A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 1, 1807-1809 : $b From the treaty of Fontainbleau to the battle of CorunnaOman, Charles
History
A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 1, 1807-1809 : $b From the treaty of Fontainbleau to the battle of Corunna
Oman, Charles
Peninsular War, 1807-1814
It is not surprising to find that the assailants had suffered very
heavily in such a desperate attack on walls and barricades teeming with
defenders worked up to a high pitch of patriotic frenzy. Lefebvre lost
700 men, and left behind him at the Portillo gate several guns which
had been brought up too close to the place, and could not be dragged
off under the dreadful musketry fire from the walls, and the flanking
discharges from the neighbouring castle of Aljafferia. The Spaniards,
fighting under cover except at the moment of their final charges, had
suffered comparatively little: their loss is estimated at not much over
300 men. They might well be proud of their success: they had certainly
showed a heroic spirit in fighting so obstinately after three crushing
defeats in the open field. That a practically unfortified town should
defend itself by street-fighting was a new idea: and that peasants
and citizens (there were not 900 regulars in the place) should not
only hold out behind walls, but execute desperate charges _en masse_,
would till that day have been regarded as impossible by any soldier
of Napoleon. Every thinking man in the French army must have looked
with some dismay on the results of the fight, not because of the loss
suffered, for that was a mere trifle, but because of the prospect of
the desperate national resistance which had evidently to be faced.
Meanwhile, Lefebvre-Desnouettes retired for some thousands of yards
from the city, and pitched his camp facing its western front. He sent
pressing letters asking for reinforcements both to Madrid and to
Bayonne, and attempted no offensive action for ten days. If he sent
a formal summons of surrender to the Saragossans, it was to waste
time and allow fresh troops to arrive, rather than with any hope that
he could intimidate the citizens. He was himself more likely to be
attacked during the next few days than to make any forward movement.
But he was already beginning to receive reinforcements: on June 21
there arrived two battalions of the 2nd Regiment of the Vistula, and
more troops were behind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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