Chapter XXXII: Section XXVIII: Chapter II (2)

Suchet, freed from a dire responsibility by the disappearance of the army of succour on the night of the 24th, resolved to hurry matters, lest it should presently come forward again in greater strength. On the following day the siege troops pushed forward by zigzag approaches to within 150 yards of the wall of the upper city, and commenced a second parallel in front of the curtain between San Juan and San Pablo. This was done under a hot and effective fire which cost many lives; the completion of the projected batteries, and more especially the hauling of their cannon up steep slopes and among ruins, took more time than the engineer officers had calculated to be necessary. It was not till the morning of the 28th that the twenty-two heavy guns destined for the breaching had been got into place, and that the fire was opened.

These three days, the 25th-26th-27th of June, were a time of agony for the unfortunate Contreras, who was distracted from his primary duty of preparing to receive the assault by having to deal with Campoverde’s plot for deposing him, and other problems. The most important of these was the arrival in the roadstead on the 26th of a flotilla, which brought not only some small reinforcements from Valencia and Murcia, but about 1,100 British infantry[655] and a half-company of artillery under Colonel Skerret. This little force had been sent by General Graham from Cadiz at the desire of the Regency, which was seeking in all quarters for help for Tarragona. Colonel Skerret had Graham’s orders to do everything that could be done for the place, short of placing his detachment in any position where it was exposed to serious danger of having to capitulate, i. e. he was forbidden to land it if he should think Tarragona untenable, unless he judged himself able to bring off the troops by sea in the moment of disaster. On the morning of his arrival the weather was so rough that no boat could get in to the shore, and communication with Contreras was opened up by a sailor who swam ashore with a letter. The governor thus found himself offered the aid of the British force if he would guarantee that it would be able to escape should the town fall--a most hampering condition. In the evening, the surf having somewhat abated, Colonel Skerret came ashore, and was joined next morning by an engineer and an artillery officer, as also by General Charles Doyle, and by Codrington, the commander of the British squadron off the Catalonian coast. They conferred with Contreras, who told them that he feared the town was untenable, and that he intended, when the walls should be breached, not to make a prolonged defence, but to sally out of the Barcelona gate, and to try to cut his way to join Campoverde. He thought that the sortie must succeed, since the French would be intent on a storm on the western side of the fortress, and would never expect an attack to be delivered at the same moment from its eastern side. He therefore invited Skerret to land his 1,200 men and take part in the enterprise. But if he preferred to join him in withstanding the approaching storm by the French, he might choose whatever point he liked in the enceinte, and defend it. It is clear that at this moment the governor was himself hesitating between the two alternatives, and that it relieved his mind to throw the responsibility of choice on Skerret.

[655] The troops were the 2/47th, a detachment of the 3/95th, and
some light companies lent by the governor of Gibraltar, 1,147
in all, counting the gunners. See Graham’s dispatches to Lord
Liverpool and to Colonel Skerret of June 14th, 1811.

The British officers, military and naval, spent the afternoon in going round the city. They agreed with Contreras that the wall was weak and likely to be breached without much difficulty. This being so, was it consistent with Graham’s directions to land the troops? The sortie might fail, and the garrison, Spanish and English, might be driven back into the town and captured. A defence of the breach might also fail, and in that case it would be almost impossible to get off the troops by sea, since if Skerret’s own single boat had had the greatest difficulty in coming ashore in the surf, it was certain that many boats, hastily manned and crammed with soldiers, and escaping under the fire of the pursuing French, would come to grief on a large scale. Skerret and Codrington, after much consultation, resolved that they dared not bring the British troops ashore, for they could not guarantee that the men could be taken away again. They therefore refused both of Contreras’s alternative offers. Just at this moment Baron Eroles arrived from Campoverde, with an appeal to Skerret to land at Villanueva de Sitjes and join the ‘army of succour.’ With Codrington’s approval the colonel consented to do so[656], and set sail northward early in the morning of the 28th. It cannot be disputed that this whole business was most unhappy in its results. That a British force should appear in the roadstead for 36 hours, and then depart without landing a man, appeared to the garrison of Tarragona to prove that their own condition was hopeless. If there had been a reasonable hope of defending the town successfully, as they argued, the British would have come ashore. Their departure caused deep discouragement, and Contreras was no doubt right in stating that next after Campoverde’s conduct that of Skerret was the most active cause of the demoralization which the garrison showed on the next day. It would have been far better that the expedition should never have appeared. Yet it is hard to blame Skerret or his adviser, Codrington. They had Graham’s orders that the men were not to be placed in a position where they might have to capitulate, and it could not be disputed that Tarragona on June 27th was such a position[657]. It would have been better not to tie Skerret’s hands by any conditions, and to leave him free to act as he thought best for the interest of Great Britain and Spain. The addition of 1,100 steady infantry to the force defending the breaches might very possibly have wrecked Suchet’s assault; even if their effort had failed, the loss of two battalions would have been a lesser shock to British prestige in eastern Spain than their withdrawal into ignominious safety at the moment of danger.

[656] That this represents pretty accurately what happened is, I
think, clear from the comparison of Codrington’s very full letter
to General Graham (see his _Life_, i. 225), Skerret’s report
to Graham and the Regency (printed in Arteche, ix. pp. 544-5),
and Contreras’s own narrative of the siege. This version, as it
will be seen, differs from that of Napier, who is much harder
on Skerret than he deserves--though the colonel was an unlucky
officer and distrusted by his subordinates (see e. g. Sir Harry
Smith’s autobiography, i. pp. 118-19).

[657] The critical phrase of Graham’s instructions to Skerret
was: ‘You will before landing your detachment state to the
governor that you must have at all times free and open
communication with his Majesty’s ships of war: and in the event
of the place being under the necessity of surrendering, that you
are at liberty to withdraw the troops on board the said ships
previous to the capitulation.’ The orders are dated June 14.

Contreras spent the few hours that remained to him after Skerret’s departure in hesitation between the idea of cutting his way out of Tarragona along the eastern road, and that of defending the town to the last possible moment. He finally resolved that he would hold the walls for one day only, and would evacuate the city on the night of the 28th, if the French had made any impression during the first twenty-four hours of the bombardment. The main body of the garrison, divided into three columns, was to make its exit from the Rosario gate, while 1,400 men remained to hold the walls as long as they could, with orders to save themselves if possible and follow the rest when the enemy should break in. Officers and men alike were informed of this, and had their destined positions in the sortie explained to them. It seems likely that the knowledge that they were intended to abscond in a few hours made the troops less obstinate in their defence when the assault came. But meanwhile Contreras made proper preparation for holding back the enemy till the destined time of departure. He told off his best regiments to the exposed front, and constructed a second line of defence behind it, by barricading and loopholing the houses of the Rambla, the broad street above the enceinte, and by blocking the narrow lanes which lead up to it with barrels filled with stones, so that from wall to wall there was a continuous inner fortification. But all this was a temporary arrangement--the garrison was to hold out till night only, and then escape by a great sortie.

Unfortunately the sortie was never made--for Suchet pushed matters so fast that the bombardment and the assault were all over in twelve hours. The twenty-two guns in the breaching batteries opened at dawn, and soon began to damage the weak old walls in the most effective style. The French had originally intended to make two breaches, one to the left in the curtain near the San Pablo bastion, the other to the right nearer the bastion of San Juan. But finding the latter hard to complete owing to the misdirection of one of his batteries, Suchet had the whole force of the battering turned on to the spot nearer to San Pablo, which he regarded as most favourable for his purpose. By four o’clock in the afternoon there was a breach over 30 feet broad at this point, all the guns in the adjacent flanks of the two bastions had been silenced, and nearly all those along the whole front. The explosion of a powder magazine had completely wrecked the Cervantes bastion at the other end of the Spanish line. Notwithstanding that the musketry fire of the garrison was still unsubdued, and that the breach was not very wide, Suchet determined to risk all, by assaulting the place in the later hours of the long summer afternoon. Three columns, each composed of 400 men of the _compagnies d’élite_ of various regiments, were sent forward into the advanced trenches: 1,200 men more under General Habert crept up to the shelter of the front houses of the lower city. A separate force of five battalions under General Montmarie marched outside the walls, and placed itself in the low ground facing the Rosario gate, but out of gunshot. This column was to advance towards that gate if the assault succeeded, and was to be admitted by the stormers, if they won their way into the north-west angle of the upper city, just behind the breach, from which the gate was not far distant.

At five o’clock the three storming-columns burst out from three separate points of the trenches and raced for the breach, which they reached by no means simultaneously, for two of them were somewhat hindered by the aloe hedge below the wall, which had not been entirely broken down by the bombardment. They received a tremendous musketry fire from the whole front, but only three guns in the left side of the San Juan bastion plied them with grape: the rest of the Spanish artillery had been dismounted or disabled. Contreras had filled the breach with the remains of the two battalions of Provincial Grenadiers of Castile, a corps which had been serving with credit in Catalonia since the autumn of 1808; in support was the regiment of Almeria, also reckoned a good unit. The important retrenchment in the Rambla was held by the regiment of Almanza; of the rest of his force there was a less proportion along the front of attack, and a greater proportion placed on the unassailed south and north flanks of the city than was wise. Troops should have been heaped unsparingly upon the breach.

The first French column that reached its destination came on in some disorder, got half-way up the crumbling débris on the breach, and recoiled under the musketry fire from its crest. But when the others arrived, and General Habert and a crowd of other officers put themselves at the head of the mass, and led a second assault, it was successful. The stormers rolled over the summit of the breach and trampled down the Provincial Grenadiers. The regiment of Almeria, which had been placed behind in column, with orders to charge the enemy with the bayonet the moment that he broke through, gave way--according to Contreras--without carrying out his command. The main body of the French then swept down into the street behind the breach, but some turned to their left to try to open the Rosario gate to Montmarie, and others made to their right and swept the ramparts as far as the Cervantes bastion. The Spaniards had rallied at the retrenchments along the line of the Rambla, and made here a better defence than on the far more tenable walls. The assault had succeeded in half an hour[658]--the street-fighting which followed was prolonged and bitter. But when the French reserves arrived and entered the upper city, the barricaded street was passed, the Rosario gate was burst open, so that Montmarie’s column got in upon the Spanish flank, and the resistance went to pieces. Contreras, manfully trying to bring up a battalion of Savoia, his last intact regiment, for a charge, was bayoneted and taken prisoner. One of the divisional generals, Courten, bethinking himself of the proposed sortie that was to have taken place that evening, led out a disorderly remnant of 3,000 men by the Barcelona gate, and tried to escape along the seashore. They had not got far when they ran into one of Harispe’s Italian brigades and some squadrons of _chasseurs à cheval_, which had been set to watch this obvious bolt-hole. When checked, some of the demoralized troops tried to turn back towards the city, others dispersed and strove to get away across the hills, some hundreds stripped, and endeavoured to swim out to the British ships, which were lying in the Milagro roadstead[659]. A fair number of these were saved by the boats of the _Blake_ and her consorts, which ran inshore to pick them up. But many more were cut down by the French cavalry on the beach, and it was some time before the excited riders would give quarter, and accepted the surrender of Courten and the survivors. General Velasco, the second-in-command in the city, had the luck to escape across the mountains almost alone, and brought the bad news to Campoverde.

[658] Codrington, looking on from his ship, says that the storm
succeeded ‘almost immediately,’ and that ‘from the rapidity with
which they [the French] entered, I fear they met with but little
opposition.’ (_Life_, i. 227.) This is borne out by Contreras’s
narrative.

[659] For details of this sally see Codrington’s letter of July
29 in his _Life_, i. p. 228.

While this ineffective attempt at a sally was in progress, the street-fighting in the city above was still going on. Isolated bodies of the Spaniards made a most desperate resistance: Colonel Gonzales, the brother of Campoverde, attempted to hold out in the cathedral with 300 men, but was killed with all followers after a brave resistance. The fact that many small parties defended themselves for a time in barricaded private houses gave the French an excuse for something that almost amounted to the systematic massacre of non-combatants. All the larger dwellings were broken open, whether shots had been fired from their windows or no, and a great proportion of their inhabitants murdered. Of the 4,000 corpses which littered the streets of Tarragona more than half were those of civilians, and according to the Spanish official report 450 women and children were among the slain[660]. As one Spanish authority bitterly remarks, the victorious stormers generally gave quarter to any man wearing a uniform, and let off their fury on priests and unarmed citizens. Plunder was even more general than murder, and there was the inevitable accompaniment of drunkenness and rape. Knowing what happened at Badajoz in April 1812, it is not for the British historian to dilate with too great moral indignation on the doings of Suchet’s soldiery. Suffice it to say that all the atrocities afterwards seen at Badajoz were suffered by the unhappy people of Tarragona, and that the actual slaughter of non-combatants was much greater--about 100 inhabitants are believed to have been murdered at Badajoz, more than 2,000 in the Catalonian city. Spanish authorities state that the Poles and Italians behaved decidedly worse than the native French. The officers made some attempt to check the orgie, but (like the British at Badajoz) they failed: riot and slaughter went on all night, and it was not till the next day that order was restored. One of the most dreadful incidents of the storm was that many individuals, both soldiers and civilians, tried to escape to the Milagro roadstead by climbing down the precipitous south front of the city, and, losing their footing, were dashed to pieces or mortally maimed on the beach below.

[660] Those who like to sup on horrors may read the original
document in Arteche’s Appendix X to his tenth volume, pp. 546-8.

The garrison, owing to the last-received reinforcements, was over 10,000 strong at the moment of the storm; as Suchet accounts for more than 8,000 prisoners[661], the actual loss at the storm cannot have been much over 2,000 men. But to the 10,000 Spaniards killed or captured on June 28th we must add the losses of the garrison during the earlier operations. It seems that the Army of Catalonia lost in all 14,000 or 15,000 men in this disastrous siege. A certain amount of the wounded, however, had been sent off from time to time on English ships to Majorca and other safe destinations, and survived to fight another day. The French casualties during the siege amounted to 924 killed and 3,372 wounded--a total of 4,296. This was a very heavy proportion out of the 22,000 men[662] who were from first to last engaged in the operations; and if the sick, who are not included in Suchet’s report along with the wounded, are deducted from the survivors, it is clear that the army must have been reduced to a dangerously low figure by June 28th, and that the Spanish authorities[663] who estimate the total loss of their enemies at 6,000 cannot be far out.

[661] See table XX in Appendix.

[662] See table XX in Appendix.

[663] e. g. see Schepeler, i. 343, and Arteche, x. 314.

But the effect produced was worth the effort which had been made: nearly two-thirds of the regular troops of the Army of Catalonia had been destroyed. The great fortress, which for three years had been the base of the Spanish resistance, had been taken; there was now no considerable place left in the hands of the patriots--Solsona, Berga, Cardona, Seo de Urgel, and the other towns which they still retained were of small importance. They had lost their one fortified harbour, and for the future their communication by sea with Valencia, the Balearic Isles, and the British fleet, could only be conducted hastily and, as it were, surreptitiously; for any port, to which their forces in the inland might descend for a moment, was always liable to be attacked and seized by a French flying column. How nearly the spirit of resistance was crushed in the principality by the stunning blow which Suchet had inflicted will be shown in our next chapter.

Meanwhile, having reorganized his troops, and determined that the upper town of Tarragona should be fortified and garrisoned, but the harbour town dismantled and abandoned, the French commander was at liberty to proceed further with his scheme for the conquest of eastern Spain. But there was bound to be some preliminary delay before he could deliver his great blow against Valencia. One brigade had to be told off to escort the 8,000 Spanish prisoners to Saragossa; another had to return to the south to deal with the insurgents of Aragon, who had been left comparatively unmolested while Abbé was drawn off to the siege. Suchet himself--soon to be a marshal, for the Emperor carried out his promise that ‘he should find his baton within the walls of Tarragona’--marched with some 7,000 or 8,000 men, all that was left disposable, to open up communications with Barcelona. Before his departure he had a curious interview with Contreras: the wounded general, brought before him on a stretcher, was reproached with having violated the laws of war by persisting in the defence of an untenable town when capitulation had been his bounden duty! The Spaniard made the proper answer, that any commander who surrenders before he is obliged is a traitor and a coward. Thereupon Suchet changed his tone, and offered him tempting conditions if he would take service under King Joseph. This proposal being answered as it deserved, Contreras was sent as a prisoner to the castle of Bouillon, from which he escaped after a captivity of fifteen months in October 1812[664].

[664] Interesting details of his perilous escape, in company with
a French royalist officer, Bouvet de Lozier, and of his final
arrival in England, may be found in his _Narrative_, written in
1813.