Lord Wellington addressed a letter of indignant denial and remonstrance to sir Henry Wellesley. “It was absurd,” he said, “to suppose the officers of the army would have risked the loss of all their labours and gallantry, by encouraging the dispersion of the men while the enemy still held the castle. To him the town was of the utmost value as a secure place for magazines and hospitals. He had refused to bombard it when advised to do so, as he had previously refused to bombard Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos, because the injury would fall on the inhabitants and not upon the enemy; yet nothing could have been more easy, or less suspicious than this method of destroying the town if he had been so minded. It was the enemy who set fire to the houses, it was part of the defence; the British officers strove to extinguish the flames, some in doing so lost their lives by the French musquetry from the castle, and the difficulty of communicating and working through the fire was so great, that he had been on the point of withdrawing the troops altogether. He admitted the plunder, observing, that he knew not whether that or the libels made him most angry; he had taken measures to stop it, but when two-thirds of the officers had been killed or wounded in the action, and when many of the inhabitants taking part with the enemy fired upon the troops, to prevent it was impossible. Moreover he was for several days unable from other circumstances to send fresh men to replace the stormers.” This was a solid reply to the scandalous libels circulated, but the broad facts remained. San Sebastian was a heap of smoking ruins, and atrocities degrading to human nature had been perpetrated by the troops. Of these crimes, the municipal and ecclesiastic bodies the consuls and principal persons of San Sebastian, afterwards published a detailed statement, solemnly affirming the truth of each case; and if Spanish declarations on this occasion are not to be heeded, four-fifths of the excesses attributed to the French armies must be effaced as resting on a like foundation. That the town was first set on fire behind the breaches during the operations, and that it spread in the tumult following the assault is undoubted; yet it is not improbable that plunderers, to forward their own views increased it, and certainly the great destruction did not befall until long after the town was in possession of the allies. I have been assured by a surgeon, that he was lodged the third day after the assault at a house well furnished, and in a street then untouched by fire or plunderers, but house and street were afterwards plundered and burned. The inhabitants could only have fired upon the allies the first day, and it might well have been in self-defence for they were barbarously treated. The abhorrent case alluded to was notorious, so were many others. I have myself heard around the picquet fires, when soldiers as every experienced officer knows, speak without reserve