In the first moment of irritation, Murat ordered all the prisoners to be tried by a military commission, which condemned them to death; but the municipality interfered, and represented to that prince the extreme cruelty of visiting this angry ebullition of an injured and insulted people with such severity. Murat admitted the weight of their arguments, and forbade any executions on the sentence; but it is said that general Grouchy, in whose immediate power the prisoners remained, exclaiming that his own life had been attempted! that the blood of the French soldiers was not to be spilt with impunity! and that the prisoners having been condemned by a council of war, ought and should be executed! proceeded to shoot them in the Prado; and forty were thus slain before Murat could cause his orders to be effectually obeyed. The next day some of the Spanish authorities having discovered that a colonel commanding the imperial guards still retained a number of prisoners in the barracks, applied to the duke of Berg to have them released. Murat consented to have those prisoners also enlarged: but the colonel getting intelligence of what was passing, and being enraged at the loss of so many choice soldiers, put forty-five of the captives to death before the order could arrive to stay his bloody proceedings[4]. Such were nearly the circumstances that attended this celebrated tumult, in which the wild cry of Spanish warfare was first heard; but as many authors, adopting without hesitation all the reports of the day, have represented it sometimes as a wanton and extensive massacre on the part of the French, at another as a barbarous political stroke to impress a dread of their power, I think it necessary to make the following observations. [Sidenote: Manifesto of the council of Castile. Page 28.] [Sidenote: Surgical Campaigns of Baron Larrey.]