The worst evil arising from the bombardment was one which had not been anticipated from that cause, and against which, had it been foreseen, it would hardly have been possible to provide. A great number of the inhabitants retired into cellars, the women especially retreated there with their children, for security from the shells. In these long low vaults, where wine and oil had formerly been kept, they were crowded together day and night, where it was necessary to burn lamps during the day, and where fresh air entered as scantily as daylight. Such places soon became hot-beds of infection, and other causes contributed to extend the calamity. On the first day of the siege, when the attack was made upon the suburbs, part of the troops, exhausted by the previous exertions, were under arms for some hours in the Cozo, exposed first to a heavy snow, and then to a severe frost: this produced a catarrh, which proved infectious, and was soon followed by all the dreadful symptoms of camp contagion. The number of soldiers and of countrymen would at any time have crowded the city, but more especially now, when the inhabitants of all those houses which were prepared and blockaded for street warfare were compelled to seek quarters in the inner parts of the town. The Murcian and Valencian troops came from a country where great part of their food consisted in fresh or preserved fruits; the mere change of diet from such aliment to garrison stores was sufficient to produce disease. They had also been used to drink well water: change of water is a cause of illness as frequent as it is unsuspected; and that of the Ebro, though it is preferred by the Aragonese to any other, is thought unwholesome for those who are not accustomed to it. To these causes must be added scantiness of food (an evil consequent upon the fatal error of crowding the place with men), unusual exertions, and the impossibility of recruiting exhausted strength by needful sleep in a city which was now bombarded without intermission; and among that part of the population who were not immediately engaged in the defence, fear, anxiety, and perpetual agitation of mind, predisposing the body for endemic disease.
♦Attempts of Lazan and Francisco Palafox to succour the city.♦
Every rumour of success, however preposterous in its circumstances, and incredible in itself, was readily believed by the Zaragozans; they were too ill-informed to judge of probabilities, or to understand the real condition of their country; but this they knew, that if in other parts the Spaniards did their duty as devoutly as they themselves were discharging it, the deliverance of Zaragoza and the triumph of Spain were certain. They were always in hope that some vigorous effort would be made for their relief; and, to accelerate this, D. Francisco Palafox left the city, embarked at night in a little boat, and descending the Ebro and getting to Alcañiz, began to organize the peasantry, who lost no opportunity of harassing the enemy’s communications. His situation, like that of the Marquez de Lazan, was truly pitiable; not only their brother, but their wives and families, were in Zaragoza, ... to them more than to any other individuals the inhabitants looked for succour, from the same hereditary feeling which had made them at the beginning of their troubles turn as it were naturally to the house of Palafox for a leader. But both were ordinary men, unequal to the emergency in every thing except in good-will. General Doyle was in Catalonia; he had passed through Zaragoza on his way to that province, had commanded the Spanish cavalry in a spirited and successful affair at Olite a few days before the battle of Tudela, and as a complimentary memorial of that service, Palafox had formed a legion, and named it after him. From him also, as an Englishman, the Zaragozans expected aid, and if zeal and activity could have supplied the place of adequate means, their expectations would not have been disappointed. He had been indefatigable in his exertions for storing the city before the French encamped around it: he succeeded by repeated representations to the local and provincial Juntas in making them put Mequinenza in a state of defence, ... an old town with a castle which commanded the navigation of the Ebro, about half way between Zaragoza and its mouth; and he was now endeavouring to make Reding attempt something in aid of the besieged city.
♦Condition of the army in Catalonia.♦
St. Cyr had not known how to improve a victory so well as the Spaniards did how to remedy a defeat. As soon as the fugitives from Molins de Rey brought the first tidings of their rout to Tarragona, the populace, supposing themselves to be betrayed, rose tumultuously, and took the power into their own hands. They blocked up the gates, unpaved the streets, and removed the stones to the windows and varandas, that they might be ready for a civic defence. They got possession of the arsenal, and distributed the arms and ammunition; they moved the artillery from one place to another, at the will of any one who fancied himself qualified to give orders; and they called out for the head of Vives, as the traitor who had been the cause of all their misfortunes. In this imminent danger Vives made a formal resignation of the ♦Reding takes the command.♦ command, and Reding, upon whom it devolved, was enabled to save his life by letting him be put in confinement. The superior Junta, apprehensive alike of the populace and of a siege or an immediate assault, got out of the city as soon as they could (for the people had forbidden any person to leave it), and fixed themselves at Tortosa, leaving, however, two of their members to represent them in the Junta of that district. If while this insubordination prevailed the French had attempted to carry the place by a coup-de-main, they might probably have succeeded; but St. Cyr was not so well acquainted with the inability of the Spaniards as with the difficulties of his own position. A few days after the battle a strong detachment of French appeared before the city; the generale was beaten, the somaten was sounded from the Cathedral, one of the forts fired, and the place was in the utmost confusion, when a flag of truce arrived, with a request that an aid-de-camp of M. St. Cyr might be allowed to confer with General Vives. Reding, to whom the letter was delivered, suspected that the real intent must be to discover the state of the place; he communicated it to the Junta, and two of their members, with two officers, were sent out to know the purport of the mission. It was not without difficulty that these persons could get out of the gate, so fearful were the people of being betrayed; the general opinion was, that the French had sent to summon the town, and the universal cry was, that they would not capitulate, they would listen to no such proposals, they would die for their king, their religion, and their country. It proved, however, that the aid-de-camp came only to propose an exchange of prisoners. The impolicy of agreeing to this was obvious; but Reding knew how ill the prisoners on both sides were treated, and thought it due to humanity to exchange them. The advantage was wholly on the enemy’s side; they received disciplined soldiers, who had now been many months in the country, and had had opportunities since their capture of observing the state of the Spaniards, and even learning their intentions, for every thing like secrecy seemed to be despised; and they gave in return ♦Cabañes, p. iii. c. 13.♦ only men of the new levies, not exchanging a single dragoon or artilleryman, nor one of the Swiss troops.
♦The army re-formed in Tarragona.♦
Reding was fully sensible how injurious it was that the enemy should thus be enabled to fill up their ranks; he suffered it, however, for the sake of mitigating the evils of a war in which he considered success absolutely hopeless. From the same hopelessness he committed the greater error of suffering himself to be surrounded by persons, some of whom were suspected by the superior Junta, and others by himself: but with this there was a generous feeling mingled; he would not, because they were unpopular, cease to employ men of whom he had a good opinion, nor would he upon a strong suspicion of guilt dismiss others as if they were guilty. His despondency was rooted in the constitution of his mind, but it did not make him omit any efforts for enabling the army again to take the field; and it was one happy part of the Spanish character, that no defeat, however complete and disgraceful, produced any effect in dispiriting the nation. The very men who, taking panic in battle, threw down their arms and fled, believed they had done their country good service by saving themselves for an opportunity of better fortune; and as soon as they found themselves in safety, were ready to be enrolled and take their chance again. Such of the runaways as had reached the Ebro, when they could get no farther, turned back, and came in troops to Tarragona. They came in pitiable condition, and without arms: ... Reding knew not where to look but to the English for money and muskets, and a failure of powder also was apprehended, the materials having hitherto been supplied from Zaragoza. It would have been madness to have attempted punishing any of these fugitives; the better mode of impressing upon them a sense of military duty was to let them see that their superiors could not behave ill with impunity: Reding therefore degraded one colonel and several inferior officers for their conduct at Molins de Rey, and made them serve in the ranks; but by posting them in advanced parties gave them an opportunity of retrieving their character and their rank. The government never acted with so much energy as when it was refitting an army after a defeat: its efforts were then such as the danger required. Two regiments arrived from Granada, a Swiss one from Majorca; supplies were sent from Valencia; men came in from all quarters as the hopes of the people rose, and by the middle of January the force in Tarragona was not inferior to that which had been so shamefully dispersed at Granollers. The men recovered heart, and acquired confidence from frequent success in the desultory warfare wherein Reding practised them. But he himself continued[3] to despond; ♦Cabañes, p. iii. c. 13.♦ and, in sad anticipation of defeat, deferred acting, when activity and enterprise might have found or made opportunities for success.
♦Conduct of the French under St. Cyr.♦
It was their victories which made the French most sensible of the difference between this and the other wars wherein they had been engaged; ... the spoils of the field were the only fruits of success. These indeed had been of signal consequence in Catalonia; they had enabled St. Cyr to relieve Barcelona, to refit his troops, and to strengthen himself with a park of field-pieces. He had profited by the first panic to dislodge the Spaniards from the pass of Bruch, which they had twice so gloriously defended; his troops had entered Igualada after the success, and the dangerous impression which his ostentation of justice and his observance of the humanities of war were likely to produce upon the wealthier classes, was seen by the conduct of the inhabitants, who seemed to think it a matter of indifference whether their houses were occupied by the national troops or by the French. But the system upon which Buonaparte carried on this wicked war rendered it impossible for any general to persist in a course of honourable conduct. The army which he had ordered into Catalonia was left to provide for itself, in a province which had now been many months the seat of war, and which never even in peace produced half its own consumption of corn. It had also to store the places of Rosas, Figueras, and Barcelona; for no attempt was made to bring provisions from France by land ... (the pass indeed between Bellegarde and Figueras was so dangerous to the French, that they called it the Straits of Gibraltar); and it was seldom that a vessel could escape the vigilance of the British cruisers. Eleven victuallers intended for Barcelona were lying in the port of Caldaques under convoy of a cutter and a lugger, when Lord Cochrane landed his men, drove the French from the town, took their batteries, and captured the whole. St. Cyr, however humane by nature, however honourable by principle, was engaged in a service with which humanity and honour were incompatible: he could support his army by no other means than by plundering the inhabitants, and the Catalans were not a people who would endure patiently to be plundered. The difficulty was increased by the Moorish custom still retained in that part of Spain of preserving corn, not in barns or granaries, but in mattamores. In the towns these subterranean magazines were emptied before the French could enter; in the country they were so easily concealed, that, after long and wearying search, it was a rare fortune to discover one. And the Miquelets and Somatenes were so constantly on the alert, that frequently when the marauders had seized their booty they were deprived of it. In this sort of warfare their loss was generally greater than that of the natives, who on such occasions had them at vantage. How considerable ♦St. Cyr, 92–99.♦ it must have been may be in some degree estimated from the fact, that in the course of seven weeks St. Cyr’s foraging parties fired away not less than two million cartridges.
♦Orders to attempt the relief of Zaragoza.♦