Military historian Dr Pádraig Lenihan will give a talk next week on the 1812 sack of Badajoz, when an Anglo-Portugese army, spearheaded by Galway’s Connaught Rangers, went on a three-day rampage in Spain.
Hosted by the Connaught Rangers Association, the presentation on Thursday, January 16, will be held at Galway Mechanics’ Institute, on Middle Street, at 8pm. Admission free.
The Rangers were a crack element of the Duke of Wellington’s army, and bore the brunt of the assault on Badajoz's Alcazaba, a citadel of precipitous walls perched above a craggy edifice. Two days and two nights of looting, rape and murder followed, when soldiers broke into the town and reportedly liberated large quantities of liquor.
What set the soldiery off? Apart from the fact that the inhabitants were allies of the British, why has the sack of Badajoz become so notorious? Never before these Napoleonic Wars had so many literate soldiers written of their experiences, and this body of eye-witness accounts allows exploration of contemporary mindsets and memories.
Recently retired from the University of Galway, Lenihan’s talk is prompted by his work-in-progress editing eyewitness accounts of military rampages from the sack of Rome in 1527, to the Burning of Smyrna in 1922. He sets these atrocities in a military and cultural context, recovering traumatising personal encounters to better understand how massacres happen, how civilians endure them, and how survivors, participants and saviours justified or explained these events.
