can see you’re not prepared for the meeting.’ Wellington gave a small nod to the Scotsman and turned to Hogan. ‘Major? Any reports?’
Hogan turned his notebook back two pages. ‘Two deserters, my Lord, both Germans, both from the Hesse-Darmstadt Regiment. They confirm that the Germans are garrisoning the castle.’ Hogan raised his eyebrows. ‘They say morale is high, my Lord.’
‘Then why desert?’
‘A brother of one, my Lord, is with the KGL.’
‘Ah. You’re sending them there?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The King’s German Legion would welcome the recruits.
‘Anything else?’ Wellington liked to keep the morning conferences brisk.
Hogan nodded. ‘They confirm, sir, that the French are devoid of roundshot, but claim plenty of canister and grape. We already knew that.’ He hurried on, forestalling a complaint of repetition from the General. ‘They also say the city is terrified of a massacre.’
‘Then they should plead for a surrender.’
‘The city, my Lord, is partly pro-French.’ It was true. Spanish civilians had been seen on the walls, firing muskets at the trenches sapping forward towards the fort at the dam. ‘They are hoping for our defeat.’
‘But.’ Wellington’s voice was scornful. ‘They hope to avoid reprisals if we win. Is that right?’
Hogan shrugged. ‘Yes, sir.’ It was, the Irishman thought, a vain hope. If Wellington had his way, and he would, the assault would be soon and the way into the city hard. If they did win through the breach, and Hogan acknowledged the possibility that they might not, then the troops would lose all vestiges of discipline. It had always been so. Soldiers who were forced to fight through the terror of a narrow breach claimed the right to possess the fortress and all within it. The Irish remembered Drogheda and Wexford, the towns sacked by Cromwell and his English troops, and the stories were still told of the victors’ atrocities. Stories of women and children herded into a church that was fired, the English celebrating while the Irish burned, and Hogan thought of Teresa and her child, Sharpe’s child. His thoughts snapped back to the meeting as Wellington dictated a fast order to an aide-de-camp. The order forbade any looting inside the city, but it was given, Hogan thought, without much conviction. Fletcher listened to the order and then, once again, pounded the map with his fist.
‘Bomb them.’
‘Ah! Colonel Fletcher is with us.’ Wellington turned to him.
Fletcher smiled. ‘I say bomb them, my Lord. Smoke them out! They’ll give up.’
‘And how long, pray, before they give up?’
Fletcher shrugged. He knew it could take weeks for the squat howitzers to reduce enough of Badajoz to smoking rubble, to burn the food supplies and thus force a surrender. ‘A month, my Lord?’
‘Two, more like, perhaps three. And let me advert you, Colonel, to the notion, imperfectly understood though it may be within the walls, that the Spanish are our allies. If we indiscriminately bomb them with shells it is possible, you will grant me, that our allies will be displeased.’
Fletcher nodded. ‘They’ll not be too happy, my Lord, if your men rape everything that moves and steal everything that doesn’t.’
‘We will trust to our soldiers’ good sense.’ The words were cynically said. ‘And now, Colonel, perhaps you can tell us about the breaches. Are they practical?’
‘No, sir, they are not.’ Fletcher’s Scottish accent was stronger again. ‘I can tell you a good deal, sir, most of it new.’ He turned the map round so that the General was looking at the two bastions from the point of view of an attacker. The Santa Maria was to the left, Trinidad to the right. Fletcher had marked the breaches. The Trinidad had lost half of its face, a gap nearly a hundred feet wide and the Engineer had pencilled in his estimate of the height reduction. Twenty-five feet. The flank of the Santa Maria facing the Trinidad was equally badly hit. ‘The breaches, as you can see, my Lord, are now about twenty-five feet high. That’s a hell of a climb! That’s higher, if you’ll forgive me for pointing it out, than the unbreached wall at Ciudad Rodrigo!’ He leaned back as if he had made a scoring hit.
Wellington nodded. ‘We are all aware, Colonel, that Badajoz is appreciably bigger than Ciudad Rodrigo. Pray continue.’
‘My Lord.’ Fletcher leaned forward again. ‘Let me advert you to this.’ He grinned as he used one of Wellington’s favourite expressions. His broad finger settled on the ditch to the front of the Santa Maria. ‘They’ve blocked the ditch here, and here.’ The finger moved to the right of the Trinidad breach. ‘They’re boxing us in.’ His voice was serious now. He could twist the General’s tail from time to time, but only dared do it because he was a good Engineer, trusted by Wellington, and he saw it as his job to give his true point of view and not be a lickspittle. The finger tapped the ditch. ‘It seems they’ve put carts in the ditch, upturned carts, and lengths of timber. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that they plan to fire those obstacles. You can see what will happen, gentlemen. Our troops will be in the ditch, trying to climb a bloody great ramp, and there’ll be no escape from the grapeshot. They can’t go left and right into the darkness to regroup. They’ll be trapped, lit up, like rats in a bloody barrel.’
Wellington listened to the impassioned outburst. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Aye, my Lord, and there’s more.’
‘Go on.’
The finger stayed to the right of the Trinidad breach. ‘The French have dug another ditch here, in the bottom of the ditch, and flooded it. We’ll be jumping into water, deep water, and it looks as if they’re extending it. Round here.’ The finger traced a line back in front of both breaches.
Wellington’s eyes were on the map. ‘So the longer we wait, the more difficult it becomes?’
Fletcher sighed, but conceded the point. ‘Aye, there’s that.’
Wellington raised his eyes to the Engineer. ‘What do we gain by time?’
‘I can lower the breaches.’
‘By how much?’
‘Ten feet.’
‘How long?’
‘A week.’
Wellington paused, then. ‘You mean two weeks.’
‘Aye, my Lord, perhaps.’
‘We do not have two weeks. We do not have one week. We must take the city. It must be soon.’ There was silence in the room. Outside the windows the guns hammered over the floodwaters. Wellington looked back to the map, reached over the table, and put a long finger on the huge space between the bastions. ‘There’s a ravelin there?’
‘Aye, my Lord, and still being built.’ The ravelin was sketched on the map; a masonry wedge, diamond shaped, that would break up an attack. If the French had been given time to finish it, before the siege guns had started firing, it would have been like a new bastion, built in the ditch, outflanking all attacks. As it was it formed a vast, flat-topped obstacle, surrounded
