On the evening of the capitulation the French troops entered. They began immediately to pillage. General Laval was appointed governor. He ordered all the clergy of the city to go out and compliment Marshal Lasnes; ... the yoke was upon their necks; they went forth to appear at this ceremony, like prisoners in a Roman triumph, and as they went, the French soldiers were permitted to rob them of their apparel in the streets. Laval, when complaint was made to him of such outrages, observed, that his troops had to indemnify themselves for the plunder which they looked upon as certain, and which ♦Ric, 235.♦ they would have had in another day, if the capitulation had not disappointed them.
♦Treatment of the prisoners.♦
When the French entered the city six thousand bodies were lying in the streets and trenches, or piled up in heaps before the churches. The people, still unsubdued in spirit, were with difficulty restrained from declaring that the capitulation was concluded without their consent, and rushing upon the invaders with the determination of taking vengeance and dying in the act. The armed peasants, instead of delivering up the weapons which they were no longer permitted to use, broke them in pieces with generous indignation. General O’Neille died before the surrender; St. Marc was one of the many hundreds whom the pestilence carried off within a few days after it. P. Basilio escaped from the danger of the war and of the contagion. He was a man of exemplary life and great attainments; and having been tutor to Palafox, and fought by his side in both sieges, remained now at his bedside, to wait upon him in his illness, and administer, if need should be, the last offices of religion to his heroic and beloved pupil. There the French found him, as they had ever found him during the siege, at the post of duty; and they put him to death for having served his country with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength. P. Santiago Sass suffered a like martyrdom. The officers received orders to come out of the city, on pain of being shot if they remained ♦Feb. 22.♦ there after four-and-twenty hours. Immediately upon forming without the town for their march, they were, in contempt of the capitulation, plundered of every thing, stripped of the devices of their different ranks, and pushed in among the common soldiers as leaders of insurgents. It was affirmed in the French bulletin that 17,000 men laid down their arms: there were not more than four-and-twenty hundred capable of bearing them; the rest were in the hospitals, and this, with five-and-twenty hundred taken in the suburbs and during the siege, was the number which was marched off for France. Two hundred and seventy of these men, who from fatigue and weakness could not keep up the pace which their ferocious guard required, were butchered and left on the road, where their companions in the next division might march over their bodies. Augustina Zaragoza was among the prisoners. She had distinguished herself in this siege as much as in the former. At the commencement she took her former station at the Portillo, by the same gun which she had served so well; “See, general,” said she, with a cheerful countenance, pointing to the gun when Palafox visited that quarter, “I am again with my old friend.” Her husband was severely wounded, and she pointed the cannon at the enemy, while he lay bleeding among his companions by her side. Frequently she was at the head of an assaulting party, sword or knife in hand, with her cloak wrapt round her, cheering the soldiers, and encouraging them by her example; constantly exposed as she was, she escaped without a wound: yet once she was thrown into a ditch, and nearly suffocated by the dead and dying who covered her. At the close of the siege she was too well known by the French to escape notice, and they made her prisoner. Fortunately, as it proved, she had at that time taken the contagion, and was removed to the hospital, where, as she was supposed to be dying, little care was taken to secure her. Feeling herself better, she availed herself of this, and effected her escape. Another heroine, whose name was Manuella Sanchez, was shot through the heart. Donna Benita, a lady of distinction, who headed one of the female corps which had been formed to carry provisions, bear away the wounded, and fight in the streets, escaped the hourly dangers to which she exposed herself, only to die of grief upon hearing that her daughter had been killed. During the siege six hundred women and children perished, not by the bombardment and the mines, but in action, by the sword, or bayonet or bullet.
♦Treatment of Palafox.♦
Marshal Lasnes had pledged his word of honour that Palafox should be at liberty to go wherever he would, as soon as he should be able to travel; in contempt of that pledge, he was immediately made prisoner, surrounded entirely by French, and left even in want of necessary food. Ric, who was ever ready to exert himself when any duty was to be performed, remonstrated against this treatment both verbally and in writing. He could obtain little immediate ♦He is compelled by threats of death to sign orders for delivering up other fortresses.♦ relief, and no redress. Arrangements were concerted for his escape, and so well laid, that there would have been every prospect of success, if he had been sufficiently recovered to make the attempt. They were not, however, altogether fruitless; for M. Lasnes having extorted from him, by threats of immediate death if he refused, orders to the governors of Jaca, Benasque, Monzon, and Mequinenza, to deliver up those places to the French, he found means to advise his brother, the Marques de Lazan, of the iniquitous proceeding, and to direct that no obedience should be given to orders so obtained. Unfortunately Jaca and Monzon had been entrusted to commanders who waited only for an opportunity of betraying their charge, and they opened the gates to the enemy. Before Palafox had recovered he was hurried away into France, a country from which and to which, while it was under the iron yoke of Buonaparte, no prisoner returned. On the way he was treated with insolence and barbarity, and robbed even to his very shirt. Buonaparte, who, feeling no virtue in himself, acknowledged none in others, had already reproached him as a coward and a runaway in the field; he now, with contradictory calumny, reviled him for having defended Zaragoza against the will of the inhabitants. “The people,” it was said in the French papers, “held him in such abhorrence, that it was necessary to station a guard before his door, for otherwise he would have been stoned. An idea of the detestation in which he and the monks of his party were held could only be formed by remembering the hatred with which those men were regarded in France, who governed by terror and the guillotine.” Yet while they thus asserted at one time that Palafox defended the city against the will of the people, at another they affirmed that the Spanish troops would have surrendered long before, being perfectly sensible that resistance was unavailing after the French had entered the city, but it did not depend upon them, ... they were obliged to submit to the wills of the meanest of the inhabitants. Any one who should have expressed a wish to capitulate would have been punished with death: such a thought could not be uttered till two-thirds of the city were lying in ruins, and 20,000 of its defenders destroyed by disease.... No higher eulogy could be pronounced upon Zaragoza than was comprised in the very calumnies of its unworthy conqueror.
♦Demands of the French.♦
Before the main body of the French made their entry they demanded of Ric 50,000 pair of shoes, 8000 pair of boots, and 1200 shirts, with medicines and every requisite for an hospital. Several of the officers demanded for themselves double equipage and linen, curtains, pens, paper, and whatever they wanted, insisting that plenty of every thing should be supplied them, and the best of its kind, at the expense of the city. A service of china was required for Junot; and this merciless oppressor, who had escaped the proper punishment of his crimes in Portugal, insisted that a tennis-court should be fitted up for his amusement, in a city of which two-thirds were then lying in ruins, beneath which so large a proportion of the inhabitants lay buried! Ric resisted demands which it was impossible for the city to supply. The French generals, provoked at his refusal to engage for the maintenance of their household, threatened to send in a squadron of hussars. He replied, that well they might, since the gates of the city were demolished and in their power, but that from that moment they would not advance a foot of ground till they had moistened it with French blood. Another member of the Junta, who had less courage, undertook that these ruffians should be satisfied as far as was possible. Ric, who was too true a Spaniard to live under the government of the Intruder, ♦Ric, 245–9.♦ renounced the high office which he held, and, not being considered a prisoner, obtained his liberty.
♦Lasnes makes his entrance.♦
Lasnes made his entrance on Sunday the 5th of March; his approach was announced by the discharge of 200 cannon, and he proceeded in triumph through that part of the city which remained standing, to the Church of the Pillar. The wretched inhabitants had been compelled to adorn the streets with such hangings as could be found, and to witness the pomp of festive triumph, and hear the sounds of joy and exultation. ♦Baseness of the suffragan bishop.♦ The suffragan bishop of the diocese, a traitor who had fled from the town when it took arms, and now returned thither to act as the instrument of the oppressors, met Lasnes at the great door of the church, and conducted him in procession, with the crucifix and the banner, to a throne prepared before the altar, and near the famous idol, which had escaped destruction. Then the wretch addressed a sermon to his countrymen upon the horrors of war! “They had seen,” he said, “in their unhappy city, the streets and market-places strewn with dead, parents expiring and leaving their children helpless and unprotected, babes sucking at the dry breast of the famished mother, palaces in ruins, houses in flames, dead bodies heaped at the doors of the churches, and hurried into common graves without any religious ceremony. And what had been the cause of all this ruin? I repeat it,” said the villanous time-server, “I shall always repeat it, your sins and your seditious spirit, your forgetfulness of the principles of the gospel. These horrors have ceased: and to whom are you indebted for this unexpected happiness? To God in the first place, who raises and destroys monarchies according to his will; after God, to the Virgin of the Pillar, who interceded for us; and in the next place to the generous heart of the great Napoleon, the man who is the messenger of God upon earth to execute his divine decrees, and who is sent to punish us for our sins. Nothing can equal his power except his clemency and his goodness! He has granted us the inestimable favour of peace; oh that, at the expense of my tears and my blood, I could render it eternal! It is fitting, O my God, that for this great and unexpected mercy, this signal mercy, we should all exclaim, Te Deum Laudamus! We praise thee, O God!” Such were the blasphemies which this hoary traitor uttered over the ruins of his heroic city! It is not possible to record them without feeling a wish, that some one of the noble-hearted Zaragozans, who at that hour of bitterness were wishing themselves in the grave, had smitten him upon the spot in the name of his religion and his country.
♦Language of the French.♦