Free All in Scarlet Uniform (Napoleonic War 4) by Adrian Goldsworthy Page B

so engineers planned forts so that everything was at an angle and it was hard to strike directly at the stonework.
    MacAndrews and his men turned to the right, going along the covered way – a road sheltered by the glacis so that the defenders could move around the outer perimeter and be safe from enemy fire. No good engineer permitted a straight approach to the main gate, and so they had to pass another footbridge and go through a demilune – a smaller outwork shaped like a bastion, but standing free of the main wall. Finally they came on to the main arched bridge leading to the big gate, the Spanish coat of arms carved on the low tower above it. Everything was made from the same well-cut blocks of pale grey granite.
    ‘A bitch of a place to attack,’ said Captain Reynolds of the 51st Foot, looking up at the rampart and then along the wide ditch. ‘Although at least it’s not flooded.’ Reynolds was one of the officers posted to MacAndrews from other units. Williams judged him to be a vulgar fellow, but in this case could not challenge his verdict. In the chaos of an attack it would be hard for men to find their way through this maze of ditches and false walls before they could place ladders up against the main ramparts. Those ladders would have to be long, and so awkward to carry, otherwise they would not be high enough to reach from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the wall. All the time the defenders would be firing at them, for the bastions and ramparts were angled so that the fields of fire from the cannon mounted on them interlocked. There were no safe places for the attackers. The glacis and covered way offered protection from the outside, but no shelter at all from the defenders’ fire. The square fort with its corner bastions, demilunes and angled ditches and banks looked in plan like a purely technical exercise in geometry, but all the science served a grim and very practical purpose. Fort La Concepción was designed to kill.
    Williams shuddered for a moment, and hoped that everyone would assume it was simply the cold. He pictured in his mind’s eye the confused attackers being mown down by storms of canister and musket shot. It had never before fully registered that all the terminology of this calculating and coldly logical form of warfare was in French. It rather suggested that the enemy were very good at it.
    MacAndrews was greeted warmly by the bespectacled Captain Morillo of the Princesa Regiment, his Spanish counterpart. After the briefest of welcomes, he led them into the esplanade, the sunken square inside the fort itself. It was surrounded by rooms set into the backs of the ramparts, and on the north-west side the grand governor’s quarters where they would live and work. Morillo ushered them inside, where warm stew was waiting. He had two lieutenants to assist him, half a dozen experienced sergeants from his own regiment, and fifteen more men to act as sentries and perform other fatigues.
    Before he went in, Williams walked up one of the ramps leading on to the main walls. These were wide enough to mount heavy guns, the granite backed by tightly packed earth faced with more stone. They were also empty. There were no cannon in the fort, and the bastion on the north corner was a tumbled ruin. Fort La Concepción, the perfect and beautiful example of the engineer’s trade, was broken.
    ‘The French did it,’ said a voice, and when Williams turned he was surprised to see Morillo. He stiffened to attention.
    ‘Back in June of ’08 when they held Portugal. The garrison was too small to fight and sneaked away before the French got here.’ Morillo’s English was slow, but precise, with just a hint of an accent. ‘Then they decided they could not hold it, so they blew up the bastion, stripped the place of guns and took them back to Almeida.’
    ‘We marched to Almeida when they surrendered,’ said Williams. ‘The locals were none too keen on letting them go.’ After Vimeiro, the British