governor, was ‘the only general of brigade available at Salamanca when his predecessor, Renaud was taken’.
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Renaud described Barrie as a ‘miserable fellow, perfectly unfit for the job’.
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His performance matched the expectations set: ‘all British accounts agree in condemning Barrie for his lack of energy’.
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There was no serious resistance to the taking of the redoubt, the convents or the fortress. Barrie has to take responsibility for this.

The greatest success of the siege and the single event that made the siege so quick was John Colborne’s taking the Renaud redoubt on the first night. Typically four to five days would have been needed to prepare to attack and take such an outwork. It is worthy of note that to take this small redoubt Colborne used more troops than Wellington did during the two failed attempts on the much stronger Fort San Christobal at Badajoz. The outcome at Badajoz may have been different had a similar strategy been used.

The size and quality of the guns used during the siege also had a significant effect on the outcome. Wellington had none of the problems with inaccuracy and overheating that plagued the old brass guns at Badajoz. Had he been able to bring up the howitzer ammunition, there would probably have been substantially fewer casualties both before and during the assault.

The performance of the engineers tells a different story from the previous two sieges. At Badajoz, the engineers had neither time nor resources to complete their task. At Ciudad Rodrigo they had better guns and more time, although time was still a constraint. Whilst the result was positive, there were some worrying mistakes. Three significant errors were recorded; a battery being placed behind the Renaud redoubt; the guns to attack the convent of San Francisco being too low to see the base of the wall; and the embrasures for the main batteries being misaligned when originally opened. The first error, the misplacing of the battery, was made on the night of 8/9 January, when Ross who was siege director for the night was killed. Burgoyne was strongly critical of the time and effort wasted, writing:

It was placed behind the French redoubt, it was nearly finished, some platforms laid, and we had worked two nights to level the parapet of the redoubt, when it was at length ascertained that not a single gun of the nine could see the object to be fired at.
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He continued: ‘Our Headquarters party have sent home a journal of the siege, in which I presume this battery does not make its appearance – it makes a very ugly one in my journal.’
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Burgoyne and his comrades do not specifically identify who they thought was at fault. Fletcher certainly marked out the batteries previously at Badajoz and it is difficult to believe that he was not present when this, the most vital stage, was being carried out, even if Ross actually did the work. Similarly, the failure to open the embrasures properly occurred after the engineer in command, Lieutenant Skelton, was killed whilst standing on the top of the parapet encouraging the troops to perform the task. His death was unlikely to have helped with the troops’ willingness to expose themselves to French fire. Burgoyne noted that when the batteries originally opened on 14 January, many of the shots were passing over the top of the town. Jones’ published Journal notes Skelton’s death but not the problem with the embrasures. However, his unpublished diary noted ‘the want of [a] qualified … Engineer … to superintend the opening of the embrasures … caused such a delay that the day was lost’.
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This problem was corrected that night and the guns were firing effectively from the following morning.
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The loss of Ross so early in the siege probably had a continuing effect. Ellicombe who replaced him, whilst being a senior officer, had no operational experience. After some years in Ceylon he had been in the UK for the preceding three years. All three errors were avoidable and should have been identified earlier. Whilst Burgoyne is highly critical of the errors, he took no personal responsibility for them, which as one of the siege directors he should have. Ultimately Fletcher must take responsibility as the commanding engineer. None of these errors had a material effect on the timescale or the outcome of the siege, but they must have had some effect on the reputation and confidence of the engineers.

Burgoyne was critical of most elements of the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, even though this was seen as the most successful Allied siege of the war. The Commanding Royal Engineer at the siege, Richard Fletcher, gave high praise to Burgoyne who ‘gave me every assistance, and executed the works under his charge with great zeal and ability’.
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Burgoyne’s initial comments in his diary were quite mild: ‘Our works were certainly not carried on with great expedition’.
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In private letters he was much more critical. He wrote lengthy letters to John Squire and Charles Pasley criticising most aspects of the siege including the preparation (the gabions and fascines were made without proper supervision and too far away, leading to poor quality and delivery problems) and the daily operations (the siting of the batteries and guns, the want of arrangement in bringing up stores and the organisation of the working parties). In a letter to Squire, Burgoyne complained: ‘We go on most miserably, no superintendents, no arrangements, it is said that Wellington objects to give any assistance the Colonel proposes, but I can’t think this would be the case to a man of firmness.’
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In a later letter he wrote: ‘His Lordship can have but little confidence in Colonel Fletcher, as it appears from what we hear that he objects to nearly every proposal made by him … for some reason or other Colonel Fletcher had not influence enough to get the smallest assistance from the army.’
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This appears to be the first suggestion that there was a lack of confidence in Fletcher’s command both amongst his subordinates and Wellington. This is a marked change from what Burgoyne said two years earlier about the relationship between Wellington and Fletcher: ‘He [Wellington] has universally treated Fletcher with the greatest consideration and attention’.
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