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.
[Footnote 38: Colonel Pasley states that only _one and a half yards of excavation_, per man, was executed _in a whole night_, by the untrained troops in the Peninsular war; whereas an instructed sapper can easily accomplish this _in twenty minutes_, and that it has been done by one of his most skilful sappers, at Chatham, _in seven minutes!_] During all this time the French furnished their armies in Spain with well-organized engineer forces.