Inferno

Chapter 79

An entire city under their guns in cold blood? It was inconceivable – but Maynard couldn’t deny the reasoning. Even the stubborn Danes must see that they’d done enough to secure their honour, and this new compelling reality made nonsense of any attempt to hold out until winter drove the British away. They would finally have reason to yield.

It was essential to make all warlike preparation in earnest so there would be no mistaking their intentions, for if it were once suspected that there was no determination to go through with it, all bargaining power would vanish.

Ensign Maynard and Lieutenant Adams of the 52nd Regiment of Foot soon found their professional education extended – in the military preparations for a formal bombardment.

First, gun emplacements. Ringing the city, batteries were thrown up at speed. Horse and field artillery were expected to move about a battlefield but siege guns were dug in for protection against the defender’s return fire and needed a hard base to allow continual firing from the same spot. Their placing was a science: engineers had three or four proven designs to match terrain but all had in common sturdy wooden platforms for the guns, inclined in reverse to damp the recoil, embrasures and flanking parapets with concealed magazines.

Then, guns. The massive twenty-four-pounders were retired to their park, howitzers put in their place. These were stubby guns, not designed to fire iron round shot into the massed ranks of an enemy. Instead, out of sight and angled up, they could hurl an explosive shell over a ridge or the walls of a fortification to reach deep within. Mounted on a broad, massive-wheeled carriage with a bore near double that of the standard six-pounder, their ugliness added to their menace.

More dreaded even than those were the mortars. Not the light, rapidly deployed battlefield pieces but tons of bronze ordnance, only a few feet long with gaping maws eight or ten inches across. They were not mounted on a carriage but on a low, flat cast-iron bed that could take the colossal recoil to the ground. There was no pretence at any kind of aiming, for their purpose was simple: the descent of every kind of destruction into the midst of the enemy.

With horrified fascination, Maynard and Adams watched the bombardiers make ready.

It was skilled work, traversing lugs and capsquares, barrel gyns and limbers, linstocks and portfires in a bewildering manipulation to turn the inert bronze and iron into deadly weapons of war. Before long there were dozens, then scores of the gleaming beasts turned hungrily towards the city.

In the rear a supply train was set up. Not bread and beer but munitions – stocks to feed each battery with its fill of flame and death.

An obliging artilleryman showed them the common round shot for plunging fire. Then a shell: black and spherical, packed with explosive and with a fuse hole, the whole protected by a wooden sabot. He passed across the fuse: a tapered piece of beechwood with a thin hole drilled lengthways through it and filled with strands of quickmatch soaked in a composition. The side was marked with half-second lines, and the art of the bombardier was to cut its length to ensure it detonated at the precise point of the trajectory desired. It was hammered into the iron shell with a mallet and the act of firing would be sufficient to start it on its destiny.

And the carcass. Resembling the shell, it had quite another purpose. Packed within was not gunpowder but a complex compound of resin and saltpetre. Fired into a general area, the interior ignited and fierce jets of flame were ejected from several vents, which would set alight everything combustible nearby. Impossible to extinguish, they would flare away for up to twelve minutes.

Finally – the war rockets. Colonel Congreve was in great good humour, unmistakable in white coat and hat, conspicuous and everywhere at once, his animation and vitality infectious. ‘So you wish to know of my splendid invention? Do step up, gentlemen!’ Like a showman at the fair he presented his wares. ‘Here we see an eight-pounder of the breed,’ he said proudly, standing over a long wooden chest. In it were six blunt-headed projectiles, dull black and lethal. ‘For the delivering of explosive force where its medicine will do the most good.’

Gingerly Maynard touched one. Its cold iron casing lay dormant but he sensed a pent-up ferocity that unnerved him.

‘And this.’ Congreve crossed rapidly to another chest and threw out his arms. ‘This is my pride and joy, gentlemen.’

Inside were four much larger missiles, which had needle-sharp nose cones, in the same iron-black.

‘A thirty-two-pounder carcass-armed rocket,’ he breathed, ‘that may pierce into any building from a stupendous height. With a patent composition that spreads itself like lava after impact and whose blazing essence can never be put out. As well, in each one, a smoke-ball of noxious quality is included that will suffocate even the bravest attempting to douse the conflagration.’

‘Er, what is their range, if I may ask it, sir?’ Adams asked, clearly trying hard not to be impressed.

‘I would be disappointed at less than one or two miles, far beyond your common mortar, however large.’

‘And how does it … That is to say, how is it fired?’

‘With a gun? No, sir! I like to say that this is ammunition without ordnance. It requires nothing but a frame of the kind you may see yonder.’

Propped up against the earthwork were several flimsy tripod devices.

‘And when ready for flight, we fasten on a stabilising pole – for the thirty-two-pounder, of about ten feet in length. The entire procedure is effortless and capable of a rate of fire that would make you stare. I wish I could tell you more, gentlemen, but time presses. Let me leave you with this one thought. The cost to the Treasury of one mortar carcass, with its powder charge, is two pounds, three shillings and elevenpence. For a thirty-two-pounder rocket of superior destructive vehemence, it amounts to little more than twenty shillings. There – what do you think of that?’

Maynard and Adams trudged back together in silence, each with his thoughts.

‘Sah!’

Adams acknowledged Sergeant Heyer with a salute.

‘Took the liberty, sir, got a message in fr’m the Guards as would welcome a party to help ’em, like. Sent Corporal Reid and ten.’

‘Doing what, pray?’

‘They’s scouting in the country, finds the pipes from the reservoir at Emdrup as supplies the city. Wants to stopper it off, quick, like.’

It had to be the final straw.

Besieged and outnumbered, a terrible array of fire and ruin waiting at their gates and now their drinking water denied them. It was the end for the Danes: there was no alternative but to concede defeat and yield.