[284] Wellington, _Supplementary Dispatches_, vii. p. 311. It was unfortunately the fact that Badajoz was a Spanish and not a French town, and this adds a special shame to the lamentable outrages which were perpetrated in its streets for many hours after the storm. It is comparatively seldom in war that an army takes by assault a town which does not belong to the hostile power. The only parallel of recent years to the sack of Badajoz had been that of Lübeck in November 1806. Blücher’s Prussian corps, retiring before the pursuing French, trespassed on neutral territory by seizing on the old Hanseatic city, which lay in its way, and endeavouring to defend it. The magistrates protested, but were powerless, as they had no armed force at their disposition. Then the French came upon the scene, and, after a fierce fight, won their way over wall and ditch and took the place. They sacked it from end to end with every circumstance of atrocity[285]: Marshal Bernadotte, when importuned by the Burgomaster to stay the horrors, said that he was sorry, but that his troops only recognized the fact that they were in a stormed town--he and his officers could only succeed in calling them off after the city had been half destroyed. This was sufficiently horrible; but to sack a town belonging to a friendly nation is a shade worse than to sack a neutral place--and this the British troops did. [285] It is said on good first-hand authority that all the inmates of an asylum for female lunatics were raped. See Lettow-Vorbeck, _Geschichte des Krieges von 1806-7_, ii. p. 384. Two short quotations from eye-witnesses may serve to show the kind of scenes that prevailed in Badajoz from the early hours of the morning on April 7th down to the following night.