On the next day, May 13, the engineers announced that the two breaches in the north front of the town walls were practicable, and that same evening Lerida was stormed. The breaches were carried with no great difficulty, but the garrison made a stubborn resistance for some time, behind traverses and fortified houses in the rear of them. When these were carried, the city was at Suchet’s mercy; but it was not at the city alone that he was aiming--he wished to master the citadel also. During the last siege of Lerida, that by the Duke of Orleans in 1707, the high-lying castle had held out for many days after the town had been lost. Suchet’s way of securing his end was effective but brutal. On the whole, it was the greatest atrocity perpetrated by any combatant, French, Spanish, or English, during the whole Peninsular War. When his troops had entered the streets, he directed columns towards each gate, and having secured possession of them all, so as to make escape into the open country impossible, bade his troops push the whole non-combatant population of Lerida uphill into the citadel, where the beaten garrison was already taking refuge. ‘The soldiery,’ as he writes, with evident complacency and pride in his ingenuity, ‘were set in a concentric movement to push the inhabitants, along with the garrison, towards the upper streets and the citadel. They were dislodged by musketry fire from street after street, house after house, in order to force them into the castle. That work was still firing, and its discharges augmented the danger and the panic of the civil population, as they were thrust, along with the wreck of the garrison, into the ditch and over the drawbridge. Pressed on by our soldiers, they hastily poured into the castle yard, before the Governor had time to order that they should not be allowed to enter.’ The castle being crammed with some fifteen thousand men, women, and children, Suchet gave orders to bombard it with every available mortar and howitzer. ‘Every shell,’ he writes, ‘that fell into the narrow space containing this multitude, fell on serried masses of non-combatants no less than of soldiery. It had been calculated that the Governor and the most determined officers would be influenced by the presence of these women, children, old folk, and unarmed peasants. As General Suchet had flattered himself would be the case, the scheme had a prompt and decisive effect.’ On the 14th at midday, Garcia Conde, unable to stand the slaughter any longer, hoisted the white flag.