The Spanish Bride Read Free Page B

to carry the town by storming the breaches, no less than five secondary attacks were to be made. The trench-guards were to try to rush the San Roque lunette; old Picton was to make an attempt to take the Castle by escalade (a very forlorn hope, this: not at all likely to succeed); Power’s brigade of Portuguese was going to threaten the bridge-head beyond the Guadiana, on the opposite side of the town to the damaged bastions; the Portuguese troops belonging to Leith’s 5th division were to make a false attack on the strong Pardeleras fort; and—a last-minute decision, this—the rest of Leith’s division was to brave the mines which had been laid outside the eastern walls of the town, and try to force the river-bastion of San Vincente.
    These five secondary attacks, timed to begin simultaneously with the main attack, were not expected to succeed, but to distract the defenders’ attention from the breaches. The approach to these, from the camping grounds of the Light and 4th divisions, lay between the Rivillas river, with its spreading inundation, on the right, and a quarry cut in rising ground to the left. It was preconcerted that the 4th division was to keep nearest to the water, and, upon reaching the ditch dug round Badajos, to swerve to the right, and to assail the breaches in the curtain-wall, and in La Trinidad. The Light division was to strike westwards to attack the breach in the flank of the Santa Maria bastion. Each division was to provide an advance of five hundred men, accompanied by several parties carrying haybags and ladders. These were to facilitate not only the storming of the breaches, but the descent into the ditch, which was reported to be as much as fourteen feet deep. There was no lack of volunteers for the forlorn hope: the only difficulty lay in selecting from the eager crowd of warriors clamouring each one to be the first to assail the walls, the fittest persons for the task. The British army, hating the trench-work it had been forced to do, irked by the fire from Badajos, and depressed by the soggy condition of the ground, desired nothing better than to come to grips with the enemy. Nor had the army any objection to coming to grips with the Spanish residents, held within the walls. Since Talavera, when the Spanish General Cuesta had abandoned the British wounded left in his charge to the French (who, if the truth were but known, had treated them with far more consideration than their Spanish allies had done), Lord Wellington’s soldiers had added loathing to the contempt they already felt for the Spanish. If Badajos fell at the end of this third siege, the inhabitants need not look for mercy at the hands of its conquerors. Not only had Lord Wellington’s men a grudge against the Spaniards, but they were further incensed by the knowledge that the inhabitants of Badajos had yielded very tamely to the French. If a besieged city surrendered at discretion, it might look for clemency; God help it if it resisted to the end! for then, by all the rules of war, it belonged to the victors to sack and pillage as they chose.
    The officers knew what kind of temper the men were in. “They’ll regret it, if they hold out,’ said Cadoux, in his soft finicking way, admiring a ring on his finger, anxiously smoothing a crease from his smart green pelisse. He flickered a glance, a whimsical, mocking glance, under his long lashes at Brigade-Major Smith. ‘I’m afraid it will be a very bloody business,” he sighed: ‘Do you think I should wear my new coat, Smith? It would be dreadful if it got spoiled. Isn’t it a damned bore, this horrid assault?’
    Harry could not bear Daniel Cadoux. There was just the suggestion of a lisp in Cadoux’s speech. Harry said that he assumed it. He said that Cadoux, with his dandified dress, and his pretty jewellery, made him feel sick. He could not imagine why Cadoux had ever joined the army, much less the Rifles; or how it was that he could induce his men to follow him.