Instantly staff officers were despatched to the castle with orders that it should be retained, and that the divisions, or rather their relics, should be withdrawn from the breaches.
Though the regular assaults had been sanguinary failures, the detached attacks upon the castle and San Vincente were brilliantly successful, and either of them must have next day produced the fall of Badajoz. In fact, the city was doubly won; and had Leith’s division obtained their ladders in proper order, the place would have fallen in half the time, and a frightful loss of life have been consequently avoided.
It may be readily imagined that such a fierce resistance as that made by the French would provoke a desperate retaliation from the victors; and as the city was given up to the excited soldiery, for a day and two nights it presented a fearful scene of rapine and riot. The streets were heaped with the drunken and the dead—and very many of the conquerors, who had escaped uninjured in the storm, fell by the bayonets of their comrades.
Sir W. Beechey
H. Cook.
Picton.
No language can depict the horrors which succeed a storm; and the following vivid but faithful picture of Badajoz, as it appeared on the evening after it had been carried, will convey some idea of the dreadful outrages that ensued.
“It was nearly dusk, and the few hours while I slept had made a frightful change in the condition and temper of the soldiery. In the morning they were obedient to their officers, and preserved the semblance of subordination; now they were in a state of furious intoxication—discipline was forgotten—and the splendid troops of yesterday had become a fierce and sanguinary rabble, dead to every touch of human feeling, and filled with every demoniac passion that can brutalize the man. The town was in terrible confusion, and on every side frightful tokens of military license met the eye.
“One street, as I approached the castle, was almost choked up with broken furniture; for the houses had been gutted from the cellar to the garret, the partitions torn down, and even the beds ripped and scattered to the winds, in the hope that gold might be found concealed. A convent[170] at the end of the strada of Saint John was in flames; and I saw more than one wretched nun in the arms of a drunken soldier.