Note 98 — OPERATIONS FROM THE BATTLE OF TALAVERA TO THE AFFAIR OF THE COA.
Reading edition
“Every day now added to the distress of the besieged. Their flour was exhausted—wheat they had still in store, but men are so much the slaves of habit, that it was considered as one great evil of the siege that they had no means of grinding it: two horse-mills, which had been erected, were of such clumsy construction, that they did not perform half the needful work; and the Geronans, rather than prepare the unground corn in any way to which they had not been accustomed, submitted to the labour of grinding it between two stones, or pounding it in the shell of a bomb with a cannon-ball. For want of other animal food, mules and horses were slaughtered for the hospital and for the shambles; a list was made of all within the city, and they were taken by lot. Fuel was exceedingly scarce, yet the heaps which were placed in cressets at the corners of the principal streets, to illuminate them in case of danger, remained untouched, and not a billet was taken from them during the whole siege. The summer fever became more prevalent; the bodies of the sufferers were frequently covered with a minute eruption, which was usually a fatal symptom: fluxes also began to prevail.
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“Augereau now straitened the blockade; and, that the garrison might neither follow the example of O’Donnell, nor receive any supplies, however small, he drew his lines closer, stretched cords with bells along the interspaces, and kept watch-dogs at all the posts. The bombardment was continued, and always with greater violence during the night than the day, as if to exhaust the Geronans by depriving them of sleep.
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“There did not remain a single building in Gerona which had not been injured by the bombardment; not a house was habitable; the people slept in cellars, and vaults, and holes, amid the ruins; and it had not unfrequently happened that the wounded were killed in the hospitals. The streets were broken up, so that the rain-water and the sewers stagnated there: and the pestilential vapours which arose were rendered more noxious by the dead bodies which lay rolling amid the ruins. The siege had now endured seven months; scarcely a woman had become pregnant during that time: the very dogs, before hunger consumed them, had ceased to follow after their kind; they did not even fawn upon their masters; the almost incessant thunder of artillery seemed to make them sensible of the state of the city, and the unnatural atmosphere affected them as well as human kind. It even affected vegetation. In the gardens within the walls the fruits withered, and scarcely any vegetable could be raised. Within the last three weeks above five hundred of the garrison had died in the hospitals: a dysentery was raging and spreading; the sick were lying upon the ground, without beds, almost without food; and there was scarcely fuel to dress the little wheat that remained, and the few horses which were yet unconsumed.”—Southey.