Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General. Richard Holmes
were common at this stage in the siege. George Carleton, then serving as a gentleman volunteer in the Prince of Orange’s Foot Guards, tells us that:
The governor, by a messenger, intimating his sorrow that we had pawned our guns for ammunition bread [the siege train was late in arriving], answer was made that in a few days we hoped to give him a taste of the loaves which he should find would be sent him into the town in extraordinary plenty … I remembered another piece of raillery which passed some days after between the Rhinegrave and the same Calvo. The former sending him word that he hoped within three weeks to salute the governor’s mistress within the place, Calvo replied that he would give him leave to kiss her all over if he kissed her anywhere in three months.65
The attacker formally began the siege by ‘breaking ground’ (tranchée ouverte), commencing his first line of trenches facing the part of the fortress he planned to assail. From this ‘first parallel’ zig-zag saps were pushed out, until a second parallel could be dug; more sapping would lead to a third. While the attacker’s engineers were busy grubbing their way forward, cannon would be mounted just forward of the parallels to bring fire to bear on the chosen front. A clear bell-like ring announced a direct hit on the exposed muzzle of a defending cannon, probably sending it spinning from its carriage, to the discomfiture of its detachment. Eventually, having first sent gusts of grapeshot scudding up the glacis to weaken the palisade, the attacker would try to storm the covered way.
This is where grenadiers came into their own. The hand grenade, its name deriving from the Spanish for pomegranate, which the little projectile resembled, was carried by specialist infantrymen who wore crownless caps rather than the more common tricorn hats, which made it easier for them to sling their muskets across their backs, leaving both hands free to light the fuse on their grenade before hurling it. The process required strength and courage, and by this time grenadiers, usually recruited on the basis of one company in each battalion, were the elite of the infantry. Although grenades could be used in a variety of circumstances, it was in the attack on the covered way that they were indispensable. The song ‘The British Grenadiers’ describes the process perfectly.
Whene’er we are commanded to storm the palisades
Our leaders march with fusees and we with hand grenades
We throw them from the glacis, about our enemies’ ears,
Sing tow row, row, row, row, the British Grenadiers.
A good deal could go amiss long before the victorious grenadiers fell to ‘drowning bumpers’ and tow-row-rowing. A Scots grenadier, Private Donald McBane, was about to hurl his grenade over the palisades at Maastricht when it exploded
in my hands, killing several about me, and blew me over the palisades; burnt my clothes so that the skin came off me. I … fell among Murray’s Company of Grenadiers, flayed like an old dead horse from head to foot. They cast me into the water to put out the fire about me.66
George Carleton was part of a ‘forlorn hope’ (two sergeants and twenty grenadiers, a captain and fifty musketeers, and then a party carrying empty sandbags) sent to rush a breach in one of Maastricht’s bastions. They got into the work well enough, but then:
One of our own soldiers aiming to throw one [grenade] over the wall into the counterscarp among the enemy, it so happened that he unfortunately missed his aim, and the grenade fell down again on our side of the wall, very near the person who fired it. He, starting back to save himself, and some others who saw it fall doing the like, those who knew nothing of the matter fell into a sudden confusion … everybody was struck with a panic fear, and endeavoured to be the first who should quit the bastion … 67
There was, though, a silver lining to this dark cloud: an ensign in Sir John Fenwick’s Regiment was killed in the scuffle, and Carleton received the vacancy.
Once the grenadiers had duly taken the covered way, the attacker would ‘crown’ the spot with gabions, great wicker baskets filled with earth, and would then haul up his heavy guns to thunder out across the ditch at the base of the scarp. His gunners would try to adjust their fire so as to make a cannelure – a long groove – cutting through the retaining masonry, and eventually gravity would assert itself and the whole mass of scarp and rampart would tumble down into the ditch. To be deemed practicable for assault the breach had to be wide enough for two men to walk up it side by side without using their hands. The great Vauban would often check practicability himself, creeping forward after dark and scrambling back like some great earthy badger, muttering, ‘C’est mûre, c’est bien mûre.’68
The establishment of a practicable breach was usually the sign for the defender’s drummers to beat the chamade, requesting a parley, or for the attacker to formally warn the governor that, with a practicable breach in his wall and assault imminent, he should give in at once to avoid a needless effusion of blood. If a town was taken by storm the attacking troops could not be expected to respect either the possessions of the inhabitants or the virtue of their womenfolk, and a sensible governor would make what terms he could, although usually the longer he left the negotiation the worse the deal he could expect. The garrison of a fortress taken by storm could expect no mercy, a practice designed to discourage pointless last-ditch defence and reflecting the very real difficulty of controlling maddened troops who had just come boiling into the town through a defended breach.
Of course there were variations to this theme. A fortress might be taken by a coup de main, perhaps with a group of picked men in civilian clothes making their way covertly into the place and then suddenly opening a gate to admit troops hiding just outside. In 1702 the Bavarians took Ulm by this method, but a subsequent Austrian attempt against Maubeuge miscarried when a French sentry beat a particularly sullen ‘peasant’ in a line of carts awaiting entry, only for the man (in fact an infantry major) to lose his temper and grab a musket from under the hay on his cart, killing the sentry but alerting the garrison. While the siege was in progress each side would drop mortar bombs onto the other, and sometimes a lucky hit on a magazine would end the struggle at a stroke: in 1687 the Venetian siege of the Acropolis at Athens was decided by two mortar bombs which caused extensive damage to the Parthenon, then used by the Turks to store gunpowder. Sorties might set back the progress of the siege by wrecking trenches and carrying off or breaking engineers’ tools; mines could engulf whole bastions and discourage even the stoutest governor, or either side might run out of food or water.
In general, though, a siege, as Captain Churchill was now beginning to discover in the trenches before Maastricht, was rather like a formal dance, in which everyone stepped out to a rhythm they understood, with engineers calling out the time and gunners providing the percussion. Vauban reckoned that the average siege, if there was such a thing, would run for thirty-nine days from tranchée ouverte to the attacker’s formal entry after terms had been agreed. In April 1705 Louis XIV gently reminded his governors that they were expected to put up a proper defence, not merely surrender on terms as soon as the outworks were lost:
Despite the satisfaction I have derived from the fine and vigorous defence of some of my fortresses besieged during this war, as well as from those of my governors who have held their outworks for more than two months – which is more than the commanders of enemy fortresses have managed when besieged by my arms; nevertheless, as I consider that the main defences of my towns can be held equally as long as the outworks … I write you this letter to inform you that in the circumstances of your being besieged by the enemy it is my intention that you should not surrender until there is a breach in the main body of the enceinte, and until you have withstood at least one assault … 69
On the other side of the lines, Brigadier General Richard Kane commended Captain Withers of Calthorp’s Regiment, who in 1696, ‘being posted in a chateau with only six men’, faced the French off for several hours. When he saw that they were preparing