ched Villafranca,
two days' march from Badajoz, the fortress had already been two days in
the power of the English. This, to the French, was another unaccountable
business; they, even yet, had not learned fully to appreciate the
sovereign virtues of British bayonets. "I think the capture of Badajoz a
very extraordinary event," Lery, Soult's chief engineer, wrote to
General Kellerman, "and I am much at a loss to account for it in a clear
and distinct manner." This comes at the end of a mysterious sort of
epistle, in which the engineer general talks of fatality, and seems to
think that the British had no right to take Badajoz, defended as it was.
But Wellington and his army were great despisers of that sort of
_right_, and, in spite of the really glorious defence, in spite of the
strategy of the governor and the valour of the garrison, of _chevaux de
frise_ of sword-blades, and of the deadly accuracy of the French
artillery and musketeers, Badajoz was taken. The triumph was fearfully
costly. Nearly four thousand five hundred men fell on the side of the
besiegers;--Picton's division was reduced to a skeleton, and the
Connaught Rangers lost more than half their numbers.

Shot through the body at Badajoz, Mr Grattan was left there when his
division marched away. He gives a terrible account of the sacking of the
town; but on such details, even had they not been many times
recapitulated, it is not pleasant to dwell. The frightful crimes
perpetrated during those two days of unbridled excess and violence, rest
at the door of the man whose boundless ambition occasioned that most
desolating war. From an ignorant and sensual soldiery, excited to
madness by a prolonged resistance, and by one of the most sanguinary
conflicts recorded in the history of sieges, forbearance could hardly be
expected. The horrible saturnalia, in which murder and rape, pillage and
intoxication, are pushed to their utmost limits, are the necessary
condition of a successful assault on a desperately defended fortress;
and supposing them prohibited, and that such prohibition could be
enforced, we agree with Mr Grattan in believing that many a town that
has been victoriously carried, might have been found impregnable. But
one must ever deplore the disgraceful scenes enacted in the streets and
houses of Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, and St Sebastian. Unsurpassed in
atrocity, they remain everlasting blots upon the bright laurels gathered
by the British in the Peninsul