Читать книгу English Battles and Sieges in the Peninsula - William Francis Patrick Napier - Страница 20

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Before Massena invaded Portugal king Joseph had subdued Andalusia, except the Isla de Leon where Cadiz stands. He left Soult in that province with a large army, of which a part under Sebastiani held Granada, while another part under Victor blockaded the Isla with immense works; the remainder, under Soult in person, formed a field-force to war against insurrections and the numerous Spanish troops, which in separate bodies acted against him. The Spaniards, after long demurring, admitted an auxiliary British and Portuguese force into Cadiz, under General Graham,14 whose arrival was signalized by the cannonade of Matagorda. This small fort, without ditch or bomb-proof, was held for fifty-four days by a garrison of seamen and soldiers, under Captain M‘Lean,15 close to the French lines at the Trocadero. A Spanish seventy-four, and a flotilla, had co-operated in the resistance until daybreak on the 21st of March, but then a hissing shower of heated shot made them cut their cables and run under the works of Cadiz, while the fire of forty-eight guns and mortars of the largest size, was turned upon the fort, whose feeble parapet vanished before that crashing flight of metal, leaving only the naked rampart and undaunted hearts of the garrison for defence. The men fell fast, and the enemy shot so quick and close, that a staff bearing the Spanish flag was broken six times in an hour; the colours were then fastened to the angle of the work itself, but unwillingly by the men, especially the sailors, all calling out to hoist the British ensign, and attributing the slaughter to their fighting under a foreign flag!

Thirty hours this tempest lasted, and sixty-four men out of one hundred and forty had fallen, when Graham, finding a diversion he had projected impracticable, sent boats to carry off the survivors. With these boats went Major Lefebre, an engineer of great promise, but to fall there, the last man whose blood wetted the ruins thus abandoned: and here be recorded an action of which it is difficult to say whether it were most feminine or heroic. A sergeant’s wife, named Retson, was in a casemate with wounded men, when a young drummer was ordered to fetch water from the well of the fort; seeing the child hesitate, she snatched the vessel from him, braved the terrible cannonade, and when a shot cut the bucket-cord from her hand, recovered it and fulfilled her mission.