Robert Southey

“ The Central Junta, upon the deliverance of Galicia, addressed one of their animated proclamations to the inhabitants. “People of Galicia,” they said, “upon seeing you fall into the power of the enemy without resistance, your naval ports and arsenals occupied by them, and so powerful and important a province subjected from sea to sea, indignation and grief made your country break out in cries of malediction and reproach, like a mother who complains to heaven and earth of the degradation of a daughter in whom alone she had confided. ”

“ Perhaps before this Portugal was reconquered. Buonaparte was hastening to fulfil all his prophecies. If ever we wished for peace, with this man probably we must make it, and it was always wrong to use insulting language towards him; the least price of peace would be for us to use something like decorous language to a power which was perhaps the greatest that had ever existed on the face of the world. And it was extraordinary indeed that a government which had committed the attack upon Copenhagen should call the usurpation of Spain unparalleled! ”

“ God forbid we should be so intolerant as to make a conformity to our own opinions the price of our assistance to others, in their efforts for national independence; to carry the sword in one hand, and what we may choose to call the Rights of Man in the other! But the enthusiasm of the Spaniards was not pretended; what they had in their mouths, they felt in their hearts: they were enthusiastically determined to defend their country to the last extremity, or to perish under its ruins. ”

“ Base and pusillanimous men, we know what war is now! this terrible lesson is written upon our soil with the finger of desolation, it is engraved in our hearts with the dagger of vengeance. The execrable criminals whose instruments you have made yourselves have in their atrocities exceeded all that your perfidious mind could have foreseen, all that your terrified imagination could have foreboded. Transport yourselves to Galicia, if ye dare do it, ye miserable men, and there learn what is the standard of the true Spanish character! ”

“ You have fought no boasted battles, but you have annihilated one of the tyrant’s proudest armies; aiding the national spirit, keeping up its noble excitement, wearying the enemy’s troops, destroying them in petty actions, and circumscribing their command to the ground upon which they stood. You have fulfilled the highest duties of the soldier; and I owe to you the reward, which all my labours, and cares, and thoughts as a general have aspired to. ”

“ Let the base, the selfish, and the cowardly be dismayed by them; not the other towns of Aragon, who are ready to imitate and to recover their capital; not the firm and faithful patriots, who see in that illustrious city a model to imitate, vengeance to be exacted, and the only path of conquest. Forty thousand Frenchmen, who have perished before the mud walls of Zaragoza, cause France to mourn the barren and210 ephemeral triumph which she has obtained, and evince to Spain, that three cities of equal resolution will save their country, and baffle the tyrant. ”

“ Could any man of sense, they demanded, any one “above the level of a drivelling courtier, or a feeble fanatic, look at this contest, without trembling every inch of him for the result?”
But the baseness of party went beyond this. Not only were ministers blamed for what they had done in assisting Spain, and counselled to withdraw their assistance as speedily as possible, but the Spaniards themselves were calumniated and insulted. They had neither courage, nor honour, nor patriotism; no love for their country, nor any thing in their country worth defending. ”

“ Time passes away, and days will come when these dreadful convulsions, with which the genius of iniquity is now afflicting the earth, will have subsided. The friends of virtue and patriotism will come to the banks of the Ebro to visit those majestic ruins, and beholding them with admiration and with envy, Here, they will say, stood that city which in modern ages realised, or, more truly, surpassed those ancient prodigies of devotement and constancy, which are scarcely credited in history! ”

“ It was in the centre of Portugal that our ancestors sealed our independence with their blood. Knowing this, the governors have directed their measures accordingly; strong passes, formed by nature to be the bulwarks of our liberty, and deep rivers, which cannot without danger be crossed, will be defended in a military manner; and if, in spite of this, the enemy of Europe should proceed to Lisbon, he will find around216 it a determined people, who will cause the glorious deeds of those times to be remembered, when the walls of that city were the scene of their heroism and their triumph. ”

“ It was a moment at which a blow might have been struck not less momentous than the battle of Baylen; for the destruction of St. Cyr’s army (and destruction must have been the consequence of defeat) would have drawn after it the recovery of Barcelona and Figueras, and effectual assistance might then have been afforded to Zaragoza. But the unreasonable hopes which he had long indulged were followed by an ominous prostration of mind. Fretted as well as embarrassed by want of money; alarmed by tidings of the rout at Tudela, and of the appearance of the enemy again before Zaragoza ”

“ The French, at the commencement of their revolutionary war, sent every unsuccessful general to the scaffold, the Convention in its bloody acts keeping pace with the bloodiest desires of a deceived and infuriated populace. The Central Junta contracted no such guilt, though humanity is not the characteristic of the Spaniards, and justice in state affairs had in that country for centuries been unknown. ”

“ Marshal Soult was panegyrized for clemency! The dreadful catastrophe which Porto had suffered, said his writers, might serve as a warning for all who undertook great enterprises without calculating the means, or looking on to the end. But amid the horror with which so severe an example affected every feeling heart, there was abundant matter of consolation for minds capable of weighing things in the balance of philosophy. Towns carried by assault had invariably, among the most civilized nations, paid with their total destruction the penalty of their contumacy. ”

“ Under any other circumstances he should have blushed to designate himself as the person in whom these qualifications were united, and unhappily the only person who possessed the last; but in such an emergency a good Spaniard must sacrifice even his modesty. Spain might still be saved if he were commissioned to take what cavalry he could raise, put himself at the head of the forces in La Mancha, and march upon Madrid; and he pledged his sacred word of honour that he would resign the command as soon as the French should be driven back to the Ebro. ”

“ They began by predicting the failure of all our efforts, and the total ruin of the Spanish cause; laying down as “a proposition too plain to be disputed, that the spirit of the people, however enthusiastic and universal, was in its nature more uncertain and short-lived, more liable to be extinguished by reverses, or to go out of itself amid the delays of a protracted contest, than the steady, regular, moderate feeling which calls out disciplined troops, and marshals them under known leaders, and supplies them by systematic arrangements.” ”

“ He who sincerely wishes the welfare of his fellows serves God, and omnipotent goodness protects him. We desire that, in conformity with these dispositions, you direct the prayers of the faithful whom Providence has entrusted to you. Ask of God, that his spirit of peace and wisdom may descend upon us, that the voice of passion may be stifled in meditating upon such sentiments as ought to animate us, and which the general interests of this monarchy inspire: that religion, tranquillity, and happiness may succeed to the discords to which we are now exposed. ”

“ Let the final issue of the contest be what it may, France has not yet succeeded in subduing Spain. I admit that Buonaparte has 200,000 men in that country; that his troops are of the bravest, and his generals among the most skilful in the world; and, above all, that he has been himself at their head: and yet, with all this, he has not got possession of more territory than he had last year: he only holds such parts as in every war fell to the lot of whichever brought the largest army into the field. ”

“ The French, by their own account, threw above 17,000 bombs during the siege, and expended near an hundred and sixty thousand weight of powder. More than 30,000 men, and 500 officers, the flower of the Spanish armies, lay buried beneath the ruins of Zaragoza; and this is far from the amount of lives which were sacrificed in this memorable and most virtuous defence, the number of women and children who perished by the bombardment, by the mines, by famine and pestilence, remaining untold. ”

“ When the French entered the city six thousand bodies were lying in the streets and trenches, or piled up in heaps before the churches. The people, still unsubdued in spirit, were with difficulty restrained from declaring that the capitulation was concluded without their consent, and rushing upon the invaders with the determination of taking vengeance and dying in the act. The armed peasants, instead of delivering up the weapons which they were no longer permitted to use, broke them in pieces with generous indignation. ”

“ Harassed in their marches, decimated in their parties, cut off in their communications,453 and baffled in their hope of fighting great actions, these arrogant Generals despair of conquest, and execrate a war in which their men are consumed without glory. Weary of struggling against a physical force which every day strengthened, and a moral resistance which had made itself invincible, they fled at last from your soil in a state of miserable exhaustion, giving to Castille a new and great example that it is not possible to force the yoke upon a people who are unanimous in resisting it. ”

“ For a man of honour and humanity to have been in the course of military service involuntarily engaged in effecting such a conquest, would be the greatest of all misfortunes; but to look back upon it with complacency, and record it as glorious, is a crime.
5 The veracious historian of Marshal Soult asserts that Romana had compelled the Bishop to withdraw, knowing how much the example of his submission would influence the Galicians; as if he thought that to make a man sacrifice any thing to a sense of patriotism and of duty compulsion was necessary! ”

“ James’s Park, than to have sent them, not to suffer the noble risk of soldiers, in a practicable cause, but to endure insufferable, ignoble, and useless misery, in a march to the very centre of Spain, where for them to attack was impracticable, and to retreat only possible, by unparalleled exertions: and what sort of retreat? ... a retreat leaving upon the roads and in the mountains of Spain from 8000 to 9000 of our brave men, dying of fatigue, without one act of courage to sweeten the death of a soldier. ”

“ A Spanish General would neither have foreseen defeat nor have been cast down by it; he would have thought a change of fortune as likely as a change of weather; he would have relied upon the Saints and the Virgin, his good cause and the insuperable constancy of his countrymen. But Reding saw only the fearful realities of his situation; he knew that his own knowledge of the art of war was of no avail when he could depend neither upon officers nor men ”

“ D’Argenton was worthy to have fallen on better times, for he was a man of kind and generous affections, at once firm of purpose and gentle of heart. When the French entered Porto, no individual exerted himself more strenuously in repressing the excesses of the troops; and many families in those dreadful days were beholden to him not only for their lives and properties, but for preservation from evils more dreadful than ruin and death. This officer undertook to open a communication with the British army, and finding his way to Colonel Trant’s head-quarters, was sent by him to Sir Arthur. ”

“ Palafox himself, confidently as he had expected that the army which he commanded would be successful in the field, had not been negligent in preparing to withstand a second siege. Works of considerable extent and importance had been designed, and executed as far as time and means permitted. It was impossible to convert so large a city into a good fortified place, accessible as it was on all sides, and every where commanded within reach of cannon; but with a population so resolute in defending themselves, every thing became of consequence which could impede the enemy. ”

“ What could, then, be a more disgusting and humiliating spectacle, than to see the government of this great empire, in such a fearful season, in the hands of men who seemed not fit to be a vestry in the smallest parish? ”

“ Nevertheless, I do not refuse to abdicate my rights of conquest in favour of the king, and to establish him in Madrid, as soon as the 30,000 citizens which this capital contains, the clergy, nobility, merchants, and lawyers shall have declared their fidelity, set an example to the provinces, enlightened the people, and made the nation sensible that their existence and prosperity essentially depend upon a king and a free constitution, favourable to the people, and hostile only to the selfishness and haughty passions of the grandees. ”