A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809

by Charles Oman

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.