ty as the
terrible scene of warfare continued day after day.

By the 17th of February the Cosso was reached and passed. But the French
soldiers had become deeply discouraged by their fifty days of unremitting
labor and battle, fighting above and beneath the earth, facing an enemy as
bold as themselves and much more numerous, and with half the city still to
be conquered. Only the obstinate determination of Marshal Lannes kept them
to their work.

By his orders a general assault was made on the 18th. Under the
university, a large building in the Cosso, mines containing three thousand
pounds of powder were exploded, the walls falling with a terrific crash.
Meanwhile, fifty pieces of artillery were playing on the side of the Ebro,
where the great convent of St. Lazar was breached and taken, two thousand
men being here cut off from the city. On the 19th other mines were
exploded, and on the 20th six great mines under the Cosso, loaded with
thousands of pounds of powder, whose explosion would have caused immense
destruction, were ready for the match, when an offer to surrender brought
the terrible struggle to an end.

The case had become one of surrender or death. The bombardment, incessant
since the 10th of January, had forced the women and children into the
vaults, which were abundant in Saragossa. There the closeness of the air,
the constant burning of oil, and the general unsanitary conditions had
given rise to a pestilence which threatened to carry off all the
inhabitants of the city. Such was the state of the atmosphere that slight
wounds became fatal, and many of the defenders of the barricades were fit
only for the hospitals. By the 1st of February the death-rate had become
enormous. The daily deaths numbered nearly five hundred, and thousands of
corpses, which it was impossible to bury, lay in the streets and houses,
and in heaps at the doors of the churches, infecting the air with their
decay. The French held the suburbs, most of the wall, and one-fourth of
the houses, while the bursting of thousands of shells and the explosion of
nearly fifty thousand pounds of gunpowder in mines had shaken the city to
its foundations. Of the hundred thousand people who had gathered within
its walls, more than fifty thousand were dead; thousands of others would
soon follow them to the grave; Palafox, their indomitable chief, was sick
unto death. Yet despite this there was a strong and energetic party who
wished to protract the si