Part 53

The weather, which had been fine and serene during the night, grew cloudy towards daybreak, and a thick fog enveloped the horizon till nine o’clock. All the columns marched in silence. At the aspect of the walls, the whole army halted in consternation. Suwarrow exclaimed to those who were near him, “You see those walls; they are very high; but the empress commands us to take possession of them.” He then suddenly fell upon his knees, arose, and marched to the assault, followed by all his army. The Turks did not fire a shot till the Russians were within three or four hundred paces of them, but then saluted them with a shower of _mitrailles_, which did them great injury. They however approached the fosse, in which there was in several places water up to the shoulders, threw in their fascines, planted their ladders against the ramparts, many parts of which were so high that they were obliged to tie two together, although every one was five toises long. As in some places the besiegers did not find this expedient quick enough, they assisted each other with as much vivacity as address, and climbed up the ramparts with the aid of their bayonets. The arquebusiers fired from the edge of the fosse upon the Turks who defended the ramparts, to prevent them from beating back the assailants. The second column, commanded by the Marshal de Lasci, arrived first, but was not assisted with sufficient energy by the first and third. The first had had to overcome a great difficulty: it had met with a chain of strong palisades, which extended to the banks of the Danube. The grenadiers, who were at the extremity of the palisades, rushed against them, one after the other, to turn them; and those most distant from that spot jumped over them. Another fosse was yet to be got over before they reached the ramparts. The Russian grenadiers took possession of the first bastion, and attacked without order the cavalier which was between that work and the second; but in doing so, they lost many men. Kutusow, who had taken the two left polygons on the side of the left bank of the Danube, would have arrived upon the rampart at the same time as the second column, if he had not been obliged to send assistance to the fourth and fifth columns, which had met with a vigorous resistance. The fosse was full of water at the place where these columns were obliged to cross; the men, being up to their middles, soaked their long Cossack clothes, and had great trouble in disengaging themselves from them. They mounted the ladders, but when they came to the ramparts, they could not maintain themselves there; the two columns were thrown back at the same time. They were separated by the gate of Bender; eight or ten thousand Turks made a sortie from that gate, uttering frightful war-cries. Among these were a great number of women armed with poniards. The besieged charged all at once, in all parts; the infantry of the reserve came to the rescue, and made way with their bayonets; the Cossacks, finding themselves supported, repulsed the Turks. Such as could not gain the bridge to re-enter Ismaïl, were cut in pieces or smothered in the fosse. The Russians then made a fresh effort, surmounted all resistance, and established themselves upon the rampart of the bastion which was assigned to them. Kutusow, however, remarked that the two battalions of reserve, although masters of the rampart, could not yet hold out against the enemy; he in consequence sent them a battalion of chasseurs, who enabled them to keep their position. Every bastion having a powder-magazine under the rampart, the conquerors immediately established a strong guard there, in order that the enemy might not be able to set fire to it and blow up the troops. There consequently followed slight actions between the besiegers and the besieged, who still continued to endeavour to introduce themselves there, but they could not succeed; so that no accident happened. Day began to appear, and every one could ascertain his position, which, till that time, had only been indicated by the different war-cries of the two nations. Whilst the Turkish infantry was fighting in the fosses near the Bender gate, a numerous body of cavalry fell upon the camp of the besiegers, where the Cossacks received them with so much vigour, that scarcely any of them returned, and the Bender gate fell into the hands of the Russians.

Whilst the land columns were marching against Ismaïl, other columns were formed upon the Danube. The first, composed of a hundred boats, manned by troops, prepared to make a descent, advanced in two lines, keeping up a continual fire; the second line, consisting of brigantines, floating batteries, double shallops, and _lançons_, followed it. The fire became still more warm as these two lines approached each other. The Turks had on the water side a work of small height, but great strength, furnished with eighty-three cannon of large calibre, fifteen mortars, and a howitzer of six hundred pounds of balls. The fire of the mortars of the second line covered the cannonade of the first; when they had arrived at some hundreds of paces from the shore, the second line divided, and placed itself on the two wings of the first; in this fashion it formed a half-circle. Both sides kept up a warm fire of _mitrailles_, and the combat lasted an hour. But as it was still night, some Russian battalions only suffered, without any vessel being sunk. About seven in the morning the total descent was effected. The Turks had abandoned the few vessels they had left. The resistance was brave and persistent, particularly on this side, which was defended by more than ten thousand Turks. The greater part of these were put to the sword, the rest saved themselves in the _chanas_, or houses solidly built with stone.

At eight o’clock, the Russians were masters of the ramparts on the water side, as well as on that of the land. A terrible conflict then commenced in the interior of the city, in the streets and public places, to which the inhabitants came from all parts. There were skirmishes beyond number, both sides fighting with equal inveteracy. The Turks defended themselves with desperation, maintaining an incessant fire from the windows, particularly in the narrow streets. The Russians swept the larger ones with the fire of twenty field-pieces, to which the Turks, having no cannon but in their chanas, could not respond. There were two thousand Turks in the first chana that was attacked: they made great havoc among the Russians with their artillery. Suwarrow ordered it to be taken, and it was escaladed, in spite of a determined resistance, and, for the first time, during the day some hundreds of prisoners were made; the unfortunate Auduslu Pacha had taken refuge in a still more considerable chana. The combat there lasted more than two hours; cannon were required to batter in the gate. Two thousand of the best Janissaries defended themselves in this place with all the rage of despair; but the Russian grenadiers rushed in the moment there was an opening, with advanced bayonets, and all were cut to pieces, with the exception of a very few hundred prisoners: the pacha was of this number. He came out into the open place; a chasseur perceiving a rich poniard in his girdle, thought it his duty to take it from him. As several Turks still had arms, a Janissary, who was near the seraskier, endeavouring to repulse the chasseur with his sabre, wounded a captain of chasseurs in the face. The Russians instantly charged their bayonets upon all that remained: they massacred the greater part, the brave seraskier being of the number: scarcely a hundred men of his immediate train escaped. Petty conflicts still continued in every place capable of the slightest defence; every post was carried at a heavy expense of blood. The terrible resistance made by the Turks was more like frantic rage than the opposition of trained soldiers; the women even fearlessly encountered the Russians, armed with poniards and other weapons. All the Russian commanders faced danger with heroic courage, and their soldiers as bravely seconded them; the _mêlée_ lasted ten entire hours, without the Russians in the least heeding the superiority of the Turks in number. The city was given up to pillage; thirty-three thousand Ottomans there perished in one day! and ten thousand were made prisoners! A single man had saved himself in a fortified house; he was slightly wounded, but contrived to drop from a window into the Danube, where he was fortunate enough to meet with a plank, by means of which he gained the opposite shore. This man carried the vizier the news of the loss of Ismaïl; there were no less than six sultans among the dead. The Russians lost fifteen thousand men. Suwarrow wrote Prince Potemkin these few words: “_The Russian flag floats over the ramparts of Ismaïl._” He was equally laconic to the empress Catherine II. “_Madame, the haughty Ismaïl is at your feet._” The booty of this city was valued at ten millions of piastres. Inaccessible to every interested view, Suwarrow, according to his custom, abstained from sharing any part of it; satisfied with the harvest of glory he had reaped, he disdained wealth. But he did not, in a similar spirit, respect the rights of humanity; the massacre of thirty-three thousand men in one day, with the murder of women, children, and unarmed soldiers, procured him the name of _Muley_ Ismaïl, in allusion to the barbarous emperor of Morocco, who had borne that name. The empress of Russia caused a medal to be struck to perpetuate the memory of this important conquest. A year after, Ismaïl, which had cost so much blood, was restored to the Turks as a guarantee of the peace between the two powers--and forty-eight thousand human beings had been slaughtered, and countless women and children had perished or been rendered miserable, to secure the conquest of it!

“O, but man, proud man! Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence,--like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep!”

BOMMEL.

A.D. 1599.

If this siege were not interesting on account of its forming part of the noble struggle which rescued the Netherlands from the domination of the Spaniards, it would command our notice from being the time and place when one of the great scientific operations of war was first brought into use.

The Spaniards having penetrated, in 1599, into the island of Bommel, formed by the Wahal, in the duchy of Gueldres, hastened to lay siege to the capital city of that island. Prince Maurice came to its succour, with the greater part of his army. He encamped on the opposite bank of the Wahal, reinforced the garrison with a thousand men, and, with great rapidity, threw two bridges over the river, above and below the besieged city; the first, destined for the infantry, was but a collection of little barks; but the second, for the cavalry, was composed of large pontoons, and was wide enough for the passage of two chariots abreast. Having completed this operation, he ordered three thousand infantry and four hundred horse, whom he charged most particularly with the defence of Bommel, to cross over into the island. This place being too small for such a numerous garrison, it was lodged without, and immediately covered itself with a good intrenchment, well flanked with redoubts, and defended by a wide ditch. This intrenchment furnished the first model of what has since been called the _covered way_.[18] This happy invention contributed much to the failure of the Spanish expedition. They had not yet perfected their intrenchments, when the Dutch artillery, established on the banks of the Wahal, the fire of the armed barks, and that of the place, thundered all at once against their ramparts. The Spaniards, however, after many efforts, succeeded in sheltering themselves from this multiplied tempest; they raised good intrenchments, they placed cannon in battery, and began to assail in earnest both the city and the intrenched camp. The besieged did not oppose a less number of works or less courage to the Spanish attacks. Towards the end of May, the garrison of Bommel fell all at once upon every one of the enemy’s quarters; it might have been supposed that they came to fight a regular battle, and not to clear out trenches or overthrow works. Both sides fought with the greatest resolution; but at length the resistance of the Spaniards disheartened the Dutch, and they retreated after a contest of three hours. They returned to the charge the following night, persuaded that they should surprise the besiegers. They succeeded in the first moments; but the Spaniards having recovered themselves, the Dutch were obliged to abandon their attack. Three days after, they perseveringly made fresh efforts, which proved likewise unfortunate. Fatigued with their endeavours to overcome so many obstacles and such obstinate enemies, the Spaniards, finding they made no considerable progress, determined to raise the siege towards the end of June, after having lost two thousand men.

BARCELONA.

A.D. 1705.

However unimportant it may appear in the vast page of history, no English account of sieges can be complete without a notice of that of Barcelona, in which he who may be called the last of our knights maintained so nobly that British good faith which we claim as our proudest characteristic.

In 1705, the earl of Peterborough commanded the army of the Archduke Charles, competitor with Philip V., the grandson of Louis XIV., in conjunction with the prince of Darmstadt. The siege was dragged on to a great length, and Peterborough was thinking of re-embarking his English soldiers, when he learnt that the prince of Darmstadt had been killed in carrying the intrenchments which covered Mount Joire and the city. A few days after, a bomb burst in the fort over the powder-magazine; the fort was taken, and the city consented to capitulate. The viceroy was conferring with Peterborough at the city gates, and the articles were not yet signed, when, on a sudden, cries and screams of distress were heard in the city: “You are betraying us!” exclaimed the viceroy; “we are capitulating loyally, and there are your English, who have entered the city by the ramparts, slaughtering, pillaging, and violating.” “You are mistaken,” replied Peterborough, “it must be the troops of the prince of Darmstadt. There is only one means of saving your city; let me enter the place at once with my English; I will make all quiet, and will then return to the gate, to complete the capitulation.” The tone with which he spoke this convinced the Spanish governor of his good faith, and he was allowed to enter Barcelona with his officers. As he expected, he found the Germans and Catalans sacking the houses of the principal citizens; he made them abandon their prey, and drove them out. Among the victims about to be sacrificed to the lust of the soldiery was the duchess of Popoli; he extricated her from the hands of the ruffians, and restored her to her husband. When the tumult was appeased, he returned to the gate and terminated the capitulation, offering a fine example of observance of his word given to a conquered enemy.

Lord Peterborough was certainly more an eccentric man than a great one, and yet, like Don Quixote’s, many of his eccentricities had a strong leaning to the side of greatness. Plutarch would have made a fine story of the above anecdote; it belongs to the character of the real hero, of whom, though abounding in great soldiers, modern history contains so few.

To show the importance of such a trait to the reputation of a nation, we have only to observe with what high praise the historians of other countries mention this act of simple good faith.

GIBRALTAR.

A.D. 1779–1783.

As in the history of mankind there are some persons so remarkable and universally known as to make a notice of them almost a work of supererogation, so there are events, which, from the interest they have excited, and the consequences that have attended them, demand, in a work of this description, a much less detailed account than others of less importance: they have created deep and widely-spread excitement during their enactment, and have produced historians worthy to commemorate them. And such is the siege of Gibraltar. This stupendous rock has now remained in the hands of the British one hundred and fifty years! We can only judge of the anomaly of this circumstance by bringing it home by comparison. Suppose the Spaniards, in their zeal for religion, had determined to seize upon the rocky point of the Land’s End, in Cornwall, or the Isle of Anglesea, in Wales, to facilitate their intercourse with Catholic Ireland, this would have been with them quite as legitimate an object as our trade with the Levant is to us. And yet we hold it, in spite of all the hostile efforts of the Spaniards to retake it; and what is still more strange, in spite of treaties of peace, at which such chance acquisitions are generally restored to the right owner. In the same manner the British held Calais, a French town, from the reign of Edward III., 1346, to that of Henry II. of France and Mary of England, when it was taken by surprise by the duke of Guise in 1557. As may be naturally supposed, the proud Spaniards have not quietly submitted to such a disgrace as that of having an inseparable portion of their country held by a foreign and frequently rival power: they have made several efforts to regain it, the most conspicuous of which comes within the scope of this work.

But, as we said above, the history of this siege has been so well written and is so generally known, that Drinkwater has placed it in the same position as Homer has that of Troy;--we could not pass it by, but yet we are not called upon to be particular in our account of it: the world does not stand in need of our history; it has one, better than any we could produce. Gibraltar was one of the fruits of the War of Succession: England took up arms to keep a Bourbon from the throne of Spain, and, during the conflict, an enterprising admiral, Sir George Rooke, added this gem to her crown. There are politicians who think the retention more a point of honour than a real advantage, but such discussions are not within our limits.

The war of 1762 did not present a favourable opportunity for retaking Gibraltar; Chatham was too vigorous a minister to allow a chance of such a loss; but England being at war with her colonies and with France, encouraged Spain, in 1779, to come to a rupture with her, for the well-understood purpose of attempting the great object of the national wish. That this was so, was rendered plain by preparations to cut off the African supplies of provisions to the rock, before war had actually taken place.

Gibraltar is situated in Andalusia, the most southern province of Spain. The rock is seven miles in circumference, running out into the sea in the form of a promontory of more than three miles in length, and is joined to the continent by an isthmus of low sand. The promontory, or rock, at the foot of which stands the town, is upwards of one thousand three hundred feet in height, and appears to have been formerly surrounded by the sea. The breadth of the isthmus at the foot of the rock is about nine hundred yards, but grows much wider as it approaches the country. Across this isthmus, at about a mile’s distance from the garrison, the Spaniards have drawn up a fortified line, extending one thousand seven hundred yards, and embracing both shores, with a strong fort of masonry at each end. That both parties, under such extraordinary circumstances, should exhaust art in their means of defence, and be always on the watch against surprise, we may readily imagine; but what gives the garrison a great advantage in this respect is its commanding height, from which it can see everything that approaches it, by either land or sea. Thus in the whole of this long siege, they appear to have been able to ascertain all that was going on in the enemy’s camp, and to descry every hostile vessel in time to be prepared for it.

Until we come to the great _finale_, this siege was little more than a blockade, and that imperfect. And yet, with the exception of the “Iliad,” we know of none that is so interesting. Drinkwater’s account has exactly the same charm as Robinson Crusoe’s journal; the events are so minute, and brought so completely home to the apprehension of the reader by the plain and graphic style of the author, that you forget it is an awful reality, and enjoy it as you would a fiction. But such a narrative we cannot adopt into our pages: to transfer it wholly would be dishonest towards a fine work; to garble it would not redound to our credit.

When the re-capture of this member of their own country was undertaken, as there was much difficulty, there was proportionate glory in the enterprise, and the eyes of all Europe were turned towards the Herculean straits. Every exertion was made by Spain--neither labour, money, nor blood was spared. The valour of her troops was ably directed by her generals, and persistently exercised through length of time and difficulties of obstacles enough to cool the ardour of the most devoted partisans. But in addition to the immense advantage of situation, upon a lofty impregnable rock, open to almost constant succour by sea, the British garrison had the still further good fortune of being commanded by a governor most admirably suited to the post. As you read the details of this memorable siege, you cannot help being struck with the idea that General Elliott’s government was a parental one. Never-flinching courage, sleepless watchfulness, consummate prudence, and far-discerning foresight, were joined in him to a kindliness of heart and an urbanity of manners, that made all he required from the troops and officers he was placed over a labour of love. And yet his _bonhomie_ did not overcome his judgment; though never severe, he was never falsely indulgent; he could punish when he was called upon to do so for the public good, as readily, though not as willingly, as he could encourage merit or devotedness by promotion or reward. It may be asserted that Elliott was never so placed as to display the genius of a great commander: but this we deny. In a difficult, isolated position, he was in no instance at a loss; no danger approached him that he was not prepared to meet, and no opportunity for gaining an advantage offered itself that he did not seize.

The two points were,--for the English, the rock, town, and fortress of Gibraltar; for the Spaniards and French, Algeziras, a town situated on the other side of the bay, five and a half miles from Gibraltar. Algeziras had been a city of great importance, and in the middle of the fourteenth century was wrested by Alonzo XI., king of Castile, from the hands of the Moors. This appears to have been a kind of crusade, and one in which the English chivalry took a prominent part; John of Gaunt, and the earls of Derby, Leicester, Salisbury, and Lincoln, all being present. It is likewise said that cannon were first used by the Moors in this siege against their assailants, and were adopted by the English, two years after, at the battle of Crecy, from observing the powerful effects of them. The Spaniards had the great advantage of being masters of the country behind and around them; and though the English had a small naval force in their port, they never had sufficient to prevent constant annoyances from the gun and bomb-boats of Algeziras. Many an anticipated succour, in a vessel which was viewed with delight from the rock, was cut off by the Spanish boats, and carried into Algeziras before the eyes of the disappointed garrison.