Pushing briskly forward along the high-road, in a level treeless plateau, destitute of cover of any kind, the leading Spanish division—that of Ibarrola—came into contact about midday with the small force guarding the bridge-head, which was now in charge of Harispe, Suchet’s chief-of-the-staff. To the surprise of the Spaniards, who had expected to see these three battalions and two squadrons of hussars retire in haste, the French showed fight. Harispe was aware that Musnier could come up to his aid within an hour, and was ready for battle. His hussars charged the leading regiment of Ibarrola’s column, and threw it into disorder, while his infantry formed up in support. At this moment the Spanish general received news that Musnier was moving in towards his flank; he therefore retired, to get the support of O’Donnell, who was following him with the second division. But at the ruined village of Margalef, six miles from Lerida, the column of Musnier came up with Ibarrola, and he was so hard pressed that he formed line, with 300 cavalry on his right wing and his three guns on his left. The position was as bad a one as could be found for the Spanish division—a dead flat, with no cover. Musnier, on reaching the front, flung his cavalry, 500 cuirassiers of the 13th regiment, at the Spanish right wing. The horsemen placed there broke, and fled without crossing sabres, and the French charge fell on the flank battalion of the infantry, which was caught while vainly trying to form square. It was ridden down in a moment, and the horsemen then rolled up the whole line, regiment after regiment. A great part of Ibarrola’s corps was captured, and O’Donnell, who came on the field with the division of Pirez just as the disaster took place, could do no more than retire in good order, covering the scattered remnants of his front line. A Swiss battalion, which he told off as his rearguard, was pierced by the cuirassiers and for the most part captured. In this disastrous affair the Spaniards lost 500 killed and wounded and several thousand prisoners[356], as also four flags and the half-battery belonging to Ibarrola’s division. The French, of whom the cavalry alone were seriously engaged, are said by Suchet to have had no more than 23 killed and 82 wounded[357].
It is clear that O’Donnell must take the blame for the ruin that fell upon his little field army. He should not have been caught with his two divisions marching with an interval of four miles between them. Nor ought he to have been ignorant of the return of Musnier’s force, considering that he had 400 cavalry, who should have been exploring the whole country-side for miles around, instead of riding in a mass along with Ibarrola’s infantry. The carelessness shown was unpardonable: relying, apparently, on Garcia Conde’s dispatch—now two days old—concerning the weakness of the French beyond the Segre, the Spanish general was caught moving as if for an unopposed entry into Lerida, instead of in battle order. It may be added that he would have done well to collect more men before advancing against Suchet—8,000 bayonets and sabres were too small a force to tackle the main body of the 3rd Corps, even if they were aided by a sortie from Lerida, as O’Donnell had intended. It would have been well to make some endeavour to get troops from the Valencian army, whose 12,000 men were absolutely idle at the moment. It is true that José Caro and the Valencian Junta were very chary of sending their men outside their own border. But for such a great affair as the relief of Lerida a brigade or two might have been borrowed. There was a considerable Valencian force, at the moment, in the neighbourhood of Alcañiz.
After the combat of Margalef Suchet summoned Lerida for a second time, and offered to allow the Governor to see the prisoners and guns which he had taken from O’Donnell. Garcia Conde very rightly answered that he relied on his own forces alone, and should fight to the end. Accordingly, the regular siege began. The trenches were opened opposite the north front of the town on April 29; several days of heavy rain hindered the completion of the first parallel, but on May 7 the breaching batteries were ready and the bombardment began. The front attacked—the Carmen and Magdalena bastions—was weak: it was not protected by any flanking fires, and had neither a ditch nor a covered way. It was bound to succumb before the very heavy fire directed against it, unless the defence should succeed in beating down the fire of the breaching batteries. The Spaniards did their best, bringing up every gun that could be mounted, and replacing each injured piece as it was disabled. But the end was obvious from the first: the walls were not strong enough to resist the attack.
Meanwhile, Suchet made two successive assaults on a part of the defences very far distant from the main front of attack—the two isolated redoubts which stood on the south end of the extramural plateau, of which Fort Garden formed the main protection. He wished to gain a footing on this high ground, both because he could from thence molest the south front of the town, and because he wished to prevent the Spaniards from using the plateau as a place of refuge after the fall of the city, which he regarded as inevitable. The first attempt to take the works by escalade, on the night of April 23-24, was a disastrous failure: the Pilar was occupied for a moment, but the attack on San Fernando failed, and the dominating fire from it drove the stormers out of the smaller work, after they had held it for a few hours.
The second escalade was more successful: it was carried out on the night of May 12-13, and ended in the storming of both works. Only a small part of their garrison succeeded in escaping into Fort Garden: the besieged lost 300 men, the successful assailants only 120. The greater part of the plateau was now in the hands of the French.
On the next day, May 13, the engineers announced that the two breaches in the north front of the town walls were practicable, and that same evening Lerida was stormed. The breaches were carried with no great difficulty, but the garrison made a stubborn resistance for some time, behind traverses and fortified houses in the rear of them. When these were carried, the city was at Suchet’s mercy; but it was not at the city alone that he was aiming—he wished to master the citadel also. During the last siege of Lerida, that by the Duke of Orleans in 1707, the high-lying castle had held out for many days after the town had been lost. Suchet’s way of securing his end was effective but brutal. On the whole, it was the greatest atrocity perpetrated by any combatant, French, Spanish, or English, during the whole Peninsular War. When his troops had entered the streets, he directed columns towards each gate, and having secured possession of them all, so as to make escape into the open country impossible, bade his troops push the whole non-combatant population of Lerida uphill into the citadel, where the beaten garrison was already taking refuge. ‘The soldiery,’ as he writes, with evident complacency and pride in his ingenuity, ‘were set in a concentric movement to push the inhabitants, along with the garrison, towards the upper streets and the citadel. They were dislodged by musketry fire from street after street, house after house, in order to force them into the castle. That work was still firing, and its discharges augmented the danger and the panic of the civil population, as they were thrust, along with the wreck of the garrison, into the ditch and over the drawbridge. Pressed on by our soldiers, they hastily poured into the castle yard, before the Governor had time to order that they should not be allowed to enter.’ The castle being crammed with some fifteen thousand men, women, and children, Suchet gave orders to bombard it with every available mortar and howitzer. ‘Every shell,’ he writes, ‘that fell into the narrow space containing this multitude, fell on serried masses of non-combatants no less than of soldiery. It had been calculated that the Governor and the most determined officers would be influenced by the presence of these women, children, old folk, and unarmed peasants. As General Suchet had flattered himself would be the case, the scheme had a prompt and decisive effect.’ On the 14th at midday, Garcia Conde, unable to stand the slaughter any longer, hoisted the white flag.
It is difficult to see how the forcing of thousands of non-combatants, by means of musketry fire, on to the front of the enemy’s line of defence, differs in any way from the device, not unknown among African savages and Red Indians[358], of attacking under cover of captured women and children thrust in upon the weapons of their fathers and husbands. The act places that polished writer and able administrator Louis-Gabriel Suchet on the moral level of a king of Dahomey. He acknowledges that the plan was deliberately thought out, and that scores of his victims perished not in the subsequent bombardment, but by being shot down by his own men while the crowd was being collected and hunted forward[359]. Historians have denounced the atrocities committed by the French rank and file at Tarragona or Oporto, by the English rank and file at Badajoz or St. Sebastian, but the cultured general who worked out this most effective plan for the reduction of a hostile citadel has never had his due meed of shame. Napier’s remark that, ‘though a town taken by assault is considered the lawful prey of a licentious soldiery, yet this remnant of barbarism does not warrant the driving of unarmed and helpless people into a situation where they must perish,’ seems a sufficiently mild censure, when all the circumstances are taken into account[360].
The total number of Spanish troops surrendered by Garcia Conde in the Citadel and Fort Garden, or captured by the French during the storm, amounted to over 7,000 men, of whom about 800 were wounded lying in the hospital. It was calculated that 1,200 or 1,500 more had perished during the siege, and that about 500 of the civil population had fallen victims to Suchet’s barbarous device. The French losses during the whole series of operations had been 1,100 killed and wounded. The Spaniards declared that Garcia Conde had betrayed Lerida, and ought never to have surrendered. But the only ground for this accusation was that, after a short captivity, he did homage to King Joseph, and became an Afrancesado. Though he had shown dash and courage at Gerona, it is clear that he lacked the firmness of governors such as Mariano Alvarez, or Andrés Herrasti. His defence of Lerida had not been particularly skilful nor particularly resolute: with over 8,000 men within the walls he ought to have been able to hold out longer against Suchet’s 13,000. The most blameworthy part of his arrangements was his neglect to retrench the breaches, and to form a strong second line of temporary works behind them. Alvarez, under similar conditions, and with a garrison far less strong in comparison to the besieging army, held out for months after his walls had been breached, simply because he treated them only as an outer line of resistance, and was prepared to fight on behind his inner defences.
After the fall of Lerida, Suchet, having received through France the news that the whole of Augereau’s army was collected in the neighbourhood of Hostalrich and Gerona, made up his mind that he had better attempt nothing ambitious until the 7th Corps was in a position to help him. But there was a small task close to his hand, which was well worth undertaking in a moment of enforced leisure. This was the siege of Mequinenza, the only fortress left in Spanish hands on the eastern side of Aragon. It was a small place, but not without its strategic importance, for not only did it cover the junction of the Segre and the Ebro, but it was the highest point open for navigation on the last-named river. Any one holding Mequinenza can use the Ebro as a high-road, except in times of drought, and this was an advantage of no small importance, since the country from thence to the sea chances to be singularly destitute of roads of any kind. A few months later, Suchet found the place invaluable, as he was able to prepare his battering-train for the siege of Tortosa within its walls, and then to send all the heavy material down-stream with the minimum of trouble. Mequinenza was a small place, consisting of a few hundred houses along the river bank enclosed by a weak and old-fashioned wall, but dominated by a strong castle, which towers 500 feet above the water at the end of a spur of the Sierra de Montenegre. The garrison consisted of about 1,000 men, under a Colonel Carbon.
The very day after Lerida had fallen, Suchet sent a brigade to invest Mequinenza: more troops followed after an interval. It was clear that the taking of the town would offer small difficulty: but the castle was another matter. Its defences were independent of those of the place below, and its site was so lofty and rocky that it could not be battered from any ground accessible by existing roads. Indeed, it could only be approached along the crest of the Sierra, of which it forms the last lofty point. The main interest of the siege of Mequinenza lies in the fact that, in order to reduce the castle, the French engineers had to build a road practicable for heavy guns in zig-zags up the side of the Sierra. They had arrived in front of the place on May 15: by June 1 the road was completed: it was a piece of hard work, as in order to utilize the easiest possible slopes it had been made no less than five miles long. But when the guns had once been got up on to the crest of the mountain, Mequinenza—town and castle alike—was doomed. The town was stormed on June 5; it might have been captured long before, but there was little use in taking possession of it until the attack upon the castle had been begun. Before the storm, Colonel Carbon had wisely ordered all the large river craft in the place, eleven in number, to run down-stream to Tortosa; he was well aware that Suchet wanted to open up the navigation of the Ebro, and was resolved that he should find no vessels ready for him. Two of the craft ran ashore and were captured; the other nine got off clear.