CHAPTER I
THE CAPTURE OF THE OUTWORKS
While Napoleon was urging on his fruitless pursuit of Sir John Moore, while St. Cyr was discomfiting the Catalans on the Besos and the Llobregat, and while Victor was dealing his last blow to the dilapidated army of Infantado, there was one point on which the war was standing still, and where the French arms had made no great progress since the battle of Tudela. Saragossa was holding out, with the same tenacity that she had displayed during the first siege in the July and August of the preceding summer. In front of her walls and barricades two whole corps of the Emperor’s army were detained from December, 1808, till February, 1809. As long as the defence endured, she preserved the rest of Aragon and the whole of Valencia from invasion.
The battle of Tudela had been fought on November 23, but it was not till nearly a month later that the actual siege began. The reason for this delay was that the Emperor had called off to Madrid all the troops which had taken part in the campaign against Castaños and Palafox, save Moncey’s 3rd Corps alone. This force was not numerous enough to invest the city till it had been strengthened by heavy reinforcements from the North.
After having routed the Armies of Aragon and the Centre, Marshal Lannes had thrown up the command which had been entrusted to him, and had gone back to France. The injuries which he had suffered from his fall over the precipice near Pampeluna[102] were still far from healed, and served as the excuse for his retirement. Moncey, therefore, resumed, on November 25, the charge of the victorious army: on the next day he was joined by Ney, who, after failing to intercept Castaños in the mountains[103], had descended into the valley of the Ebro, with Marchand and Dessolles’ divisions of infantry, and Beaumont’s light cavalry brigade. On the twenty-eighth the two marshals advanced along the high-road by Mallen and Alagon, and on the second day after appeared in front of Saragossa with all their troops, save Musnier’s division of the 3rd Corps and the division of the 6th Corps lately commanded by Lagrange, which had followed the retreating army of Castaños into the hills on the road to Calatayud. They were about to commence the investment of the city, when Ney received orders from the Emperor, dispatched from Aranda, bidding him leave the siege to Moncey, and cross the mountains into New Castile with all the troops of the 6th Corps: he was to find Castaños, and hang on his heels so that he should not be able to march to the help of Madrid.
Accordingly the Duke of Elchingen marched from the camp in front of Saragossa with the divisions of Marchand and Dessolles, and the cavalry brigades of Beaumont and Digeon. At Calatayud he came up with the force which had been dispatched in pursuit of Castaños,—Musnier’s division of the 3rd Corps, and that of the 6th Corps which Maurice Mathieu had taken over from Lagrange, who had been severely wounded at Tudela[104]. Leaving Musnier at Calatayud to protect his communications with Aragon, Ney picked up Maurice Mathieu, and passed the mountains into New Castile, where he fell into the Emperor’s sphere of operations. We have seen that he took a prominent part in the pursuit of Sir John Moore and the invasion of Galicia.
Moncey, meanwhile, was left in front of Saragossa with his 1st, 3rd, and 4th Divisions—the 2nd being still at Calatayud. This force consisted of no more than twenty-three battalions, about 15,000 men, and was far too weak to undertake the siege. The Marshal was informed that the whole corps of Mortier was to be sent to his aid, but it was still far away, and with very proper caution he resolved to draw back and wait for the arrival of the reinforcements. If the Spaniards got to know of his condition, they might sally out from Saragossa and attack him with more than 30,000 men. Moncey, therefore, drew back to Alagon, and there waited for the arrival of the Duke of Treviso and the 5th Corps. It was not till December 20 that he was able to present himself once more before the city.
Thus Saragossa gained four weeks of respite between the battle of Tudela and the commencement of the actual siege. This reprieve was invaluable to Palafox and the Aragonese. They would have been in grave danger if Lannes had marched on and assaulted the city only two days after the battle, and before the routed army had been rallied. Even if Ney and Moncey had been permitted to begin a serious attack on November 30, the day of their arrival before the place, they would have had some chance of success. But their sudden retreat raised the spirits of the defenders, and the twenty extra days of preparation thus granted to them sufficed to restore them to full confidence, and to re-establish their belief in the luck of Saragossa and the special protection vouchsafed them by its patron saint Our Lady of the Pillar. Napoleon must take the blame for all the consequences of Ney’s withdrawal. He had ordered it without fully realizing the fact that Moncey would be left too weak to commence the siege. Probably he had over-estimated the effect of the defeat of Tudela on the Army of Aragon. For the failure of Ney’s attempt to surround Castaños he was only in part responsible, though (as we have seen) he had sent him out on his circular march two days too late[105]. But to draw off the 6th Corps to New Castile (where it failed to do any good), before the 5th Corps had arrived to take its place before Saragossa, was clearly a blunder.
Palafox made admirable use of the unexpected reprieve that had been granted him. He had not, it will be remembered, taken part in person in the battle of Tudela, but had returned to his head quarters on the night before that disaster. He was occupied in organizing a reserve to take the field in support of his two divisions already at the front, when the sudden influx of fugitives into Saragossa showed him what had occurred. In the course of the next two days there poured into the place the remains of the divisions of O’Neille and St. March from his own Army of Aragon. With them came Roca’s men, who properly belonged to Castaños, but having fought in the right wing had been separated from the main body of the Andalusian army[106]. In addition, fragments of many other regiments of the Army of the Centre straggled into Saragossa. At least 16,000 or 17,000 men of the wrecks of Tudela had come in ere four days were expired. To help them, Palafox could count on all the newly organized battalions of his reserve, which had never marched out to join the field army: they amounted to some 10,000 or 12,000 men, but many of the regiments had only lately been organized and had not received their uniforms or equipment. Nor was this all: several belated battalions from Murcia and Valencia came in at various times during the next ten days[107], so that long ere the actual siege began Palafox could count on 32,000 bayonets and 2,000 sabres of more or less regularly organized corps. He had in addition a number of irregulars—armed citizens and peasants of the country-side—whose numbers it is impossible to fix, for though some had been collected in partidas or volunteer companies, others fought in loose bands just as they pleased, and without any proper organization. They may possibly have amounted to 10,000 men at the time of the commencement of the siege, but so many were drafted into the local Aragonese battalions before the end of the fighting, that when the place surrendered in February, there were less than a thousand[108] of these unembodied irregulars under arms.
But it was not so much for the reorganization of his army as for the strengthening of his fortifications that Palafox found the respite during the first three weeks of December profitable. During the first siege it will be remembered that the fortifications of Saragossa had been contemptible from the engineer’s point of view: the flimsy mediaeval enceinte had crumbled away at the first fire of the besiegers, and the real defence had been carried out behind the barricades. By the commencement of the second siege everything had changed, and the city was covered by a formidable line of defences, executed, as was remarked by one of the French generals[109], with more zeal and energy than scientific skill, but presenting nevertheless most serious obstacles to the besieger.
After the raising of the first siege by Verdier, the Spaniards had been for some time in a state of such confidence and exultation that they imagined that there was no need for further defensive precautions. The next campaign was to be fought, as they supposed, on the further side of the Pyrenees. But the long suspension of the expected advance during the autumn months began to chill their spirits, and, as the year drew on, it was no longer reckoned unpatriotic or cowardly to take into consideration the wisdom of strengthening the inland fortresses in view of a possible return of the French. In September, Colonel San Genis, the engineer officer who had worked for Palafox during the first siege, received permission to commence a series of regular fortifications for Saragossa. The work did not progress rapidly, for the Aragonese had not as yet much belief in the possibility that they might be called on once again to defend their capital. San Genis only received a moderate sum of money, and the right to requisition men of over thirty-five from the city and the surrounding villages. The labour had to be paid, and therefore the labourers were few. The new works were sketched out rather than executed. Things progressed with a leisurely slowness, till in November the dangers of the situation began to be appreciated, and the approach of the French reinforcements drove the Saragossans to greater energy. But it was only the thunderclap of Tudela that really alarmed them, and sent soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children, to labour with feverish haste at the completion of the new lines. Between November 25 and December 20 the amount of work that was carried out was amazing and admirable. If Ney and Moncey had been allowed to commence the regular siege before the month of November had expired, they would have found the whole system of works in an incomplete condition. Three weeks later Saragossa had been converted into a formidable fortress.
The only point where San Genis’ scheme had not been fully developed was the Monte Torrero. It will be remembered that this important hill, whose summit lies only 1,800 yards from the walls of Saragossa, overlooks the whole city, and had been chosen during the first siege as the emplacement for the main breaching batteries. To keep the French from this commanding position was most important, and the Spanish engineer had intended to cover the whole circuit of the hill with a large entrenched camp, protected by continuous lines of earthworks and numerous redoubts, with the Canal of Aragon, which runs under its southern foot, as a wet ditch in its front. But, when the news of Tudela arrived, little or nothing had been done to carry out this scheme: the fortification of the city had absorbed the main attention of the Aragonese, and while that was still incomplete the Monte Torrero had been neglected. In December it was too late to begin the building of three or four miles of new earthworks, and in consequence nothing was constructed on the suburban hill save one large central redoubt, and two small works serving as têtes-de-pont, at the points where the Madrid and the La Muela roads cross the Canal of Aragon. St. March’s Valencian division, still 6,000 strong, was told off for the defence of the hill, but had no continuous line of works to cover it. The only strength of the position lay in the canal which runs round its foot: but this was not very broad, and was fordable at more than one point. In short, the Monte Torrero constituted an outlying defence which might be held for some time, in order to keep the besiegers far off from the body of the place, rather than an integral part of its line of defence.
It was on the works of Saragossa itself that the energy of more than 60,000 enthusiastic labourers, military and civilian, had been expended during the month that followed Tudela. The total accomplished in this time moves our respect: it will be well to take the various fronts in detail.
On the Western front, from the Ebro to the Huerba, there had been in August nothing more than a weak wall, many parts of which were composed of the rear-sides of convents and buildings. In front of this line there had been constructed by November 10 a very different defence. A solid rampart reveted with bricks taken from ruined houses, and furnished with a broad terrace for artillery, and a ditch forty-five feet deep now covered the entire western side of the city. The convents of the Augustinians and the Trinitarians, which had been outside the walls during the earlier siege, had been taken into this new enceinte and served as bastions in it. There being a space 600 yards long between them, where the curtain would have been unprotected by flanking fires, a great semicircular battery had been thrown out, which acted as a third bastion on this side. Strong earthworks had also been built up to cover the Portillo and Carmen gates. As an outlying fort there was the castle of the Aljafferia, which had received extensive repairs, and was connected with the enceinte by a ditch and a covered way. It would completely enfilade any attacks made on the north-western part of the new wall.
On the Southern front of the defences the work done had been even more important. Here the new fortifications had been carried down to the brink of the ravine of the Huerba, so as to make that stream the wet ditch of the town. Two great redoubts were pushed beyond it: one called the redoubt of ‘Our Lady of the Pillar’ lay at the bridge outside the Santa Engracia gate. It was provided with a deep narrow ditch, into which the water of the river had been turned, and armed with eight guns. The corresponding fort, at the south-east angle of the town, was made by fortifying the convent of San José, on the Valencia road, just beyond the Huerba. This was a quadrangle 120 yards long by eighty broad, furnished with a ditch, and with a covered way with palisades, cut in the counterscarp. It held twelve heavy guns, and a garrison of no less than 3,000 men. Between San José and the Pillar redoubt, the old town wall above the Huerba had been strengthened and thickened, and several new batteries had been built upon it. It could not well be assailed till the two projecting works in front of it should be reduced, and if they should fall it stood on higher ground and completely commanded their sites. The convent of Santa Engracia, so much disputed during the first siege, had been turned into a sort of fortress, and heavily armed with guns of position.
On the eastern front of the city from San José to the Ebro, the Huerba still serves as a ditch to the place, but is not so steep or so difficult as in its upper course. Here the suburb of the Tanneries (Las Tenerias), where that stream falls into the Ebro, had been turned into a strong projecting redoubt, whose fire commanded both the opposite bank of the Ebro on one side, and the lower reaches of the Huerba on the other. Half way between this redoubt and San José was a great battery (generally called the ‘Palafox Battery’) at the Porta Quemada, whose fires, crossing those of the other two works, commanded all the low ground outside the eastern front of the city.
It only remains to speak of the fortifications of the transpontine suburb of San Lazaro. This was by nature the weakest part of the defences, as the suburb is built in low marshy ground on the river’s edge. Here deep cuttings had been made and filled with water, three heavy batteries had been erected, and the convents of San Lazaro and Jesus had been strengthened, crenellated and loopholed, and turned into forts. The whole of these works were joined by palisades and ditches. They formed a great tête-de-pont, requiring a garrison of 3,000 men. As an additional defence for the flanks of the suburb three or four gunboats, manned by sailors brought up from Cartagena, had been launched on the Ebro, and commanded the reach of the river which runs along the northern side of the city.
Yet great as were the works which now sheathed the body of Saragossa, the people had not forgotten the moral lesson of the first siege. When her walls had been beaten down, she had resisted behind her barricades and the solid houses of her narrow streets. They fully realized that this might again have to be done, if the French should succeed in breaking in at some point of the long enceinte. Accordingly, every preparation was made for street fighting. Houses were loopholed, and communications were pierced between them, without any regard for private property or convenience. Ground-floor windows were built up, and arrangements made for the speedy and solid closing of all doors. Traverses were erected in the streets, to guard as far as was possible against the dangers of a bombardment, and an elaborate system of barricades, arranged in proper tactical relation to each other, was sketched out. The walls might be broken, but the people boasted that the kernel should be harder than the shell.
Outside the city, where the olive groves and suburban villas and summer houses had given much cover to the French during the first siege, a clean sweep had been made of every stone and stick for 800 yards around the defences. The trees were felled, and dragged into the city, to be cut up into palisades. The bricks and stones were carried off to revet the new ramparts and ditches. The once fertile and picturesque garden-suburbs were left bald and bare, and could be perfectly well searched by the cannon from the walls, so that the enemy had to contrive all his cover by pick and shovel, or gabion and fascine.
The soldiery, whose spirits had been much dashed by the disaster of Tudela, soon picked up their courage when they noted the enthusiasm of the citizens and the strength of the defences. Indeed, it was dangerous for any man to show outward signs of doubt or fear, for the Aragonese had been wrought up to a pitch of hysterical patriotism which made them look upon faintheartedness as treason. Palafox himself did his best to keep down riots and assassinations, but his followers were always stimulating him to apply martial law in its most rigorous form. A high gallows was erected in the middle of the Coso, and short shrift was given to any man convicted of attempted desertion, disobedience to orders, or cowardice. Delations were innumerable, and the Captain-General had the greatest difficulty in preserving from the popular fury even persons whom he believed to be innocent. The most that he could do for them was to shut them up in the prisons of the Aljafferia, and to defer their trial till the siege should be over. The fact was that Palafox was well aware that his power rested on the unlimited confidence reposed on him by the people, and was therefore bent on crossing their desires as little as he could help. He was careful to take counsel not only with his military subordinates, but with all those who had power in the streets. Hence came the prominence which is assigned in all the narratives of the siege to obscure persons, such as the priests Don Basilio (the Captain-General’s chaplain) and Santiago Sass, and to the demagogues ‘Tio Jorge’ and ‘Tio Marin.’ They represented public opinion, and had to be conciliated. It is going too far to say, with Napier, that a regular ‘Reign of Terror’ prevailed in Saragossa throughout the second siege, and that Palafox was no more than a puppet, whose strings were pulled by fanatical friars and bloodthirsty gutter-politicians. But it is clear that the Captain-General’s dictatorial power was only preserved by a careful observation of every gust of popular feeling, and that the acts of his subordinates were often reckless and cruel. The soldiers disliked the fanatical citizens: the work of Colonel Cavallero, the engineer officer who has left the best Spanish narrative of the siege, is full of this feeling. He sums up the situation by writing that ‘The agents of the Commander-in-chief sometimes abused their power. Everything was demanded in the name of King and Country, every act of disobedience was counted as high treason: on the other hand, known devotion to the holy cause gave unlimited authority, and assured impunity for any act to those who had the smallest shadow of delegated power. Even if the citizens had not been unanimous in their feelings, fear would have given them an appearance of unanimity. To the intoxication of confidence and national pride caused by the results of the first siege, to the natural obstinacy of the Aragonese, to the strength of a dictatorial government supported by democratic enthusiasm, there was added an exalted religious fanaticism. Our Lady of the Pillar, patroness of Saragossa, had, it was supposed, displayed her power by the raising of the first siege: it had been the greatest of her miracles. Anything could be got from a people in this frame of mind[110].’
Palafox knew well how to deal with his followers. He kept himself always before their eyes; his activity was unceasing, his supervision was felt in every department. His unending series of eloquent, if somewhat bombastic, proclamations was well suited to rouse their enthusiasm. He displayed, even to ostentation, a confidence which he did not always feel, because he saw that the strength of the defence lay in the fact that the Aragonese were convinced in the certainty of their own triumph. The first doubt as to ultimate success would dull their courage and weaken their arms. We cannot blame him, under the circumstances, if he concealed from them everything that was likely to damp their ardour, and allowed them to believe everything that would keep up their spirits.
Meanwhile he did not neglect the practical side of the defence. The best testimony to his capacity is the careful accumulation which he made of all the stores and material needed for a long siege. Alone among all the Spanish garrisons of the war, that of Saragossa never suffered from hunger nor from want of resources. It was the pestilence, not starvation, which was destined to prove the ruin of the defence. Before the French investment began Palafox had gathered in six months’ provisions for 15,000 men; the garrison was doubled by the arrival of the routed army from Tudela: yet still there was food for three months for the military. The citizens had been directed to lay in private stocks, and to feed themselves: this they had done, and it was not till the end of the siege that they began to run short of comestibles. Even when the place fell there were still large quantities of corn, maize, salt fish, oil, brandy, and forage for horses in the magazines[111]. Only fresh meat had failed, and the Spaniard is never a great consumer of that commodity. Military stores had been prepared in vast quantities: there was an ample stock of sandbags, of timber for palisading, of iron work and spare fittings for artillery. Instead of gabions the garrison used the large wicker baskets employed for the vintage, which were available in profusion. Of artillery there were some 160 pieces in the place, but too many of them were of small calibre: only about sixty were 16-pounders or heavier. Of these more than half were French pieces, abandoned by Verdier in August in his siege-works, or fished out of the canal into which he had thrown them. Of cannon-balls there was also an ample provision: a great part, like the siege-guns, were spoil taken in the deserted camp of the French in August. Shells, on the other hand, were very deficient, and the workmen of the local arsenal could not manufacture them satisfactorily. The powder was made in the place throughout the siege: the accident in July, when the great magazine in the Seminary blew up with such disastrous results, had induced Palafox to order that no great central store should be made, but that the sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal should be kept apart, and compounded daily in quantities sufficient for all requirements. So many thousand civilians were kept at work on powder-and cartridge-making that this plan never failed, and no great explosions took place during the second siege.
It will be remembered that want of muskets had been one of the chief hindrances of the Aragonese during the operations in July and August. It was not felt in December and January, for not only had Palafox collected a large store of small arms during the autumn, to equip his reserves, but he received, just before the investment began, a large convoy of British muskets, sent up from Tarragona by Colonel Doyle, who had gone down to the coast by the Captain-General’s desire, to hurry on their transport. As the siege went on, the mortality among the garrison was so great that the stock of muskets more than sufficed for those who were in a state to bear arms.
Such were the preparations which were made to receive the French, when they should finally present themselves in front of the walls. All had been done, save in one matter, to enable the city to make the best defence possible under the circumstances. The single omission was to provide for a field force beyond the walls capable of harassing the besiegers from without, and of cutting their communications with their base. From his 40,000 men Palafox ought to have detached a strong division, with orders to base itself upon Upper Aragon, and keep the French in constant fear as to their supplies and their touch with Tudela and Pampeluna. Ten thousand men could easily have been spared, and the mischief that they might have done was incalculable. The city had more defenders than were needed: in the open country, on the other hand, there was no nucleus left for further resistance. Almost every available man had been sent up to Saragossa: with the exception of Lazan’s division in Catalonia, and of three other battalions[112], the whole of the 32,000 men raised by the kingdom of Aragon were inside the walls. Outside there remained nothing but unorganized bands of peasants to keep the field and molest the besiegers. The only help from without that was given to the city was that supplied by Lazan’s small force, when it was withdrawn from Catalonia in January, and 4,000 men could do nothing against two French army corps. Even as it was, the French had to tell off the best part of two divisions to guard their communications. What could they have done if there had been a solid body of 10,000 men ranging the mountains, and descending at every favourable opportunity to fall upon some post on the long line Alagon-Mallen-Tudela-Pampeluna by which the besiegers drew their food and munitions from their base?
It would seem that the neglect of Palafox to provide for this necessary detachment arose from three causes. The first was his want of real strategical insight—which had been amply displayed during the autumn, when he was always urging on his colleagues his ridiculous plan for ‘surrounding’ the French army, by an impossible march into Navarre and the Pyrenees. The second was his conviction, well-founded enough in itself, that his troops would do much better behind walls than in the open[113]. The third was a strong belief that the siege would be raised not by any operations from without, but by the rigours of the winter. In average years the months of January and February are tempestuous and rainy in Aragon. The low ground about Saragossa is often inundated: even if the enemy were not drowned out (like the besiegers of Leyden in 1574), Palafox thought that they would find trench-work impossible in the constant downpour, and would be so much thinned by dysentery and rheumatism that they would have to draw back from their low-lying camps and raise the siege. Unfortunately for him the winter turned out exceptionally mild, and (what was worse) exceptionally dry. The French had not to suffer from the awful deluge which in Galicia, during this same month, was rendering the retreat of Sir John Moore so miserable. The rain did no more than send many of the besiegers to hospital: it never stopped their advance or flooded their trenches.
When Palafox had nearly completed his defences—the works on the Monte Torrero alone were still hopelessly behindhand—the French at last began to move up against him. On December 15 Marshal Mortier arrived at Tudela with the whole of the 5th Corps, veterans from the German garrisons who had not yet fired a shot in Spain. Their ranks were so full that though only two divisions, or twenty-eight battalions, formed the corps, it counted 21,000 bayonets. It had also a brigade of two regiments of hussars and chasseurs as corps-cavalry, with a strength of 1,500 sabres. The condition of Moncey’s 3rd Corps was much less satisfactory: it was mainly composed of relics of the original army of Spain—of the conscripts formed into provisional regiments with whom Napoleon had at first intended to conquer the Peninsula[114]. Its other troops, almost without exception, had taken part in the first siege of Saragossa under Verdier, a not very cheerful or inspiriting preparation for the second leaguer[115]. All the regiments had been thinned by severe sickness in the autumn; on October 10 they had already 7,741 men in hospital—far the largest figure shown by any of the French corps in Spain. The number had largely increased as the winter had drawn on, and the battalions had grown so weak that Moncey consolidated his four divisions into three during his halt at Alagon. The whole of the 4th division was distributed between the 2nd and 3rd, so as to bring the others up to a decent strength. On December 20 the thirty-eight battalions only made up 20,000 effective men for the siege, while more than 10,000 lay sick, some with the army, some in the base hospitals at Pampeluna. The health of the corps grew progressively worse in January, till at last in the middle days of the siege it had 15,000 men with the colours, and no less than 13,000 sick. We find the French generals complaining that one division of the 5th Corps was almost as strong and effective at this time as the whole combined force of the 3rd Corps[116]. Nevertheless these weary and fever-ridden troops had to take in charge the main part of the siege operations.
During the twenty days of his halt at Alagon, Moncey had employed his sappers and many of his infantry in the manufacture of gabions, wool-packs, and sandbags for the projected siege. He was continually receiving convoys of heavy artillery and ammunition from Pampeluna, and when Mortier came up on December 20, had a sufficiency of material collected for the commencement of the leaguer. The two marshals moved on together on that day, and marched eastward towards Saragossa, with the whole of their forces, save that four battalions were left to guard the camp and dépôts at Alagon, and three more at Tudela to keep open the Pampeluna road[117]. Gazan’s division crossed the Ebro opposite Tauste, to invest the transpontine suburb of Saragossa: the rest of the army kept to the right bank. Late in the evening both columns came in sight of the city. They mustered, after deducting the troops left behind, about 38,000 infantry, 3,500 cavalry, and 3,000 sappers and artillerymen. They had sixty siege-guns, over and above the eighty-four field-pieces belonging to the corps-artillery of Mortier and Moncey. The provision of artillery was copious—far more than the French had turned against many of the first-class fortresses of Germany. The Emperor was determined that Saragossa should be well battered, and had told off an extra proportion of engineers against the place, entrusting the general charge of the work to his aide-de-camp, General Lacoste, one of the most distinguished officers of the scientific corps.
When the reinvestment began, Gazan on the left bank established himself at Villanueva facing the suburb of San Lazaro. Mortier with Suchet’s division took post at San Lamberto opposite the western front of the city. Moncey, marching round the place, ranged Grandjean’s troops opposite the Monte Torrero, on the southern front of the defences, and Morlot further east near the mouth of the Huerba. His other division, that of Musnier, formed the central reserve, and guarded the artillery and the magazines. The Spaniards made no attempt to delay the completion of the investment, and kept quiet within their walls.
On the next morning the actual siege began. It was destined to last from December 20 to February 20, and may be divided into three well-marked sections. The first comprises the operations against the Spanish outworks, and terminates with the capture of the two great bridge-heads beyond the Huerba, the forts of San José and Our Lady of the Pillar: it lasted down to January 15. The second period includes the time during which the besiegers attacked and finally broke through the main enceinte of the city: it lasts from January 16 to January 27. The third section consists of the street-fighting, after the walls had been pierced, and ends with the fall of Saragossa on February 20.
Having reconnoitred the whole circuit of the Spanish defences on the very evening of their arrival before the city (December 20), Moncey and Mortier recognized that their first task must be to evict the Spaniards from the Monte Torrero, the one piece of dominating ground in the whole region of operations, and the spot from which Saragossa could be most effectively attacked. They were rejoiced to see that the broad hill was not protected by any continuous line of entrenchments, but was merely crowned by a large open redoubt, and defended in front by the two small bridge-heads on the Canal of Aragon. There was nothing to prevent an attempt to storm it by main force. This was to be made on the following morning: at the same time Gazan, on the left bank of the Ebro, was ordered to assault the suburb of San Lazaro. Here the marshals had underrated the strength of the Spanish position, which lay in such low ground and was so difficult to make out, that it presented to the observer from a distance an aspect of weakness that was far from the reality.
At eight on the morning of December 21 three French batteries, placed in favourable advanced positions, began to shell the redoubts on the Monte Torrero, with satisfactory results, as they dismounted some of the defender’s guns and exploded a small dépôt of reserve ammunition. An hour later the infantry came into action. Moncey had told off for the assault the divisions of Morlot and Grandjean, twenty battalions in all[118]. The former attacked the eastern front of the position, fording the canal and assailing the left-hand tête-de-pont on the Valencia road from the flank. The latter, which had passed the canal far outside the Spanish lines, and operated between it and the Huerba, attacked the south-western slopes of the hill. The defence was weak, and when a brigade of Grandjean’s men pushed in between the main redoubt on the crest and the Huerba, and took the western part of the Spanish line in the rear, the day was won. St. March’s battalions wavered all along the line; and as his reserves could not be induced to fall upon the French advance, the Valencian general withdrew his whole division into the city, abandoning the entire circuit of the Monte Torrero. The assailants captured seven guns—some of them disabled—in the three redoubts, and a standard of the 5th regiment of Murcia. They had only lost twenty killed and fifty wounded; the Spanish loss was also insignificant, considering the importance of the position that was at stake, and hardly any prisoners were taken[119]. The besiegers had now the power to bombard all the southern front of Saragossa, and dominated, from the slopes of the hill, the two advanced forts of San José and the Pillar. The leaders of the populace were strongly of opinion that the Valencian division had misbehaved, and they were not far wrong. Palafox had great difficulty in protecting St. March, whose personal conduct had been unimpeachable, from the wrath of the multitude, who wished to make him responsible for the weakness shown by his men[120]. The officer who lost the Monte Torrero in the first siege had been tried and shot[121]: St. March was lucky to escape even without a reprimand.
Meanwhile things had gone very differently at the other point where the French had tried to break down the outer defences of the city. The attack on the transpontine suburb of San Lazaro had been allotted to Gazan’s division. This was a very formidable force, 9,000 veterans of the best quality, who were bent on showing that they had not degenerated since they fought at Friedland. Owing to some slight mistake in the combination, Gazan only delivered his attack at one o’clock, two hours after the fighting on the Monte Torrero had ceased. His leading brigade, that of Guérin, six battalions strong, advanced against the northern and eastern fronts of the defences of the suburb. The Spaniards were holding as an outwork a large building called the Archbishop’s Tower (Torre del Arzobispo)[122] on the Villanueva road, 600 yards in front of the main line of entrenchments. This Gazan’s men carried at the first rush, killing or capturing 300 men of a Swiss battalion[123] which held it. They then pushed forward towards the inner fortifications, but were taken in flank by a heavy artillery fire from a redoubt which they had overlooked. This caused them to swerve towards the Barcelona road, where they got possession of a house close under the convent of Jesus, and threatened to cut off the garrison of that stronghold from the rest of the defenders of the suburb. At this moment a disgraceful panic seized the defenders of the San Lazaro convent, which lay directly in front of the assailants. They abandoned their post, and began to fly across the bridge into Saragossa. But Palafox came up in person with a reserve, and reoccupied the abandoned post. He then ordered a sortie against the buildings which the French had seized, and succeeded in driving them out and compelling them to retire into the open ground. Gazan doubted for a moment whether he should not send in his second brigade to renew the attack, for the six battalions that had borne the brunt of the first fighting had now fallen into complete disorder. But remembering that if this force failed to break into the suburb he had no reserves left, and that Palafox might bring over the bridge as many reinforcements as he chose, the French general resolved not to push the assault any further. He drew back and retired behind the Gallego stream, where he threw up entrenchments to cover himself, completely abandoning the offensive. For two or three days he did not dare to move, expecting to be attacked at any moment by the garrison. A sudden rise of the Ebro had cut off his communication with Moncey, and he could neither send the marshal an account of his check, nor get any orders from him[124]. His casualty-list was severe, thirty officers and 650 men killed and wounded: the Spaniards lost somewhat less, even including the 300 Swiss who were cut to pieces at the Archbishop’s Tower.
Palafox next morning issued a proclamation, extolling the valour shown in the defence of the suburb, treating the loss of the Monte Torrero as insignificant, and exaggerating the losses of the French. The Saragossans were rather encouraged than otherwise by the results of the day’s fighting, and spoke as if they had merely lost an outwork by the unsteadiness of St. March’s Valencians, while the main hostile attack had been repulsed. But it is clear that the capture of the dominating heights south of the city was an all-important gain to the French. Without the Monte Torrero they could never have pressed the siege home. As to the failure at the suburb, it came from attacking with headlong courage an entrenched position that had not been properly reconnoitred. The assault should never have been delivered without artillery preparation, and was a grave mistake. But clearly Mortier’s corps had yet to learn what the Spaniards were like, and to realize that to turn them out from behind walls and ditches was not the light task that they supposed.
Moncey so thoroughly miscalculated the general effect of the fighting upon the minds of the Spaniards, that next morning he sent in to Palafox a flag of truce, with an officer bearing a formal demand for the surrender of the city. ‘Madrid had fallen,’ he wrote: ‘Saragossa, invested on all sides, had not the force to resist two complete corps d’armée. He trusted that the Captain-General would spare the beautiful and wealthy capital of Aragon the horrors of a siege. Ample blood had already been shed, enough misfortunes already suffered by Spain.’ Palafox replied in the strain that might have been expected from him—‘The man who only wishes to die with honour in defence of his country cares nothing about his position: but, as a matter of fact, he found that his own was eminently favourable and encouraging. In the first siege he had held out for sixty-one days with a garrison far inferior to that now under his command. Was it likely that he would surrender, when he had as many troops as his besiegers? Looking at the results of the fighting on the previous day, when the assailants had suffered so severely in front of San Lazaro, he thought that he would be quite as well justified in proposing to the Marshal that the besieging army should surrender “to spare further effusion of blood,” as the latter had been to make such a proposition to him. If Madrid had fallen, Madrid must have been sold: but he begged for leave to doubt the truth of the rumour. Even at the worst Madrid was but a town, like any other. Its fate had no influence on Saragossa[125].’
Having received such an answer Moncey had only to set to work as fast as possible: his engineer-in-chief, General Lacoste, after making a thorough survey of the defences, pronounced in favour of choosing two fronts of attack, both starting on the Monte Torrero, and directed the one against the fort of San José and the other against that of the Pillar. These projecting works would have to be carried before any attempt could be made against the inner enceinte of the town. At the same time, Lacoste ordered a third attack, which he did not propose to press home, to be made on the castle of the Aljafferia, on the west side of the town. It was only intended to distract the attention of the Spaniards from the points of real danger. On the further bank of the Ebro, Gazan’s division was directed to move forward again, and to entrench itself across all the three roads, which issue from the suburb, and lead respectively to Lerida, Jaca, and Monzon. He was not to attack, but merely to blockade the northern exits of Saragossa. Communications with him were established by means of a bridge of boats and pontoons laid above the town. Gazan succeeded in shortening the front which he had to protect against sorties by letting the water of the Ebro into the low-lying fields along its banks, where it caused inundations on each of his flanks.
On the twenty-third the preliminary works of the siege began, approaches and covered ways being constructed leading down from the Monte Torrero to the spots from which Lacoste intended to commence the first parallels of the two attacks on the Pillar and San José. Preparations of a similar sort were commenced for the false attack on the left, opposite the Aljafferia. Six days were occupied in these works, and in the bringing up of the heavy artillery, destined to arm the siege-batteries, from Tudela. The guns had to come by road, as the Spaniards had destroyed all the barges on the Canal of Aragon, and blown up many of its locks. It was not till some time later that the French succeeded in reopening the navigation, by replacing the sluice-gates and building large punts and floats for the carriage of guns or munitions.
Just before the first parallel was opened Marshal Moncey was recalled to Madrid [December 29], the Emperor being apparently discontented with his delays in the early part of the month. He was replaced in command of the 3rd Corps by Junot, whose old divisions had been made over (as we have seen in the first volume) to Soult’s 2nd Corps. This change made Mortier the senior officer of the besieging army, but he and Junot seem to have worked more as partners than as commander and subordinate. Junot, in his report to the Emperor[126] on the state in which he found the troops, enlarges at great length on the deplorable condition of the 3rd Corps. Many of the battalions had never received their winter clothing, hundreds entered the hospitals every day, and there was no corresponding outflow of convalescents. No less than 680 men had died in the base hospital at Pampeluna in November, and the figure for December would be worse. He doubted if there were 13,000 infantry under arms in his three divisions—here he exaggerated somewhat, for even a fortnight later the returns show that his ‘present under arms,’ after deducting all detachments and sick, were still over 14,000 bayonets: on January 1, therefore, there must have been 15,000. He asked for money, reinforcements, and a supply of officers, the commissioned ranks of his corps showing a terrible proportion of gaps. On the other hand, he conceded that the 5th Corps was in excellent condition, its veterans suffering far less from disease than his own conscripts. Either of Gazan’s and Suchet’s divisions was, by itself, as strong as any two of the divisions of the 3rd Corps.
On the night of the twenty-ninth—thirtieth, within twelve hours of Moncey’s departure, the first parallel was opened, both in the attack towards San José and in that opposite the Pillar fort. When the design of the besiegers became evident, Palafox made three sallies on the thirty-first, but apparently more with the object of reconnoitring the siege-works and distracting the workers than with any hope of breaking the French lines, for there were not more than 1,500 men employed in any of the three columns which delivered the sorties. The assault on the trenches before San José was not pressed home, but opposite the false attack at the Aljafferia the fighting was more lively; the French outposts were all driven in with loss, and a squadron of cavalry, which had slipped out from the Sancho gate, close to the Ebro, surprised and sabred thirty men of a picket on the left of the French lines. Palafox made the most of this small success in a magniloquent proclamation published on the succeeding day. He should have sent out 15,000 men instead of 3,000 if he intended to get any profit out of his sorties. An attack delivered with such a force on some one point of the lines must have paralysed the siege operations, and might have proved disastrous to the French.
Meanwhile the besiegers, undisturbed by these sallies, pushed forward their works on the northern slopes of the Monte Torrero. The attack opposite San José got forward much faster than that against the Pillar: its second parallel was commenced on January 1, and its batteries were all ready to open by the ninth. The other attack was handicapped by the fact that the ground sloped down more rapidly towards the Huerba, so that the trenches had to be made much deeper, and pushed forward in perpetual zigzags, in order to avoid being searched by the plunging fire from the Spanish batteries on the other side of the stream, in the enceinte of the town. To get a flanking position against the Pillar redoubt, the left attack was continued by another line of trenches beyond the Huerba, after it has made its sharp turn to the south.
Before the engineers had completed their work, and long ere the breaching batteries were ready, a great strain was thrown upon the besiegers by fresh orders from Napoleon. On January 2, Marshal Mortier received a dispatch, bidding him march out to Calatayud with one of his two divisions, and open up the direct communication with Madrid. Accordingly he departed with the two strong brigades of Suchet’s division, 10,000 bayonets. This withdrawal threw much harder work on the remainder of the army: Junot was left with not much more than 24,000 men, including the artillerymen, to maintain the investment of the whole city. He was forced to spread out the 3rd Corps on a very thin line, in order to occupy all the posts from which Suchet’s battalions had been withdrawn. Morlot’s division came down from the Monte Torrero to occupy the ground which Suchet had evacuated: Musnier had to cover the whole of the hill, and to support both the lines of approach on which the engineers were busy. Grandjean’s division remained on its old front, facing the eastern side of the city, and Gazan still blockaded the suburb beyond the Ebro. As the last-named general had still 8,000 men, there were only 15,000 bayonets and the artillery available for the siege, a force far too small to maintain a front nearly four miles long. If Palafox had dared to make a general sortie with all his disposable men, Junot’s position would have been more than hazardous. But the Captain-General contented himself with making numerous and useless sallies on a petty scale, sending out the most reckless and determined of his men to waste themselves in bickering with the guards of the trenches, when he should have saved them to head a general assault in force upon some weak point of the siege lines. The diaries and narratives of the French officers who served at Saragossa are full of anecdotes of the frantic courage shown by the besieged, generally to no purpose. One of the strangest has been preserved by the very prosaic engineer Belmas, who tells how a priest in his robes came out on January 6 in front of Gazan’s lines, and walked among the bullets to within fifty yards of the trenches, when he preached with great unction for some minutes, his crucifix in his hand, to the effect that the French had a bad cause and were drawing down God’s anger upon themselves. To the credit of his audience it must be said that they let him go off alive, contenting themselves with firing over his head, in order to see if they could scare him into a run.
At daybreak on January 10, the whole of the French batteries opened upon San José and the Pillar fort. The fire against the latter was distant and comparatively ineffective, but the masonry of San José began to crumble at once: its walls, solid though they were, had never been built to resist siege artillery. The roofs and tiles came crashing down upon the defenders’ heads, and most of their guns were silenced or injured. The besiegers suffered little—Belmas says that only one officer and ten men fell, though two guns in the most advanced battery were disabled. The loss of the Spaniards on the other hand was numbered by hundreds, more being slain by the fall of stones and slates than by the actual cannon balls and shells of the assailants. At nightfall Palafox withdrew most of the guns from the convent, but replaced the decimated garrison by three fresh battalions. It was clear that the work would fall next day unless the besiegers were driven off from their batteries. At 1 A.M., therefore, 300 men made a desperate sally to spike the guns. But the French were alert, and had brought up two field-pieces close to the convent, which repressed the sortie with a storm of grape.
Next morning the bombardment of San José recommenced, and by the afternoon a large breach had been established in its southern wall. At four o’clock General Grandjean launched a picked force, composed of the seven voltigeur companies of the 14th and 44th regiments, upon the crumbling defences[127]. The garrison had already begun to quit the untenable post, and only a minority remained behind to fight to the last. The storming column entered without much loss, partly by laying scaling-ladders to the foot of the breach, partly by using a small bridge of planks across the ditch, which the Spaniards had forgotten to remove. They only lost thirty-eight men, and made prisoners of about fifty of the garrison who had refused to retire into the city when the rest fled.
Though San José was thus easily captured, it was difficult to establish a lodgement in it, for the batteries on the enceinte of Saragossa searched it from end to end, dominating its ruined quadrangle from a superior height. But during the night the besiegers succeeded in blocking up its gorge, and in connecting the breach with their second parallel by a covered way of sandbags and fascines. The convent was now the base from which they were to attack the town-walls behind it.
But before continuing the advance in this direction it was necessary to carry the fort of Our Lady of the Pillar, the other great outwork of the southern front of Saragossa. The main attention of the besiegers was directed against this point from the twelfth to the fifteenth, and their sapping gradually took them to within a few yards of the counterscarp. The Spanish fire had been easily subdued, and a practicable breach established. On the night of the fifteenth-sixteenth the fort was stormed by the Poles of the 1st regiment of the Vistula. They met with little or no resistance, the greater part of the garrison having withdrawn when the assault was seen to be imminent. A mine under the glacis exploded, but failed to do any harm: another, better laid, destroyed the bridge over the Huerba, behind the fort, when the work was seen to be in the power of the assailants. Lacoste reported to Junot that the Poles lost only one killed and two wounded—an incredibly small casualty list[128].
The fall of the fort of the Pillar gave the French complete possession of all the ground to the south of the Huerba, and left them free to attack the enceinte of the city, which had now lost all its outer works save the Aljafferia: in front of that castle the ‘false attack’ made little progress, for the besiegers did not press in close, and contented themselves with battering the old mediaeval fortress from a distance. On that part of the line of investment nothing of importance was to happen.
SECTION XI: CHAPTER II
SIEGE OF SARAGOSSA: THE FRENCH WITHIN THE WALLS: THE STREET-FIGHTING: THE SURRENDER
Lacoste’s first care, when the Pillar and San José had both fallen into his hands, was to connect the two works by his ‘third parallel,’ which was drawn from one to the other just above the edge of the ravine of the Huerba. In order to assail the walls of the city that stream had to be crossed, a task of some difficulty, for its bed was searched by the great batteries at Santa Engracia along the whole front between the two captured forts, while north of San José the ‘Palafox Battery’ near the Porta Quemada completely overlooked the lower and broader part of the river bed. The Spaniards kept up a fast and furious fire upon the lost works, with the object of preventing the besiegers from moving forward from them, or constructing fresh batteries among their ruins. In this they were not successful: the French, burrowing deep among the débris, successfully covered themselves, and suffered little.
The second stage of the siege work, the attack on the actual enceinte of Saragossa, now began. The two points on which it was directed were the Santa Engracia battery—the southern salient of the town—and the extreme south-eastern angle of the place, where lay the Palafox Battery and the smaller work generally known as the battery of the Oil Mill (Molino de Aceite). The former was less than 200 yards from the Pillar fort, the latter not more than 100 from San José, but between them ran the deep bed of the Huerba.
From the twelfth to the seventeenth the French were busily engaged in throwing up batteries in the line of their third parallel, and on the morning of the last-named day no less than nine were ready. Five opened on Santa Engracia, four on the Palafox battery: at both points they soon began to do extensive damage, for here the walls had not been entirely reconstructed (as on the western front of the city), but only patched up and strengthened with earthworks at intervals. The masonry of the convent of Santa Engracia suffered most, and began to fall in large patches. Palafox saw that the enceinte would be pierced ere long, and that street-fighting would be the next stage of the siege. Accordingly he set the whole civil population to work on constructing barricades across the streets and lanes of the south-eastern part of the city, in the rear of the threatened points, and turned every block of houses into an independent fort by building up all the doorways and windows facing towards the enemy. The spirits of the garrison were still high, and the Captain-General had done his best to keep them up by issuing gazettes containing very roseate accounts of the state of affairs in the outer world. His communication with the open country was not completely cut, for thrice he had been able to send boats down the Ebro, which took their chance of running past the French batteries at night, and always succeeded. One of these boats had carried the Captain-General’s younger brother, Francisco Palafox, who had orders to appeal to the Catalans for help, and to raise the peasants of Lower Aragon. Occasional messengers also got in from without: one arrived on January 16 from Catalonia, with promises of aid from the Marquis of Lazan, who proposed to return from Gerona with his division, in order to fall upon the rear of the besiegers. Palafox not only let this be known, but published in his Official Gazette some utterly unfounded rumours, which the courier had brought. Reding, it was said, had beaten St. Cyr in the open field: the Duke of Infantado was marching from Cuenca on Aragon with 20,000 men. Sir John Moore had turned to bay on the pursuing forces of the Emperor, and had defeated them at a battle in Galicia in which Marshal Ney had been killed[129]. To celebrate this glorious news the church bells were set ringing, the artillery fired a general salute, and military music paraded the town. These phenomena were perfectly audible to the besiegers, and caused them many searchings of heart, for they could not guess what event the Saragossans could be celebrating.
The garrison needed all the encouragement that could be given to them, for after the middle of January the stress of the siege began to be felt very heavily. Food was not wanting—for, excepting fresh meat and vegetables, everything was still procurable in abundance. But cold and overcrowding were beginning to cause epidemic disorders. The greater part of the civil population had taken refuge in their cellars when the bombardment began, and after a few days spent in those dark and damp retreats, from which they only issued at night, or when they were called on for labour at the fortifications, began to develop fevers and dysentery. This was inevitable, for in most of the dwellings from twenty to forty persons of all ages were crowded in mere holes, no more than seven feet high, and almost unprovided with ventilation, where they lived, ate, and slept, packed together, and with no care for sanitary precautions[130]. The malignant fevers bred in these refuges soon spread to the garrison: though under cover, the soldiery were destitute of warm clothing (especially the Murcian battalions), and could not procure enough firewood to cook their meals. By January 20 there were 8,000 sick among the 30,000 regular troops, and every day the wastage to the hospital grew more and more noticeable. Many officers of note had already fallen in the useless sorties, and in especial a grave loss had been suffered on January 13, when Colonel San Genis, the chief engineer of the besieged, and the designer of the whole of the defences of the city, was killed on the ramparts of the Palafox battery, as he was directing the fire against the new entrenchment which the French were throwing up across the gorge of the San José fort[131]. He had no competent successor as a general director, for his underlings had no grasp of siege-strategy, and were only good at details. They built batteries and barricades and ran mines in pure opportunism, without any comprehensive scheme of defence before their eyes.
The French meanwhile were very active, though the constant increase of sickness in the 3rd Corps was daily thinning the regiments, till the proportion of men stricken down by fever was hardly less than that among the Spaniards. On the seventeenth and eighteenth Lacoste began to contrive a descent into the bottom of the ravine of the Huerba, by a series of zigzags pushed forward from the third parallel, both in the direction of Santa Engracia and in that of the Palafox battery. The latter was repeatedly silenced by the advanced batteries of the besiegers, but they could not subdue the incessant musketry fire from windows and loopholes which swept the whole bed of the Huerba, and rendered the work at the head of the new sap most difficult and deadly. Sometimes it had to be completely abandoned because of the plunging fire from the city[132]. Yet it was always resumed after a time: the French found that their best and easiest work was done in the early morning, when, for day after day, a dense fog rose from the Ebro, which rendered it impossible for the Spaniards to see what was going on, or to aim with any certainty at the entrenchments. Irritated at the steady if slow progress of the enemy, Palafox launched on the afternoon of January 23 the most desperate sortie that his army had yet essayed against the advanced works of the French. At four o’clock on that day[133] three columns dashed out and attacked the line of trenches: one, as a blind, was sent out opposite the Aljafferia, to distract the attention of Morlot’s division from the main sally. The other two were serious attacks, but both made with too small numbers—apparently no more than 200 picked men in each. The left-hand column became hotly engaged with the trenches to the north of San José, and got no further forward than a house a little beyond the Huerba, from which they expelled a French post. But the right-hand force carried out a very bold programme. Crossing the Huerba below Santa Engracia, they broke through the third parallel, and then made a dash at two mortar-batteries in the second parallel which had particularly annoyed the defence on that morning. The commander of the sortie, Mariano Galindo, a captain of the Volunteers of Aragon, led his men so straight that they rushed in with the bayonet on the first battery and spiked both its pieces. They were making for the second when they were overwhelmed by the trench guard and by reinforcements hurrying up from Musnier’s camp. Of a hundred men who had gone forward with Galindo from the third parallel twelve were killed and thirty, including their brave leader, taken prisoners. The French stated their loss at no more than six killed and five wounded, a figure that seems suspiciously low, considering that the first line of trenches had been stormed by the assailants, and a battery in the second line captured and disabled. Galindo had gone forward more than 500 yards, into the very middle of the French works, before he was checked and surrounded. It was a very gallant exploit, but once more we are constrained to ask why Palafox told off for it no more than a mere handful of men. What would have happened had he thrown a solid column of 10,000 men upon the siege-works, instead of a few hundred volunteers?
On the twenty-second, the day before Galindo’s sortie, Junot was superseded in command of the besieging army by Lannes, who had been restored to health by two months’ holiday, and was now himself again. He arrived just in time to take charge of the important task of storming the main enceinte, for which Junot’s preparations were now far advanced. But though the siege operations looked not unpromising, he found the situation grave and dangerous. Belmas and the other French historians describe this as the most critical epoch of the whole Saragossan episode[134]. The fact was that at last there were beginning to be signs of movement in the open country of Aragon. During the month that had elapsed since the siege began, the peasantry had been given time to draw together. Francisco Palafox, after escaping from the city, had gone to Mequinenza, and was arming the local levies with muskets procured from Catalonia. He had already a great horde assembled in the direction of Alcañiz. On the other bank of the Ebro Colonel Perena had been organizing a force at Huesca, from northern Aragon and the foot-hills of the Pyrenees. Lastly, it was known that Lazan was on his way from Gerona to aid his brothers, and had brought to Lerida his division of 4,000 men[135], a comparatively well-organized body of troops, which had been under arms since October. Even far back, on the way to Pampeluna, insurgents had gathered in the Sierra de Moncayo, and were threatening the important half-way post of Tudela, by which the besieging army kept up its communication with France.
Hitherto these gatherings had looked dangerous, but had done no actual harm. General Wathier, with the cavalry of the 3rd Corps, had scoured the southern bank of the Ebro and kept off the insurgents; but now they were pressing closer in, and on January 20 a battalion, which Gazan had sent out to drive away Perena’s levies, had been checked and beaten off at Perdiguera, only twelve miles from the camp of the besiegers.
Lannes could not fail to see that if he committed himself to the final assault on Saragossa, and entangled the 3rd Corps in street-fighting, he might find himself assailed from the rear on all points of his lines. There were no troops whatever in front of Saragossa to form a ‘covering-force’ to beat off the insurgents, if they should come down upon his camps while he was storming the city, for the 3rd Corps and Gazan’s division had now only 20,000 infantry for the conduct of the siege.
Accordingly the Marshal resolved to undo the Emperor’s arrangements for keeping up the line of communication with Madrid, and to draw in Mortier, with Suchet’s strong and intact division, from Calatayud, where he had been lying for the last three weeks. This was the only possible force which he could use to provide himself with a covering army. The touch with Madrid, a thing of comparatively minor importance, had to be sacrificed, except so far as it could be kept up by the division of Dessolles, which had now come back from the pursuit of Sir John Moore, and had pushed detachments back to its old posts at Sigüenza and Guadalajara.
Mortier therefore evacuated Calatayud by the orders of Lannes, and came back to the Ebro: passing behind the besieging army he crossed the river and took post at Perdiguera with 10,000 men, facing the levies of Perena in the direction of Huesca. It was only when he had made certain of having this powerful reinforcement close at hand, ready to deal with any interference from without, that Lannes dared to proceed with the assault. At the same time that Mortier arrived at Perdiguera, he sent out Wathier, with two battalions and two regiments of cavalry, to deal with the insurgents of the Lower Ebro, where Francisco Palafox had been busy. Four or five thousand peasants with one newly-levied regiment of Aragonese volunteers tried to resist this small column, but were beaten on the twenty-sixth in front of the town of Alcañiz, which fell into Wathier’s hands, and with it 20,000 sheep and 1,500 sacks of flour, which had been collected for the revictualling of Saragossa, in case the investment should be broken. They were a welcome windfall to the besieging army, where food was none too plentiful, since the plain country where it lay encamped had now been eaten bare, and convoys of food from Tudela and Pampeluna were rare and inadequate.
On January 24 the French had succeeded in pushing three approaches across the Huerba, and were firmly established under its northern bank. Two days later they made lodgements in ruins, cellars, and low walls where buildings had been pulled down, in the narrow space between the town wall and the river bank, below the Palafox battery. The cannon of the defenders could only act intermittently: every night the parapets were repaired, but every morning after a few hours of artillery duel the Spanish guns were silenced by the dreadful converging fire poured in upon them. Meanwhile Palafox was heaping barricade upon barricade in the quarters behind the threatened points, and fortifying the houses and convents which connected them.
The final crisis arrived on the twenty-seventh. There were now three practicable breaches,—two were on the side of the Palafox battery, one in the convent of Santa Engracia. To storm the first and second Lannes told off the light companies of the first brigade of Grandjean’s division; to the third was allotted the 1st regiment of the Vistula from Musnier’s division. Heavy supports lay behind them, in the third parallel, with orders to rush in if the storming parties should prove successful.
The assault was delivered with great dash and swiftness at noon on the twenty-seventh. On two points it was successful. At the most northern breach the assailants reached the summit of the wall, but could not get down into the city, on account of the storm of musketry from barricades and houses that swept the gap into which they had advanced. They merely made a lodgement in the breach itself, and could penetrate no further. But in the central breach, close beneath the Palafox battery, the voltigeurs not only passed the walls, but seized the ‘Oil Mill’ which abutted on them, and a triangular block of houses projecting into the town. At the Santa Engracia breach they were even more fortunate: the Poles carried the convent with their first rush: its outer wall had been battered down for a breadth of thirty yard and entering there the stormers drove out the Spaniards from the interior buildings of the place, and got into the large square which lies behind it, where they seized the Capuchin nunnery. Thus a considerable wedge was driven through the enceinte, and the Spaniards had to evacuate the walls for some little distance on each side of Santa Engracia. From the stretch to the west of that convent they were driven out by an unpremeditated assault of Musnier’s supports, who ran out from the trenches on the left of the Huerba, and escaladed the dilapidated wall in front of them, when they saw the garrison drawing back on account of the flanking fire from Santa Engracia. They got possession of the whole outer enceinte as far as the Trinitarian convent by the Carmen gate.
These successes were bought at the moderate loss of 350 men, of whom two-thirds fell in the fighting on the Santa Engracia front; the Spaniards lost somewhat more, including a few prisoners. In any ordinary siege the day would have settled the fate of the place, for the besiegers had broken through the enceinte in two places, and though the space seized inside the Palafox battery was not large, yet on each side of Santa Engracia the assailants had penetrated so far that a quarter of a mile of the walls was in their possession. But Saragossa was not as other places, and the garrison were perfectly prepared with a new front of defence, composed of batteries and crenellated houses in rear of the lost positions. Two wedges, one large and one small, had been driven into the town, but they had to be broadened and driven further in if they were to have any effect.
On the twenty-eighth, therefore, a new stage of the siege began, and the street-fighting, which was to last for twenty-four days more, had its commencement. Lannes had heard, from those who had served under Verdier in the first siege, of the deplorable slaughter and repeated repulses that had followed the attempt to carry by main force the internal defences of the city. To hurl solid columns of stormers at the barricades and the crenellated houses was not his intention. He had made up his mind to advance by sap and mine, as if he were dealing with regular fortifications. His plan was to use each block of houses that he gained as a base for the attack upon the next, and never to send in the infantry with the bayonet till he had breached by artillery, or by mines, the building against which the assault was directed. This form of attack was bound to be slow, but it had the great merit of costing comparatively little in the way of casualties. The fact was that the Marshal had not the numbers which would justify him in wasting lives by assaults which might or might not be successful, but which were certain to prove very bloody. The whole Third Corps, as we have already seen, did not now furnish much more than 13,000 bayonets, while Gazan’s men were all occupied in watching the suburb, and Suchet’s lay far out, as a covering corps set to watch Perena and Lazan.
There was no one single dominating position in the city whose occupation was likely to constrain the besieged to surrender. The whole town is built on a level, and its fifty-three solidly-built churches and convents formed so many forts, each of which was defensible in itself and could not be reduced save by a direct attack. All that could be done was to endeavour to capture them one by one, in the hope that at last the Saragossans would grow tired of their hopeless resistance, and consent to surrender, when they realized that things had gone so far that they could only protract, but could not finally beat off, the slow advance of the besieging army.
The work of the French, therefore, consisted in spreading out from their two separate lodgements on the eastern and southern sides of the city, with the simple object of gaining ground each day and of driving the Spaniards back towards the centre of the place. On the right attack the most important objective of the besiegers was the block of monastic buildings to the north of the Palafox battery, the twin convents of San Augustin and Santa Monica, which lay along the northern side of the small wedge that they had driven into the north-eastern corner of the town. As these buildings lay on ground slightly higher than that which the French had occupied, it was difficult to attack them by means of mines. But an intense converging fire was brought to bear upon them, both from batteries outside the walls, playing across the Huerba, and by guns brought inside the captured angle of the enceinte. The outer walls of Santa Monica were soon a mass of ruins: nevertheless the first attack on it [January 29] was beaten off, and it was only on the next day, after twenty-four hours more of furious bombardment, that Grandjean’s men succeeded in storming, first the convent and then its church, after a furious hand-to-hand fight with the defenders.
After establishing themselves in Santa Monica the French were able to capture some of the adjoining houses, and to turn their attention against its neighbour San Augustin. They ran two mines under it, and at the same time battered it heavily from the external batteries beyond the Huerba. On February I the explosion took place: it opened a breach in the east end of the convent church, and the storming party, entering by the sacristy, got possession of the choir chapels and the high altar. But the Spaniards rallied in the nave, ran a barricade of chairs and benches across it, and held their own for some time, firing down from the pulpit and the organ loft with effect. Some climbed up into the roof and picked off the French through the holes which the bombardment had left in the ceiling. For some hours this strange indoor battle raged within the spacious church. But at last the French carried the nave, and at night only the belfry remained untaken. Its little garrison pelted the French with grenades all day, and saved themselves at dusk by a sudden and unexpected dash through the enemy.
In the first flush of success, after San Augustin had been stormed, the 44th regiment, from Grandjean’s division, tried to push on through the streets towards the centre of the town. They captured several barricades and houses, and struggled on till they had nearly reached the Coso. But this sort of fighting was always dangerous in Saragossa: the citizens kept up such a fierce fire from their windows, and swarmed out against the flanks of the column in such numbers, that the 44th had to give back, lost all that it had taken beyond San Augustin, and left 200 dead and wounded behind. Even the formal official reports of the French engineers speak with respect of the courage shown by the besieged on this day. The houses which they had lost in the afternoon they retook in the dusk, by an extraordinary device. Finding the French solidly barricaded in them, and proof against any attack from the street, hundreds of the defenders climbed upon the roofs, tore up the tiles and entered by the garrets, from which they descended and drove out the invaders by a series of charges which cleared story after story[136]. Many monks, and still more women, were seen among the armed crowds which swept the assailants back towards Santa Monica. It was especially noticed that the civilians did far more of the fighting than the soldiers. This was their own special battle.
Irritated at his losses on this day, Lannes issued a general order, expressly forbidding any attempts to storm houses and barricades by main force. After an explosion, the troops were to seize the building that had been shattered, and to cover themselves in it; they were not to go forward and fall upon intact defences further to the front.
While the struggle was raging thus fiercely from January 28 to February 1, in the eastern area of street-fighting, there had been a no less desperate series of combats all around Santa Engracia, on the southern front of attack. Here Musnier’s division was endeavouring to drive the Spaniards out of the blocks of houses to the right and left of the captured convent. They worked almost entirely by mines, running tunnels forward from beneath the convent to blow down the walls of the adjoining dwellings. But even when the mines had gutted the doomed buildings, it was not easy to seize them: the few men who survived the explosion did not fly, but held out among the ruins, and had to be bayonetted by the assailants who rushed out from the convent to occupy the new lodgements. Time after time the defenders, though perfectly conscious that they were being undermined, and that by staying on guard they were courting certain death, refused to evacuate the threatened houses or to retire into safety. Hence their losses were awful, but the French too suffered not a little, while pushing forward to occupy each building as it was cleared by the explosion. The constant rain of musket balls from roofs and church towers searched out the ruins in which they had to effect their lodgements, and many of the assailants fell before they could cover themselves among the débris.
On the thirty-first the Spaniards made a sudden rush from the Misericordia buildings, to recover the Trinitarian convent, the most western point on the enceinte which had fallen into the hands of the French at the assault of the twenty-seventh. They charged in upon it with the greatest fury, and blew open the gate with a four-pounder gun which they dragged up by hand to the very threshold. But the French had built up the whole entrance with sandbags, which held even when the doors had been shattered; and, after persisting for some time in a fruitless attempt to break in, the Saragossans had to retire, foiled and greatly thinned in numbers.
On the following day (February 1) the French began to move forward from Santa Engracia towards the Coso, always clearing their way by explosions, and risking as few men as possible. Nevertheless they could not always keep under cover, and this day they suffered a severe loss: their chief engineer, General Lacoste, was shot through the head, while reconnoitring from a window the houses against which his next attack was to be directed[137]. He was succeeded in command by Colonel Rogniat, one of the French historians of the siege. That officer, as he tells us, discovered that his sappers were using too large charges of powder, which destroyed the roofs and four walls of each house that they undermined, so that the infantry who followed had no cover when they first took possession. He therefore ordered the substitution of smaller measures of powder, so as to throw down only parts of the wall of the building nearest to the French lines, and to leave the roof and the outer walls uninjured. In this way it was much more easy to establish a lodgement, since the storming-party were covered the moment that they had dashed into the shattered shell. The only plan which the Spaniards could devise against this method of procedure, was to set fire to the ruins, and to prevent the entry of the assailants by burning down all that was left of the house. As the buildings of Saragossa contained little woodwork, and were not very combustible[138], the besieged daubed the walls with tar and resin to make them blaze the better. When an explosion had taken place, the surviving defenders set fire to the débris of floors and roofs before retiring[139]. In this way they sometimes kept the French back for as much as two days, since they could not make their lodgement till the cinders had time to cool. Countermining against the French approaches was often tried, but seldom with success, for there were no trained miners in the city: the one battalion of sappers which Palafox possessed had been formed from the workmen of the Canal of Aragon, who had no experience in subterranean work. On the other hand the French had three whole companies of miners, beside eight more of sappers, who were almost as useful in the demolition of the city. They maintained a distinct ascendent underground, though they not unfrequently lost men in the repeated combats with knife and pistol which ensued when mine and countermine met, and the two sides fought for the possession of each other’s galleries.
The first week of February was now drawing to its close, and the advance of the French into the city, though steady, had been extremely slow. Every little block of five or six houses cost a day to break up, and another to entrench. The waste of life, though not excessive, was more than Lannes could really afford, and he waited impatiently, but in vain, for any signs that the obstinacy of the defence was slackening. But though he could not see it, the garrison were being tried far more hardly than the besiegers. It was not so much the loss by fire and sword that was ruining them as the silent ravages of the epidemic fevers. Since the French had got within the walls, and the bombardment of the city was being carried on from a shorter range than before, the civilian population had been forced to cling more closely than ever to its fetid cellars, and the infectious fever which had appeared in January was developing at the most fearful rate. Living under such insanitary conditions, and feeding on flour and salt fish, for the vegetables had long been exhausted, the Saragossans had no strength to bear up against the typhus. Whole families died off, and their bodies lay forgotten, tainting the air and spreading the contagion. Even where there were survivors, they could not easily dispose of the dead, for the urban cemeteries were gorged, and burials took place in trenches hastily opened in streets or gardens. Outside the churches there were hundreds of corpses, some coffined, others rolled in shrouds or sheets, waiting in rows for the last services of the church, which the surviving clergy were too few to read. The shells from the incessant bombardment were continually falling in these open spaces, and tearing the dead to pieces. Ere the siege was over there was a mass of mutilated and decaying bodies heaped in front of every church door. Hundreds more lay in the debatable ground for which the Spaniards and French were contending, and the whole town reeked with contagion. The weather was generally still and warm for the time of year, with a thick fog rising every morning from the low ground by the Ebro. The smoke from the burning houses lay low over the place, and the air was thick with the mingled fumes of fire and pestilence. If it nauseated the French, who had the open country behind them, and were relieved by regiments at intervals, and allowed a rest in their camps outside the walls, it was far more terrible to the Spaniards. The death rate rose, as February drew on, from 300 up to 500 and even 600 a day. The morning state of the garrison on the fourth day of the month showed 13,737 sick and wounded, and only 8,495 men under arms. As the total had been 32,000 when the siege began, nearly 10,000 men must already have perished by the sword or disease. The civil population, containing so many women, children, and aged persons, was of course dying at a much quicker rate. Yet the place held out for sixteen days longer! Palafox himself was struck down by the fever, but still issued orders from his bed, and poured out a string of hysterical proclamations, in which his delirium is clearly apparent.
The terrible situation of the Saragossans was to a large extent concealed from the besiegers, who only saw the line of desperate fighting-men which met them in every house, and could only guess at the death and desolation that lay behind. Every French eye-witness bears record to the low spirits of the troops who were compelled to fight in the long series of explosions and assaults which filled the early weeks of February. The engineer Belmas, the most matter-of-fact of all the historians of the siege, turns aside for a moment from his traverses and mining-galleries, to describe the murmurs of the weary infantry of the 3rd Corps. ‘Who ever heard before,’ they asked, ‘of an army of 20,000 men being set to take a town defended by 50,000 madmen? We have conquered a quarter of it, and now we are completely fought out. We must halt and wait for reinforcements, or we shall all perish, and be buried in these cursed ruins, before we can rout out the last of these fanatics from their last stronghold[140].’ Lannes did his best to encourage the rank and file, by showing them that the Spaniards were suffering far more than they, and by pointing out that the moment must inevitably come when the defence must break down from mere exhaustion. He also endeavoured to obtain reinforcements from the Emperor, but only received assurances that some conscripts and convalescents for the 3rd Corps should be sent to him from Pampeluna and Bayonne. No fresh regiments could be spared from France, when the affairs of Central Europe were looking so doubtful[141]. The best plan which the Marshal could devise for breaking down the resolution of the Spaniards was to lengthen his front of attack, and so endeavour to distract the attention of the besieged from the main front of advance towards the Coso.
This was only to be done by causing the division of Gazan, which had so long remained passive in front of the suburb, to open an energetic attack on that outlying part of the fortress. The advantage to be secured in this direction was not merely that a certain amount of the defenders would be drawn away from the city. If the suburb were captured it would be possible to erect batteries in it, which would search the whole northern side of Saragossa, the one quarter of the city which was still comparatively unaffected by the bombardment. Here the bulk of the civil population was crowded together, and here too Palafox had collected the greater part of his stores and magazines. If the last safe corner of the city were exposed to a bombardment from a fresh quarter, it would probably do much to lower the hopes of the defenders.
During the last days of January Gazan’s division had pressed back the Spanish outposts in front of the suburb, and on the thirtieth of that month Lannes had sent over two companies of siege artillery, to construct batteries opposite the convents of Jesus and San Lazaro. It was not till February 2-3, however, that he ordered a serious and active attack to be pressed in this quarter. From the trench which covered the front of Gazan’s investing lines a second parallel was thrown out, and two breaching batteries erected against the Jesus convent: on the fourth an advance by zigzags was pushed still further forward, and more guns brought up. Some little delay was caused by an unexpected swelling of the Ebro, which inundated that part of the trenches which lay nearest to the river: but by the eighth all was ready for the assault. The Jesus convent, as a glance at the map will readily show, was the most projecting point of the defences of the suburb, and was not well protected by any flanking fire from the other works—indeed it was only helped to any appreciable extent by a long fire across the water from the northern side of Saragossa, and by the few gunboats which were moored near the bridge. It was a weak structure—merely a brick convent with a ditch beyond it—and the breaching batteries had found no difficulty in opening many large gaps in its masonry. On the eighth it was stormed by Taupin’s brigade of Gazan’s division: the garrison made a creditable resistance, which cost the French ninety men, and then retired to San Lazaro and the main fortifications of the suburb. The French established themselves in the convent, and connected it with their siege-works, finally turning its ruins into part of the third parallel, which they began to draw out against the remaining transpontine works. They would probably have proceeded to complete their operations in this direction within the next two or three days, if it had not been for an interruption from without. The two brothers, Lazan and Francisco Palafox, had now united their forces, and had come forward to the line of the Sierra de Alcubierre, only twenty miles from Saragossa, the former with his 4,000 men from Catalonia, the latter with a mass of peasants. Mortier, from his post at Perdiguera, reported their approach to Lannes, and the latter went out in person to meet them, taking with him Guérin’s brigade of Gazan’s division, and leaving only that of Taupin to hold the lines opposite the suburb. Faced by the 12,000 veteran bayonets of the 5th Corps, the two Palafoxes felt that they were helpless, and retreated towards Fraga and Lerida, without attempting to fight. On the thirteenth, therefore, Lannes came back to the siege with the troops that he had drawn away from it. While he was absent Palafox had a splendid opportunity for a sortie on a large scale against Taupin and his isolated brigade, for only 4,000 men were facing the suburb. But the time had already gone by in which the garrison was capable of such an advance. They could not now dispose of more than 10,000 men, soldiers and peasants and citizens all included, and none of these could be drawn away from the city, where the fighting-line was always growing weaker. Indeed, its numbers were so thinned by the epidemic that Palafox was guarding the Aljafferia with no more than 300 men, and manning the unattacked western front with convalescents from the hospitals, who could hardly stand, and often died at their posts during the cold and damp hours of the night. All his available efficients were engaged in the street-fighting with the 3rd Corps.
For while the attack on the suburb was being pressed, the slow advance of the besiegers within the walls was never slackened. On some days they won a whole block of houses by their mining operations: on others they lost many men and gained no advantage. The right attack was extending itself towards the river, and working from the convent of San Augustin into the quarter of the Tanneries. At the same time it was also moving on toward the Coso, but with extreme slowness, for the Spaniards made a specially desperate defence in the houses about the University and the Church of the Trinity. One three-storied building, which covered the traverse across the Coso to the south of the University, stood ten separate assaults and four explosions, and held out from the ninth to the eighteenth, effectually keeping back the advance of the besiegers in this direction[142]. Nor could the French ever succeed in connecting their field of operations on this front with that which centred around Santa Engracia. Down to the very end of the siege the Saragossans clung desperately to the south-eastern corner of the city, and kept control of it right down to the external walls and the bank of the Huerba, where they still possessed a narrow strip of 300 yards of the enceinte.
The left attack of the French, that from the Santa Engracia side, made much more progress, though even here it was slow and dearly bought. On February 10, however, in spite of several checks, the besiegers for the first time forced their way as far as the Coso, working through the ruined hospital which had been destroyed in the first siege. On the same day, at the north-western angle of their advance, they made a valuable conquest in the church and convent of San Francisco. A mine was driven under this great building from the ruins of the hospital, and filled with no less than 3,000 pounds of powder. It had not been discovered by the Spaniards, and the convent was full of fighting-men at the moment of the explosion. The whole grenadier company of the 1st regiment of Valencia and 300 irregulars were blown up, and perished to a man[143]. Nor was this all: in the northern part of the building was established the main factory for military equipment of the Army of Aragon: it was crammed with workpeople, largely women, for Palafox had forgotten or refused to withdraw the dépôt to a less convenient and spacious but more safe position. All these unfortunate non-combatants, to the number of at least 400, perished, and the roof-tops for hundreds of yards around were strewn with their dismembered limbs.
It might have been expected that, as the immediate consequence of this awful catastrophe, the French would have made a long step forward in this direction. But such was not the case: before the smoke had cleared away Spaniards rushed forward from the inner defences, and occupied part of the ruins of San Francisco. A body of peasants, headed by the émigré colonel de Fleury, got into the bell-tower of the convent, which had not fallen with the rest, and kept up from its leads a vigorous plunging fire upon the besiegers, when they stole forward to burrow into the mass of débris. But with the loss of some thirty men the French succeeded in mastering two-thirds of the ruins: next day they cleared the rest, and stormed the belfry, where de Fleury and his men were all bayonetted after a desperate fight on the winding stairs. It was first from the commanding height of this steeple that the French officers obtained a full view of the city. The sight was encouraging to them: they could realize how much the inner parts of the place had suffered from the bombardment, and noted with their telescopes the small number of defenders visible behind the further barricades, the heaps of corpses in the streets, and the slow and dejected pace of the few passengers visible. Two great gallows with corpses hanging from them especially attracted the eyes of the onlookers[144]. Other circumstances united on this and the following day (February 11-12) to show that the defence was at last beginning to slacken. A great mob of peasants, mainly women, came out of the Portillo gate towards Morlot’s trenches, and prayed hard for permission to go through the lines to their villages. They were not fired on, but given a loaf apiece, and then driven back into the city. It was still more significant that at night, on the eleventh, four or five bodies of deserters stole out to the French; they were all foreigners, belonging to the ‘Swiss’ battalion[145] which was shut up in Saragossa: several officers were among them. To excuse themselves they said that Palafox and the friars were mad, and that they judged that all further defence had become impossible. Yet the siege was to endure for nine days longer[146]!
Though the two main attacks continued to press slowly forward, and that on the left had now reached the Coso and covered a front of 100 yards on the southern side of that great street, it was not on this front that the decisive blow was destined to be given. On the eighteenth Lannes determined to deliver the great assault on the suburb, where the batteries in the third parallel and about the Jesus convent had now completely shattered the San Lazaro defences. All Gazan’s men being now back in their trenches, since Mortier’s expedition had driven off the Marquis of Lazan, Lannes considered that he might safely risk the storm. Fifty-two siege-guns played on San Lazaro throughout the morning of the eighteenth, and no less than eight practicable breaches were opened in it and the works to its right and left. At noon three storming columns leaped out of the trenches and raced for the nearest of these entries. All three burst through: there was a sharp struggle in the street of the suburb, and then the French reached and seized a block of houses at the head of the bridge, which cut the defence in two and rendered a retreat into Saragossa almost impossible. The Spaniards, seeing that all was lost, split into two bodies: one tried to force its way across the bridge; but only 300 passed; the rest were slain or captured. The main part, consisting of the defenders of the western front of the suburb, formed in a solid mass and, abandoning their defences, tried to escape westward up the bank of the Ebro, into the open country. They got across the inundation in their front, but when they had gone thus far were surrounded by two regiments of French cavalry, and forced to surrender. They numbered 1,500 men, under General Manso, commanding the 3rd division of Palafox’s army, the one which furnished the garrison of the suburb. The officer commanding the whole transpontine defence, Baron de Versage, had been killed by a cannon-ball on the bridge.
This was not the only disaster suffered by the Saragossans on the eighteenth: at three in the afternoon, when the news of the loss of the suburb had had time to spread round the town, and the attention of the besieged was distracted to this side, Grandjean’s division attacked the houses and barricades in the north-eastern part of the city, which had so long held them at bay. A great mine opened a breach in the University, which was stormed, and with it fell the houses on each side, as far as the Coso. At the same time another attack won some ground in the direction of the Trinity convent, and the Ebro. Next day the Spaniards in this remote corner of the town, almost cut off from the main body of the defenders, and now battered from the rear by new works thrown up in the suburb, in and about San Lazaro, drew back and abandoned the quarter of the Tanneries, the quays, and the outer enceinte looking over the mouth of the Huerba.
On the nineteenth it was evident that the end had come: a third of the ever-dwindling force of effective men of which Palafox could dispose had been killed or captured at the storm of San Lazaro. The city was now being fired on from the north, the only side which had hitherto been safe. The epidemic was worse than ever—600 a day are said to have died during the final week of the siege. The last mills which the garrison possessed had lately been destroyed, and no more flour was issued, but unground corn, which had to be smashed up between paving-stones, or boiled and eaten as a sort of porridge. The supply of powder was beginning to run low; not from want of material to compound it, but from the laboratories having been mostly destroyed and from the greater part of the arsenal workmen having died. Only about 700 pounds a day [six quintals] could now be turned out, and the daily expenditure in the mines and barricades came to much more.
On this morning the French noted that at many points the defence seemed to be slackening, and that parts of the line were very feebly manned. They made more progress this day than in any earlier twenty-four hours of the siege. Their main work, however, was to run six large mines under the Coso, till they got below the houses on its further side, somewhat to the right of San Francisco. Rogniat placed 3,000 pounds of powder in each, a quantity that was calculated to blow up the whole quarter.
It was not necessary to use them. The spirits of the defenders had at last been broken, and surrender was openly spoken of—though its mention ten days earlier would have cost the life of the proposer. Palafox on his sick bed understood that all was over; he sent for General St. March and resigned the military command to him. But in order that he might not seem to be shirking his responsibility, and trying to put the ignominy of asking for terms on his successor, he sent his aide-de-camp Casseillas to Lannes, offering surrender, but demanding that the troops should march out with the honours of war and join the nearest Spanish army in the field. Then he turned his face to the wall, and prepared to die, for the fever lay heavy upon him, and broken with despair and fatigue he thought that he had not many hours to live. St. March’s appointment not being well taken—the loss of the Monte Torrero was still remembered against him—Palafox’s last act was to give over charge of the city to a Junta of thirty-three persons[147], mainly local notables and clergy, to whom the finishing of the negotiations would fall.
Of course Lannes sent back the Captain-General’s aide-de-camp with the message that he must ask for unconditional surrender, and that the proposal that the garrison should be allowed to depart was absurd. The fighting was resumed on the morning of the twentieth, and the French were making appreciable progress, when the Junta once more sent to ask terms from the besiegers. It was not without some bitter debate among themselves that they took this step, for there was still a minority, including St. March and the priest Padre Consolation, who wished to continue the resistance. They were backed by a section of the citizens, who began to collect and to raise angry cries of Treason. But the whole of the soldiery and the major part of the civilian defenders were prepared to yield. At four o’clock in the afternoon they sent out to ask for a twenty-four hours’ truce to settle terms of surrender. Lannes granted them two hours to send him out a deputation charged with full powers to capitulate, and ordered the bombardment and the mining to cease. His aide-de-camp, who bore the message, was nearly murdered by fanatics in the street[148], and was rescued with difficulty by some officers of the regular army. But the Junta sent him back with the message that the deputation should be forthcoming, and within the stipulated time eleven of its members came out from the Portillo gate[149], to the Marshal’s head quarters on the Calatayud road. There was not much discussion: Lannes contented himself with pointing out to the Spaniards that the place was at his mercy: he had the plan of his siege-works unrolled before them, and pointed out the position of the six great mines under the Coso[150], as well as those of the advanced posts which he had gained during the last two days. The deputies made some feeble attempts to secure that the name of Ferdinand VII should appear in the articles of capitulation, and that the clergy should be guaranteed immunity and undisturbed possession of their benefices. Lannes waved all such proposals aside, and dictated a form of surrender which was on the whole reasonable and even generous. The garrison should march out on the following day, and lay down its arms 100 yards outside the Portillo gate. Those who would swear homage to King Joseph should have their liberty, and might take service with him if they wished. Those who refused the oath should march as prisoners to France. The city should be granted a general pardon: the churches should be respected: private property should not be meddled with. The citizens must surrender all their weapons of whatever sort. Any civil magistrates or employés who wished to keep their places must take the oath of allegiance to King Joseph.
On the following morning the garrison marched out: of peasants and soldiers there were altogether about 8,000 men, 1,500 of whom were convalescents from the Hospitals. ‘Never had any of us gazed on a more sad or touching sight,’ writes Lejeune; ‘these sickly looking men, bearing in their bodies the seeds of the fever, all frightfully emaciated, with long black matted beards, and scarcely able to hold their weapons, dragged themselves slowly along to the sound of the drum. Their clothes were torn and dirty: everything about them bore witness to terrible misery. But in spite of their livid faces, blackened with powder, and scarred with rage and grief, they bore themselves with dignity and pride. The bright coloured sashes, the large round hats surmounted by a few cock’s-feathers which shaded their foreheads, the brown cloaks or ponchos flung over their varied costumes, lent a certain picturesqueness to their tattered garb. When the moment came for them to pile their arms and deliver up their flags, many of them gave violent expression to their despair. Their eyes gleamed with rage, and their savage looks seemed to say that they had counted our ranks, and deeply regretted having surrendered to such a small army of enemies[151].’
Another and more matter-of-fact eye-witness adds, ‘They were a most motley crowd of men of all ages and conditions, some in uniform, more without it. The officers were mostly mounted on mules or donkeys, and were only distinguished from the men by their three-cornered hats and their large cloaks. Many were smoking their cigarillos and talking to each other with an aspect of complete indifference. But all were not so resigned. The whole garrison, 8,000 to 10,000 strong, defiled in front of us: the majority looked so utterly unlike soldiers, that our men said openly to each other that they ought not to have taken so long or spent so much trouble in getting rid of such a rabble[152].’ The column was promptly put in motion for France, under the escort of two of Morlot’s regiments. Many died on the way from the fever whose seeds they carried with them. Few or none, as might have been supposed, took advantage of the offer to save themselves from captivity by taking the oath to King Joseph.
It is sad to have to confess that the French did not keep to the terms of the capitulation. That Lannes could not restrain his men from plunder, as he had promised, was hardly surprising. There were so many empty houses and churches containing valuables, that it was not to be wondered at that the victors should help themselves to all they could find. But they also plundered occupied houses, and even stole the purses of the captive officers. What was worse was that many assassinations took place, especially of clergy, for the French looked upon the priests and friars as being mainly responsible for the desperate defence. Two in especial, Padre Basilio Bogiero, the chaplain of Palafox, and Santiago Sass, a parish priest, were shot in cold blood two days after the surrender[153]. Public opinion in the French ranks was convinced that they, more than any one else, had kept the Captain-General up to the mark. Palafox himself was treated with great brutality. As he lay apparently moribund, the French officer who had been made interim governor of Saragossa came to his bedside, and bade him to sign orders for the surrender of Jaca and Monzon. When he refused, this colonel threatened to have him shot, but left him alone when threats had no effect. Ere he was convalescent he was sent off to France, where the Emperor ordered that he should be treated, not as a prisoner of war, but as guilty of treason, and shut him up for many years as a close captive in the donjon of Vincennes.
The state in which Saragossa was found by the French hardly bears description. It was a focus of corruption, one mass of putrefying corpses. According to a report which Lannes elicited from the municipal officers, nearly 54,000 persons had died in the place since the siege began[154]. Of these about 20,000 were fighting-men, regular or irregular, the rest were non-combatants. Only 6,000 had fallen by fire and sword: the remainder were victims of the far more deadly pestilence. A few days after the siege was ended Lannes stated that the total population of the town was now only 15,000 souls, instead of the 55,000 which it had contained when the siege began. But his estimate does not include some thousands of citizens who had fled into the open country, the moment that they were released from investment, in order to escape from the contagion in the city. ‘Il est impossible que Saragosse se relève,’ wrote the marshal; ‘cette ville fait horreur à voir.’ It was weeks indeed before the dead were all buried: months before the contagion of the siege-fever died out from the miserable city. Even after five years of the capable and benevolent government of Suchet it was still half desolate, and no attempt had been made to rebuild the third of its houses and churches which had been reduced to ashes by the mines and the bombardment.
The French losses in front of Saragossa are not easy to calculate. Belmas says that the total of casualties was about 3,000 in the infantry, but he takes no notice of the losses by siege-fever, except to say that many died from it. He does not give the losses of the artillery, except of that small part of it which was not attached either to the 3rd or to the 5th Corps. Considering that the 3rd Corps alone had 13,123 sick on January 15, and that typhus is a notoriously deadly disease, it is probable that the total losses of the French during the siege amounted to 10,000 men. It is hard otherwise to explain the difference between the 37,000 men that the 3rd Corps counted in October, and the 14,000 men which it mustered when Suchet took over its command in April. The sufferings of the 5th Corps were small in comparison, for till February began it took no very serious part in the siege, and its health was notoriously far better than that of Junot’s divisions[155]. But we cannot be far wrong in concluding with Schepeler and Arteche that the total French loss must have been 10,000 men, rather than the 4,000 given by Napier, who is apparently relying on Rogniat. That officer gives only the casualties in battle, and not the losses in hospital.
So ended the siege of Saragossa—a magnificent display of civic courage, little helped by strategy or tactics. For Palafox, though a splendid leader of insurgents, was, as his conduct in October and November had shown, a very poor general. He made a gross initial mistake in shutting up 40,000 fighting-men in a place which could have been easily defended by 25,000. If he had sent one or two divisions to form the nucleus of an army of relief in Lower Aragon, with orders to harass, but not to fight pitched battles, it is hard to see how the siege could have been kept up. His second fault was the refusal to make sorties on a large scale during the first half of the siege, while he was still in possession of great masses of superfluous fighting-men. He sent out scores of petty sallies of a few hundred men, but never moved so many as 5,000 on a single day. Such a policy worried but could not seriously harm the French, while it destroyed the willing men of the garrison; if the Captain-General had saved up all the volunteers whom he lost by tens and twenties in small and fruitless attacks on the trenches, he could have built up with them a column-head that would have pierced through the French line at any point that he chose. Anything might have been done during the three weeks while Mortier was at Calatayud, and especially during the days when Gazan with his 8,000 men was cut off by the floods, and isolated on the further bank of the Ebro.
The Captain-General’s conduct, in short, was not that of a capable officer. But it is absurd to endeavour to represent him as a coward, or as a puppet whose strings were pulled by fanatical friars. He knew perfectly well what he was doing, and how to manage the disorderly but enthusiastic masses of the population[156]. There can be no doubt that his personal influence was all-important, and the effect of his constant harangues and proclamations immense. It would be quite as true to say that the friars and the mob-orators were his tools, as that he was theirs. He had to humour them, but by humouring them he got out of them the utmost possible service. Against the stories that his proclamations were written for him, and that he had to be goaded into issuing every order that came from his head quarters, we have the evidence of Vaughan and others who knew him well. It is unanimous in ascribing to him incessant activity and an exuberant fluency in composition. Arteche has preserved some minutes on the siege which he wrote long after the Peninsular War was over: they are interesting and well-stated, but more creditable to him as a patriot than as a military man[157]. There can be no doubt that the garrison might have been much more wisely handled: but it is doubtful whether under any other direction it would have shown so much energy and staying power. There is certainly no other Spanish siege, save that of Gerona, where half so much resolution was shown. If the defence had been conducted by regular officers and troops alone, the place would probably have fallen three weeks earlier. If the monks and local demagogues had been in command, and patriotic anarchy alone had been opposed to the French, Saragossa would possibly have fallen at an even earlier date, from mere want of intelligent direction. Palafox, with all his faults, supplied the connecting link between the two sections of the defenders, and kept the soldiery to work by means of the example of the citizens, while he restrained the citizens by dint of his immense personal influence over them, won in the first siege. In short, he may have been vain, bombastic, and a bad tactician, but he was a good Spaniard. If there had been a few dozen men more of his stamp in Spain, the task of the French in 1808-9 would have been infinitely more difficult. The example of Saragossa was invaluable to the nation and to Europe. The knowledge of it did much to sicken the French soldiery of the whole war, and to make every officer and man who entered Spain march, not with the light heart that he felt in Germany or Italy, but with gloom and disgust and want of confidence. They never failed to do their duty, but they fought without the enthusiasm which helped them so much in all the earlier wars of the Empire.