The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (235 page)

But at about the same time the men of the Fourth Division and of the Light Division had played a great and tragic part in the storming of Badajoz. They moved against the great breach in stealthy silence. All was dark and quiet as they reached the glacis. They hurled bags full of hay in the ditch, placed their ladders, and the storming parties of the Light Division, five hundred men in all, hurried to this desperate attack.

But the French general had perfectly understood that the main attacks would be made at his three breaches, and he had made the great breach the most impregnable part of his line. The English troops, certain that they had surprised the enemy, were suddenly exposed by dozens of brilliant lights. Above them they could see the ramparts crowded with the French. These fire-balls made such a vivid picture that the besieged and besiegers could gaze upon one another’s faces at distances which amounted to nothing. There was a moment of this brilliance, and then a terrific explosion shattered the air. Hundreds of shells and powder-barrels went off together, and the English already in the ditch were literally blown to pieces. Still their comrades crowded after them with no definite hesitation. The French commander had taken the precaution to fill part of the ditch with water from the inundation, and in it one hundred fusiliers, men of Albuera, were drowned.

The Fourth Division and the Light Division continued the attack upon the breach. Across the top of it was a row of sword-blades fitted into ponderous planks, and these planks, chained together, were let deep into the ground. In front of them the slope was covered with loose planks studded with sharp iron points. The English, stepping on them, rolled howling backward, and the French yelled and fired unceasingly.

It was too late for the English to become aware of the hopelessness of their undertaking. Column after column hurled themselves forward. Young Colonel Macleod, of the Forty-third Foot (now the First Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry), a mere delicate boy, gathered his men again and again and led them at the breach. A falling soldier behind him plunged a bayonet in his back, but still he kept on till he was shot dead within a yard of the line of sword-blades.

For two hours the besiegers were tirelessly striving to achieve the impossible, while the French taunted them from the ramparts.

“Why do you not come into Badajoz?”

Meanwhile, Captain Nicholas of the Engineers, with Lieutenant Shaw and about one hundred men of the Forty-third Foot, actually had passed through the breach of the Santa Maria bastion, but once inside they were met with such a fire that nearly every man dropped dead. Shaw returned almost alone.

Wellington, who had listened to these desperate assaults and watched them as well as he was able from a position on a small knoll, gave orders at midnight for the troops to retire and re-form. Two thousand men had been slain. Dead and mangled bodies were piled in heaps at the entrance to the great breach, and the stench of burning flesh and hair was said to be insupportable.

And still, in the meantime, General Walker’s brigade had made a feint against Pardaleras and passed on to the bastion of San Vincente. Here for a time everything went wrong. The fire of the French was frightfully accurate and concentrated. General Walker himself simply dripped blood; he was a mass of wounds. His ladders were all found to be too short. The walls of the fortress were thirty feet in height. However, through some lack of staying power in the French, success at last crowned the attack. One man clambered somehow to the top of a wall and pulled up others, until about half of the Fourth Foot (now the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment) were fairly into the town. Walker’s men took three bastions. General Picton, severely wounded, had not dared to risk losing the Castle, but now, hearing the tumult of Walker’s success, he sent his men forth and thousands went swarming through the town. Phillipon saw that all was lost, and retreated with afew hundred men to San Christoval. He surrendered next morning to Lord Fitzroy Somerset.

The English now occupied the town. With their comrades lying stark, or perhaps in frightful torment, in the fields beyond the walls of Badajoz, these soldiers, who had so heroically won this immortal victory, became the most abandoned drunken wretches and maniacs. Crazed privates stood at the corners of streets and shot every one in sight. Everywhere were soldiers dressed in the garb of monks, of gentlemen at court, or mayhap wound about with gorgeous ribbons and laces. Jewels and plate, silks and satins, all suffered a wanton destruction. Napier writes of “shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder, shrieks and piteous lamentations.”

He further says that the horrible tumult was never quelled. It subsided through the weariness of the soldiers. One wishes to inquire why the man who was ultimately called the Iron Duke did not try to stop this shocking business. But one remembers that Wellington was a wise man, and he did not try to stop this shocking business because he knew that his soldiers were out of control, and that if he tried he would fail.

THE
BRIEF
CAMPAIGN
AGAINST
NEW
ORLEANS

(December 14, 1814 - January 8, 1815)

THE Mississippi, broad, rapid, and sinister, ceaselessly flogging its enwearied banks, was the last great legend of the dreaming times when the Old World’s information of the arisen continents was roseate but inaccurate. England, at war with the United States, heard stories of golden sands, bejewelled temples, fabulous silks, the splendour of a majestic barbarian civilisation; and even if these tales were fantastic they stood well enough as symbols of the spinal importance of the grim Father of Waters.

The English put together a great expedition. It was the most formidable that ever had been directed against the Americans. It assembled in a Jamaican harbour and at Pensacola, then a Spanish port and technically neutral. The troops numbered about fourteen thousand men and included some of the best regiments in the British army, fresh from service in the Peninsula under Wellington. They were certainly not men who had formed a habit of being beaten. Included in the expedition was a full set of civilian officials for the government of New Orleans after its capture.

A hundred and ten miles from the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans lay trembling. She had no forts or entrenchments; she would be at the mercy of the powerful British force. The people believed that the city would be sacked and burned. They were not altogether a race full of vigour. The peril of the situation bewildered them; it did not stir them to action.

But the spirit of energy itself arrived in the person of Andrew Jackson. Since the Creek War, the nation had had much confidence in Jackson, and New Orleans welcomed him with a great sigh of relief.

The sallow, gnarled, crusty man came ill to his great work; he should have been in bed. But the amount of vim he worked into a rather flabby community in a short time looked like a miracle. The militia of Louisiana were called out; the free negroes were armed and drilled; convicts whose terms had nearly expired were enlisted; and down from Tennessee tramped the type of man that one always pictures as winning the battle — the long, lank woodsman, brown as leather, hard as nails, inseparable from his rifle, in his head the eye of a hawk.

The Lafitte brothers, famous pirates, whose stronghold was not a thousand miles from the city, threw in their lot with the Americans. The British bid for their services, but either the British committed the indiscretion of not bidding enough or the buccaneers were men of sentiment. At any rate they accepted the American pledge of immunity and came with their men to the American side, where they rendered great service. Afterwards the English, their offer of treasure repulsed, somewhat severely reproved us for allowing these men to serve in our ranks.

Martial law was proclaimed, and Jackson kept up an exciting quarrel with the city authorities at the same time that he was working his strange army night and day in the trenches. Captain John Coffee with two thousand men joined from Mobile.

The British war-ships first attempted to cross the sand-bars at the mouth of the river and ascend the stream, but the swift Mississippi came to meet them, and it was as if this monster, immeasurable in power, knew that he must defend himself. The well-handled war-ships could not dodge this simple strength; even the wind refused its help. The river won the first action.

But if the British could not ascend the stream, they could destroy the small American gunboats on the lakes below the city, and this they did on December 14 with a rather painful thoroughness. The British were then free to land their troops on the shores of these lakes and attempt to approach the city through miles of dismal and sweating swamps. The decisive word seems to have rested with Major-General Keane. Sir George Pakenham, the commander-in-chief, had not yet arrived. One of Wellington’s proud veterans was not likely to endure any nonsensical delay over such a business as this campaign against a simple people who had not had the art of war hammered into their heads by a Napoleon. Moreover, the army was impatient. Some of the troops had been with Lord Ross in the taking of Washington, and they predicted something easier than that very easy campaign. Everybody was completely cock-sure.

On the afternoon of December 23, Major-General Gabrielle Villeré, one of the gaudy Creole soldiers, came to see Jackson at headquarters, and announced that about two thousand British had landed on the Villeré plantation, nine miles below the city. Jackson was still feeble, but this news warmed the old passion in him. He pounded the table with his fist. “By the Eternal!” he cried, “they shall not sleep on our soil!” All well-regulated authorities make Jackson use this phrase—”By the Eternal!” — and any reference to him hardly would be intelligible unless one quoted the familiar line. I suppose we should not haggle over the matter; historically one oath is as good as another.

Marching orders were issued to the troops, and the armed schooner
Carolina
was ordered to drop down the river and open fire upon the British at
7.50 in
the evening. In the meantime, Jackson reviewed his troops as they took the road. He was not a good-natured man; indeed, he is one of the most irascible figures in history. But he knew how to speak straight as a stick to the common man. Each corps received some special word of advice and encouragement.

This review was quaint. Some of the Creole officers were very gorgeous, but perhaps they only served to emphasise the wildly unmilitary aspect of the procession generally. But the woodsmen were there with their rifles, and if the British had beaten Napoleon’s marshals, the woodsmen had conquered the forests and the mountains, and they too did not understand that they could be whipped.

The first detachment of British troops had come by boat through Lake Borgne and then made a wretched march through the swamps. Both officers and men were in sorry plight. They had been exposed for days to the fury of tropical rains, and for nights to bitter frosts, without gaining even an opportunity to dry their clothes. But December 23 was a clear day lit by a mildly warm sun. Arriving at Villeré’s plantation on the river bank, the troops built huge fires and then raided the country as far as they dared, gathering a great treasure of “fowls and hams and wine.” The feast was merry. The veteran soldier of that day had a grand stomach, and he made a deep inroad into Louisiana’s store of “fowls and hams and wine.”

As they lay comfortably about their fires in the evening some sharp eye detected by the faint light of the moon a moving shadowy vessel on the river. She was approaching. An officer mounted the levee and hailed her. There was no answer. He hailed again. The silent vessel calmly furled her sails and swung her broadside parallel. Then a voice shouted, and a whistling shower of grape-shot tore the air. It was the little
Carolina.

The British forces flattened themselves in the shelter of the levee and listened to the grape-shot go ploughing over their heads. But they had not been long in this awkward position when there was a yell and a blare of flame in the darkness. Some of Jackson’s troops had come.

Then ensued a strange conflict. The moon, tender lady of the night, hid while around the dying fires two forces of infuriated men shot, stabbed, and cut. One remembers grimly Jackson’s sentence—”They shall not sleep on our soil.” No; they were kept awake this night at least.

There was no concerted action on either side. An officer gathered a handful of men and by his voice led them through the darkness at the enemy. If such valour and ferocity had been introduced into the insipid campaigns of the North, the introduction would have made overwhelming victory for one people or the other. Dawn displayed the terrors of the fighting in the night. In some cases an American and an English soldier lay dead, each with his bayonet sheathed in the other’s body.

Bayonets were rare in the American ranks, but many men carried long hunting knives.

As a matter of fact, the two forces had been locked in a blind and desperate embrace. The British reported a loss of forty-six killed, one hundred and sixty-seven wounded, and sixty-four missing. In this engagement the Americans suffered more severely than in any other action of the short campaign.

On the morning of December 24, Sir George Pakenham arrived with a strong reinforcement of men and guns. Pakenham was a brother-in-law of Wellington. He had served in the Peninsula and was accounted a fine leader. The American schooners
Carolina
and
Louisiana
lay at anchor in the river firing continually upon the British camp. Pakenham caused a battery to be planted which quickly made short work of these vessels.

During the days following the two armies met in several encounters which were fiery but indecisive. One of these meetings is called the Battle of the Bales and Hogsheads.

Jackson employed cotton-bales in strengthening a position, and one night the British advanced and built a redoubt chiefly of hogsheads containing sugar and molasses. The cotton suffered considerably from the British artillery, often igniting and capable of being easily rolled out of place, but the sugar and molasses behaved very badly. The hogsheads were easily penetrated, and they soon began to distribute sugar and molasses over the luckless warriors in the redoubt, so that British soldiers died while mingling their blood with molasses, and with sugar sprinkling down upon their wounds.

Although neither side had gained a particular advantage, the British were obliged to retire. They had been the first disciplined troops to engage molasses, and they were glad to emerge from the redoubt, this bedraggled, sticky, and astonished body of men.

On the opposite bank of the river a battery to rake the British encampment had been placed by Commander Patterson. This battery caused Pakenham much annoyance, and he engaged it severely with his guns, but at the end of an hour he had to cease firing with a loss of seventy men and his emplacements almost in ruins. The damage to the American works was slight, but they had lost thirty-six in killed and disabled.

Both sides now came to a period of fateful thought. In the beginning the British had spoken of a feeble people who at first would offer a resistance of pretence, but soon subside before the victorious colours of the British regiments. Now they knew that they were face to face with determined and skilful fighters who would dauntlessly front any British regiment whose colours had ever hung in glory in a cathedral of old England. The Americans had thought to sweep the British into the Gulf of Mexico. But now they knew that although their foes floundered and blundered, — although they displayed that curious stern-lipped stupidity which is the puzzle of many nations, — they were still the veterans of the Peninsula, the stout, undismayed troops of Wellington.

Jackson moved his line fifty yards back from his cotton-bale position. Here he built a defensive work on the northern brink of an old saw-mill race known as the Rodriguez Canal. The line of defence was a mile in length. It began on the river bank and ended in a swamp where, during the battle, the Americans stood knee-deep in mud or on floating planks and logs moored to the trees. The main defences of the position were built of earth, logs, and fence-rails in some places twenty feet thick. It barred the way to New Orleans.

The Americans were prepared for the critical engagement some days before Pakenham had completed his arrangements. The Americans spent the interval in making grape-shot out of bar-lead, and in mending whatever points in their line needed care and work.

Pakenham’s final plan was surprisingly simple, and perhaps it was surprisingly bad. He decided to send a heavy force across the river to attack Patterson’s annoying battery simultaneously with the deliverance of the main attack against Jackson’s position along the line of the Rodriguez Canal. Why Pakenham decided to make the two attacks simultaneously is not quite clear at this day. Patterson’s force, divided by the brutally swift river from the main body of the Americans, might have been considered with much reason a detached body of troops, and Pakenham might have eaten them at his leisure while at the same time keeping up a great show in front of Jackson, so that the latter would consider that something serious was imminent at the main position.