For the first five years of this war the English struggled with a most imperfect army organization.[37] When “the first serious siege,” says Napier, was undertaken by the British army, “to the discredit of the English government, no army was ever so ill provided with the means of prosecuting such an enterprise.  The engineer officers were exceedingly zealous; and many of them were well versed in the theory of their business.  But the ablest trembled when reflecting on their utter destitution of all that belonged to real service.  Without a corps of sappers and miners, without a single private who knew how to carry on an approach under fire, they were compelled to attack fortresses defended by the most warlike, practised, and scientific troops of the age.”

[Footnote 37:  In a letter dated February 11th, 1812, Wellington wrote to the Secretary of State as follows:—­“I would beg leave to suggest to your lordship the expediency of adding to the engineer establishment a corps of sappers and miners.  It is inconceivable with what disadvantages we undertake any thing like a siege for want of assistance of this description.  There is no French corps d’armee which has not a battalion of sappers and a company of miners; but we are obliged to depend for assistance of this description upon the regiments of the line; and although the men are brave and willing, they want the knowledge and training which are necessary.  Many casualties among them consequently occur, and much valuable time is lost at the most critical period of the siege.”]

“The best officers and finest soldiers were obliged to sacrifice themselves in a lamentable manner, to compensate for the negligence and incapacity of a government, always ready to plunge the nation into war, without the slightest care of what was necessary to obtain success.  The sieges carried on by the British in Spain were a succession of butcheries; because the commonest materials, and the means necessary to their art, were denied the engineers.”  Colonel J.T.  Jones writes in nearly the same terms of the early sieges in the Peninsula, and with respect to the siege of Badajos, adds in express terms, that “a body of sappers and miners, and the necessary fascines and gabions, would have rendered the reduction of the work certain."[38] Soon after this siege a body of engineer troops arrived from England, but their number was insufficient, and Wellington, having learned by sad experience the importance of engineer troops, ordered a body of two hundred volunteers to be detached from the line, “and daily instructed in the practice of sapping, making and laying fascines and gabions, and the construction of batteries, &c.”  The siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, which immediately followed this organization, was conducted with greater skill and success than any other till nearly the close of the war; and all military writers have attributed this result to the greater efficiency of the engineer force engaged in the siege.  This arm was now gradually increased, and the last year of the war the engineer force with the English army in the field consisted of seventy-seven officers, seven assistant-engineers and surveyors, four surgeons and assistants, one thousand six hundred and forty-six sappers, miners, artificers, &c., one thousand three hundred and forty horses and one hundred and sixty carriages.