St. Cyr himself remained some three weeks in Barcelona. From the depôts of the Spaniards, which, in the course of this successful campaign had fallen into his hands, he had supplied the garrison of that city with grain, pulse, and salt for three months’ consumption: but there was not enough ammunition for a fortnight’s siege. Of being formally besieged indeed there was not now even the remotest danger; but from within there was sufficient cause for inquietude. The honourable feeling of nationality, for which the Catalans are eminently distinguished, was in no part of the principality stronger than in its capital. At this very time Barcelona had two tercios of Miquelets in the field, raised among its inhabitants, and paid and clothed by them. The individuals of those regiments, having no uniform by which they could be recognised, used to enter the city fearlessly whenever it suited them, for the purpose of visiting their friends, raising recruits, and receiving money or clothing: nor was it in Duhesme’s power, with all the vigilance, and it may be added, all the villany of his police, to detect a single person in this practice; so unanimous were the Barcelonans in their detestation of the intrusive government, and so well was the secret kept. That police was continually reporting to Duhesme and Lechi, and these again to the Commander-in-chief, the existence of conspiracies which they had discovered; but the members of the police were men of such character, that St. Cyr suspected these schemes to be suggested by their agents, if they were not mere fabrications, brought forward for the most nefarious motives. Now, however, that he was on the spot, he allowed Duhesme ♦1809.
April.♦ to exact an oath of allegiance to the Intruder from all the public functionaries, and from the Spanish soldiers who had been disarmed after ♦St. Cyr, 142–4.♦ the treacherous seizure of the place. Sunday was the day chosen for this act of oppression. They were summoned to the house of the Royal Audience, which was surrounded with horse and foot, and 3000 troops were drawn up on the esplanade and the sea-wall; the display and the actual force being necessary to keep down the indignation of a generous and most injured people. Every member of the Audience refused thus to disgrace himself and betray his country; only one of the Relatores took the oath, and only three of the numerous persons employed in the inferior departments. The French were not more successful in tempting the military. Persuasions and promises availed as little as the threat of immediate imprisonment. The Contador Asaguerre told Duhesme, that if all Spain were to acknowledge Joseph, he would expatriate himself. The French executed their threat. Nine-and-twenty of these honourable Spaniards were sent prisoners, some to Monjuic, others to the citadel. The people, undeterred by their strong escort, followed them as in procession, cheering them as they went, and promising that their families should be well provided ♦Prisoners sent to France.♦ for during their imprisonment. Many others were put under arrest in their own houses, and the whole of the military were, by St. Cyr’s orders, marched with the prisoners of war, under convoy of Lechi’s division, as far as the Fluvia, where Reille received and sent them into France: and by Lechi’s return the commander-in-chief ♦St. Cyr, 151, 158.♦ received the first intelligence from that country which had reached him since he crossed the Fluvia himself, ... five months before. His last remaining anxiety was for the provisionment of Barcelona; and that was removed soon afterward by the arrival of a squadron from Toulon, which had the rare good fortune to reach its destined port and return in safety. ♦Barcelona relieved by sea.♦ The place was thus amply supplied with military stores as well as provisions, and the siege of Gerona then became the only object of the French.
♦Reding dies of his wounds.♦
The dispatch in which Reding informed the Central Junta of his defeat at Valls, was marked equally by his habitual despondency and his magnanimity as to every thing which regarded himself. He rendered the fullest justice both to the policy and humanity of St. Cyr’s conduct as opposed to that of Duhesme and Lechi, and expressed an apprehension that it had produced some effect upon the public mind. Some ground for this had been afforded by what had happened at Igualada and at Reus; but the evil extended no farther. He had no reliance upon the Somatenes, he said, nor upon the enthusiasm which they displayed; order was wanting among them, and where order ended confusion began. He complained that he could obtain no intelligence of the enemy’s numbers, whereas they were well informed of every thing that related to his army; and he gave as a reason for having taken the field, the opinions of those whom he had consulted, and the popular cry. He made no mention of his own wounds; and when the government published such parts of his dispatch as were intended for publication, they noticed, as it became them, his silence upon this point. The wounds, though many, were not thought dangerous, and they appeared for a time to be going on well; but the symptoms changed, and in the course of a month they proved mortal. He fell in a foreign land, and in the service of a foreign state; but the cause in which Theodore Reding fell was the same for which his brother Aloys had fought amid their native mountains; and it was the cause of his own countrymen as well as of the Spaniards; the cause of all good men every where. The motives for which ordinary wars have been undertaken are so mean and transitory, and come so little to the heart of man, that after a few years have elapsed all interest concerning them is exhausted; and even nationality does not prevent us from feeling, that they, whose lives have been expended in such contests, have died rather in the exercise of their profession than of their duty. But the struggle of Spain against Buonaparte is of the same eternal and unfading interest as the wars of Greece against Xerxes: at whatever distance of time its records shall be perused, they will excite in every generous mind the same indignant and ennobling sympathy. Not, therefore, in an ungrateful service did Reding lay down his life, for with those records his name will be perpetuated: Switzerland will remember him with pride, as one of the most honourable, though not most fortunate of her sons, and Spain with respectful gratitude, as a soldier not unworthy of her service in its best day, and true to it in its worst.
♦Peasants of the Vallés.♦
Right as this General was in his opinion, that the co-operation of an irregular force was not to be relied on in a plan of regular operations, he estimated the effects of a popular resistance below its real importance, nor did he fairly appreciate the Catalan spirit. A fine example of it was shown immediately after his death by the peasants in the Vallés. Their country lies in the line between Vicq and Barcelona, and the peasants taking arms to impede the communication occupied the heights near the Church of Canovellas, about a mile from Granollers, which is the capital of that district. The district is so strong, that the invaders were desirous of opening the communication by persuasion rather than by force; and therefore communicated to these insurgents in due form, that the French commanders ordered their troops to make war upon soldiers only, not upon peasants; that if they would lay down their arms, and retire every man to his house, no injury should be done them; but otherwise there was a division of the enemy in their front, and another was coming in their rear. A written answer was returned, in the name of the peasants of the Vallés. “They held it a great honour,” they said, “to form a part, though but a small one, of the Spanish nation; and they had seen what their requital had been for receiving and entertaining the French troops, when their government had commanded them so to do; their peaceful habitations had been invaded, their property plundered, their houses burnt, their women violated, their brethren murdered in cold blood, and above all, the religion of their fathers outraged and profaned. Nothing remained for them but to repel force by force; and as they could not by themselves defend their open villages, they had taken to the mountains as to a strong hold: from thence they would defend their valleys, and oppose to the enemy the most obstinate resistance, as long as the government enjoined them to consider as enemies the subjects of Napoleon. The Spanish general in Catalonia was the person whose instructions they were to obey. For themselves, emulating as they did the courage and constancy of all Spain, they would never depart from those principles which the whole nation maintained. General St. Cyr and his companions might have the dreadful glory of seeing nothing but ruins in all that country; ... they might pass in triumph over the bodies of those whom they had sacrificed; but neither they nor their masters should ever say that the people of the Vallés had submitted their necks to a yoke which the whole nation had justly rejected.” The Spaniards are a nation upon whom deeper impression would be made by a circumstance of this kind than by the defeat of one of their armies; and the success with which these peasants harassed the French, and cut off some of their artillery and baggage, raised the spirits of the Catalans more than the battle of Valls had depressed them.
♦Blake appointed to the command.♦
Upon Reding’s death the command devolved upon the Marques de Coupigny, till Blake was nominated as his successor, and with more extensive powers, being appointed Commander-in-chief in Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon. This General, after leaving Romana, had been sent to serve under Reding, and was in Tortosa at the time of Reding’s decease, where Lazan, obeying without hesitation the Central Junta’s instructions, resigned to him the charge of his division, and continued with it, to serve under him. The Aragonese had not been disheartened by the loss of their capital; they had regarded the former siege with a happier, but not with a prouder feeling, for of all examples, that of dignified suffering makes the deepest impression upon a generous and high-minded nation. The ♦Movements of the Aragonese.♦ lordship of Molina de Aragon was surrounded with points which were occupied by the enemy. Nevertheless, the people, cut off as they were from support, took arms, trusting in themselves and the strength of their country: for want of better weapons some of them used slings, as the Somatenes also had done with good effect; and they made wooden artillery, so light, that a single man could carry one of these pieces up the heights, and yet strong enough to bear from fifteen to twenty rounds. The French endeavoured to surprise them with a detachment of 1800 men, for the purpose of opening the communication with Madrid, which they had cut off; but part of this body was itself surprised in Iruecha, and put to flight with some loss. The Molinese were about to pursue their success against another party in Alcolea, when they learned that General Suchet, who had now the command in Aragon, had passed the Puerto de Daroca, and was entering the lordship on its open side, with some 4000 foot and 600 horse. In the course of two hours the cavalry would reach Molina. The Junta gave instant orders for removing the ammunition, the town was deserted by all its inhabitants, and the men in arms retired with the Junta to the mountains five leagues distant. The efforts of the French to arrest the Junta or any of its members were in vain; the proclamations which they issued to intimidate or to delude the people were of no effect; and after remaining five days in Molina, they returned with no other advantage from this expedition than that of carrying away all the flocks and herds they could find.
♦1809.
May.
There was no part of Spain in which the French had imagined themselves to be so secure as in Aragon, after the fall of Zaragoza. During that siege the army of Aragon had proved completely inefficient, and the Catalans were too hardly pressed themselves to make any efforts in behalf of their neighbours. In reliance upon this, some troops had been withdrawn to march into Germany; and that larger detachment under Mortier had been called off towards the Douro, which was to co-operate with Marshal Soult. Advantage was taken of this when Blake’s appointment to the command had raised the spirits of the soldiers and of the people, ... both being alike ready to impute their ill success to any cause except the true one, and to expect better fortune with every new commander. Blake brought with him a good name, for though always unfortunate, the Spaniards had never suffered any disgrace under his guidance; and the Roman government never demeaned itself with more generosity toward an unsuccessful general than the Central Junta. The first effect of the impulse which his arrival communicated was on the side of Lerida. As soon as Mortier had withdrawn from the neighbourhood of that city, the garrison, in conformity to Blake’s instructions, was on the alert. A French detachment occupied Barbastro and the places near, with other points on the right of the Cinca; on the left of that river they were in possession of Monzon; and from thence, as from a strong hold, they tyrannized over the country, levying contributions without mercy. The town of Albalda having refused to answer one of these oppressive demands, a detachment of 1400 was sent to make what was called an example of that place for its disobedience. The governor of Lerida, D. Josef Casimiro de Lavalle, who was apprised of this movement, stationed 700 of his garrison at Tamarite, under Colonels Perena and Baget, with some Aragonese and Catalan Somatenes, who succeeded in routing the enemy; the greater part retreated to Barbastro, and in consequence of this movement and defeat, about 200 only remained in Monzon. The inhabitants rose against them, though they had only seven muskets; knives and bludgeons supplied the place of other weapons; they recovered the Castle, and drove the invaders out.