The citizens and the neighbouring peasantry were astounded at this quick and unexpected calamity. They had, with a natural credulity, relied on the vain and boasting promises of their chiefs, and being necessarily ignorant of the true state of affairs never doubted that their vengeance would be sated by a speedy and complete destruction of the French. When their hopes were thus suddenly blasted; when they beheld troops, from whom they expected nothing but victory, come pouring into the town with all the tumult of panic; when the peasants of all the villages through which the fugitives passed, came rushing into the city along with the scared multitude of flying soldiers and camp followers; every heart was filled with consternation, and the date of Zaragoza’s glory would have ended with the first siege, if the success at Tudela had been followed up by the French with that celerity and vigour which the occasion required. [Sidenote: Appendix Vol. I.] Napoleon, foreseeing that this moment of confusion and terror would arrive, had with his usual prudence provided the means and given directions for such an instantaneous and powerful attack as would inevitably have overthrown the bulwark of the eastern provinces. But the sickness of marshal Lasnes, the difficulty of communication, the consequent false movements of Moncey and Ney, in fine, the intervention of fortune, omnipotent as she is in war, baffled the emperor’s long-sighted calculations, and permitted the leaders in the city to introduce order among the multitude, to complete the defensive works, to provide stores, and finally by a ferocious exercise of power to insure implicit obedience to their minutest orders. The danger of resisting the enemy appeared light, when a suspicious word or even a discontented gesture was instantaneously punished by a cruel death. [Sidenote: Muster roll of the French Army, MSS.] The third corps having thus missed the favourable moment for a sudden assault, and being reduced by sickness, by losses in battle, and by detachments to seventeen thousand four hundred men, including the engineers and artillery, was too weak to invest the city in form, and, therefore, remained in observation on the Xalon river. Meanwhile, a battering train of sixty guns, with well furnished parcs, which had been by Napoleon’s orders previously collected in Pampeluna, were dragged by cattle to Tudela and embarked upon the canal leading to Zaragoza. [Sidenote: Cavalhero. Doyle’s Correspondence, MSS.]