obey the rules of war when dealing with a 'captain of bandits'. Zaragoza,
having held out for two-and-a-half months against a large siege train,
even though poorly fo rtified, was then the scene of sanguinary house-to
house streetfighting. French patrols were ambushed and cut down to the
last man, if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, they were reserved for
horrible deaths by mutilation, crucifixion, being nailed to trees, boiled in
oil, drowned or buried alive. The crazed xenophobia of the juntas must
bear some of the blame for the descent into barbarism. An inflammatory
proclamation by the Valencia junta on 7 June r8o9 said of the French:
'They have behaved worse than a horde of Hottentots. They have
profaned our temples, insulted our religion and raped our women.'
It must be conceded that the French gave as good as they got. Dupont
sacked Cordoba and elsewhere Spain was given over to the looting of a
Napoleonic soldiery imbued with a spirit wherein a rational system of
living off the land by military requisition had yielded to an anarchy of
rapine and plunder. The French were devotees of mass execution, usually
without trial. They dispatched hundreds by firing squad and hanged,
looted and raped with gusto. Repression and backlash, atrocity and
counter-atrocity plunged the country into an inferno of brutality and
degradation. The breakdown of all social order had predictable results.
Soon the country hovered on the brink of famine. The writer George
Sand remembered vividly the terrible scenes in Spain in r8o8 when she
travelled there as a child with her father. She existed on raw onions,
sunflower seeds, green lemons and soup made of candle-ends, which she
shared with the soldiers. She remembered the noise of the wagon in
which she lay as it crunched over the bones of corpses in the road, and
recalled once clutching at the sleeve of a trooper only to find his arm
mtssmg.
The resistance on the peninsula spread to Portugal, where Wellington
landed at Oporto and soon had an army of r6,ooo behind him. The
impulsive Junot foolishly attacked with inferior numbers and was
defeated at Vimeiro. The Convention of Cintra, to Spanish fu ry, allowed
for the repatriation of French forces in English ships, together with all
their equipment and loot. Wellington was opposed to such liberal terms,
but his last-minute supersession by General Burrard - reflecting
infighting in London - took the shine off Vimeiro; and it was Burrard
who let the French off the hook with the Cintra agreement. A
disconsolate Wellington temporarily returned to the post of Irish
Secretary in London. The British then marched into Galicia, where the
locals welcomed them with open arms. The Vimeiro defeat was played up
marcin
(Marcin)
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