According to all ordinary precedents of war, the French were now in possession of the city. But the besiegers found that their real work was only beginning. The streets were trenched and barricaded; every dwelling was converted into a fortress; for twenty days the French were forced to besiege house by house. In the centre of the town the popular leaders erected a gallows, and there they hanged every one who flinched from meeting the enemy. Disease was added to the horrors of warfare. In the cellars, where the women and children crowded in filth and darkness, a malignant pestilence broke out, which, at the beginning of February, raised the deaths to five hundred a day. The dead bodies were unburied; in that poisoned atmosphere the slightest wound produced mortification and death. At length the powers of the defenders sank. A fourth part of the town had been won by the French; of the townspeople and peasants who were within the walls at the beginning of the siege, it is said that thirty thousand had perished; the remainder could only prolong their defence to fall in a few days more before disease or the enemy. Even now there were members of the Junta who wished to fight as long as a man remained, but they were outnumbered. On the 20th of February what was left of Saragossa capitulated. Its resistance gave to the bravest of Napoleon's soldiers an impression of horror and dismay new even to men who had passed through seventeen years of revolutionary warfare, but it failed to retard Napoleon's armies in the conquest of Spain. No attempt was made to relieve the heroic or ferocious city. Everywhere the tide of French conquest appeared to be steadily making its advance. Soult invaded Portugal; in combination with him, two armies moved from Madrid upon the southern and the south-western provinces of Spain. Oporto fell on the 28th of March; in the same week the Spanish forces covering the south were decisively beaten at Ciudad Real and at Medellin upon the line of the Guadiana. The hopes of Europe fell. Spain itself could expect no second Saragossa. It appeared as if the complete subjugation of the Peninsula could now only be delayed by the mistakes of the French generals themselves, and by the untimely removal of that controlling will which had hitherto made every movement a step forward in conquest. CHAPTER IX.