PAYMENT OPTIONS

Forthcoming titles

(Book titles are subject to change)

A Royal Engineer in the Low Countries

A Cavalry Surgeon at Waterloo

With the Third Guards during the Peninsular War

The First and Last Campaigns of the Great War

Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Vincent O'Sullivan

Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Algernon Blackwood

Narratives of the Anglo-Zulu War

and many others

Stephen Crane’s Battles

enlarge Click on image to enlarge
enlarge Mouse over the image to zoom in
Stephen Crane’s Battles
Qty:     - OR -   Add to Wish List

Author(s): Stephen Crane
Date Published: 05/2007
Page Count: 180
Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-210-9
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-209-2

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, written in 1895, propelled him to international fame and placed him justifiably in the pantheon of American Literature. His vivid portrayal of war caused him to be offered journalistic assignments in Cuba and in the Greek-Turkish war of 1897. Although Crane wrote broadly as a novelist, poet and journalist, it is, perhaps, not surprising that he was drawn to and commissioned to write on the subject of warfare. This book finds Crane applying his familiar style to nine accounts of conflict in which he considers not only the events, but the motives and emotions of the principal characters. The battles are drawn from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and include the wars of Gustavus Adolphus, the wars of the Napoleonic age and those that reshaped Europe. This is a little known book, by a great writer on his principal theme. It is an invaluable resource for both military historians and those who study American literature.

Great rain-storms now began to com≠plicate the work of the besiegers. The trenches became mere ditches half full of discoloured water. This condition was partly improved by throwing in bags of sand. On the French side a curious device had been employed as a means of communication between the gate of the Trinidad bastion and Fort San Roque. The French soldiers had begun to dig, but had grown tired, so they finished by hang≠ing up a brown cloth. This to the be≠siegersí eyes was precisely like the fresh earth of a parallel, and behind it the French soldiers passed in safety.
Storm followed storm. The Guadiana, swollen past all tradition by these furious downpours, swept away the flying bridges, sinking twelve pontoons. For several days the army of the allies was entirely without food, but they stuck doggedly to their trenches, and when communication was at last restored it was never again broken. The weather cleared, and the army turned grimly with renewed resolution to the business of taking Badajoz. This was in the days of the forlorn hope. There was no question of anything but a desperate and deadly frontal attack. The command of the assault of Fort Picerina was given to General Kempt. He had five hundred men, including engineers, sappers, and miners, and fifty men who carried axes. At nine oíclock they marched. The night was very dark. The fort remained silent until the assailants were close. Then a great fire blazed out at them. For a time it was impossible for the men to make any progress. The palisades seemed insur≠mountable, and the determined soldiers of England were falling on all sides. In the meantime there suddenly sounded the loud, wild notes of the alarm-bells in the besieged city, and the guns of Badajoz awakened and gave back thunder for thunder to the batteries of the allies. The confusion was worse than in the mad nights on the heath in King Lear, but amid the thundering and the death, Kemptís fifty men with axes walked deliberately around Fort Picerina until they found the entrance gate. They beat it down and rushed in. The infantry with their bayonets followed closely. Lieutenant Nixon of the Fifty-second Foot (now the Second Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry) fell almost on the threshold, but his men ran on. The interior of the fort became the scene of a terrible hand-to-hand fight. All of the English did not come in through the gate. Some of Kemptís men now succeeded in establishing ladders against the rampart, and swarmed over to the help of their com≠rades. The struggle did not cease until more than half of the little garrison were killed. Then the commandant, Gasper Thiery, surrendered a little remnant of eighty-six men. Others who had not been killed by the British had rushed out and been drowned in the waters of that inunda≠tion which had so troubled Wellington and so pleased the French general. Phillipon had estimated that the Picerina would endure for five days, but it had been taken in an hour, albeit one of the bloodiest hours in the annals of a modern army.The army had now waited only for the night. When it had come, thick mists from the river increased the darkness. At 10 oíclock Major Wilson, of the Forty-eighth Foot (now the First Battalion of the Northamptonshire regiment), led a party against Fort San Roque so suddenly and so tempestuously that the work capitu≠lated almost immediately. At the castle, General Pictonís men had placed their ladders and swarmed up them in the face of showers of heavy stones, logs of wood, and crashing bullets, while at the same time they were under a heavy fire from the left flank. The foremost were bayoneted when they reached the top, and the be≠sieged Frenchmen grasped the ladders and tumbled them over with their load of men. The air was full of wild screams as the English fell towards the stones below. Presently every ladder was thrown back, and for the moment the assailants had to run for shelter against a rain of flying missiles.
In this moment of uncertainty one man, Lieutenant Ridge, rushed out, rallying his company. Seizing one of the abandoned ladders, he planted it where the wall was lower. His ladder was followed by other ladders, and The troops scrambled with revived courage after this new and intrepid leader. The British gained a strong foot≠hold on the ramparts of the castle, and every moment added to their strength as Pictonís men came swarming. They drove the French through the castle and out of the gates. They met a heavy reinforce≠ment of the French, but after a severe engagement they were finally and triumphantly in possession of the castle. Lieu≠tenant Ridge had been killed.
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 impreg≠nable 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 be≠siegers could gaze upon one anotherís 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 hesita≠tion. 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 tire≠lessly striving to achieve the impossible, while the French taunted them from the ramparts.
ìWhy do you not come into Badajoz?î