“Their good will had been so often abused by the folly of their leaders, that many times their assistance was called for in vain. The peasantry, of whom so much had been demanded, began to demand in their turn. They insisted that the soldiers should fight always to the last gasp, were angry when the latter retreated, and robbed and ill-used them when broken by defeat.”
“They had been so excited, so exasperated against the French, that they became habitually ferocious, and their ferocity was often as dangerous to their own party, as to the enemy. The atrocities committed against their own chiefs disgusted the most patriotic, abated their zeal, caused the middle classes to desire peace as the only remedy of a system so replete with disorder. Numbers of distinguished men, even those who had vehemently opposed Joseph at first, began to abandon Ferdinand; and it is certain that, but for the expedition to Russia, that branch of the Bourbons which reigns in Spain, would never have remounted the throne.”
“The cruelties exercised upon the French military were as little conformable to the interest of the Spaniards. Those men were but the slaves of their duty, and of the state; certain of death a little sooner or a little later, they, like the Spaniards, were victims of the same ambition. The soldier naturally becomes cruel in protracted warfare; but the treatment experienced from the Catalans brought out this disposition prematurely; and that unhappy people were themselves the victims of a cruelty, which either of their own will or excited by others, they had exercised upon those troops that fell into their power; and this without any advantage to their cause, while a contrary system would, in a little time, have broken up the seventh corps,—seeing that the latter was composed of foreigners, naturally inclined to desert. But the murders of all wounded, and sick, and helpless men, created such horror, that the desertion, which at first menaced total destruction, ceased entirely.”
Such were St. Cyr’s opinions; and, assuredly, the struggle in Catalonia, of which it is now the time to resume the relation, was not the least successful in Spain.
CHAPTER II.
OPERATIONS IN CATALONIA.
See Vol II. p. 102.
The narrative of the Catalonian affairs was broken off at the moment, when St. Cyr having established his quarters at Vich, received intelligence of the Austrian war, and that Barcelona had been relieved by the squadron of admiral Comaso. His whole attention was then directed towards Gerona; and with a view to hastening general Reille’s preparation for the siege of that place, a second detachment, under Lecchi, proceeded to the Ampurdan.
During this time Conpigny continued at Taragona, and Blake made his fatal march into Aragon; but those troops which, under Milans and Wimphen, had composed Reding’s left wing, were continually skirmishing with the French posts in the valley of Vich, and the Partizans, especially Claros and the doctor Rovira, molested the communications in a more systematic manner than before.