Next day we occupied ourselves with my enlistment. The spirit of the men who were enlisting filled me with such enthusiasm that nothing seemed to me so noble as to follow glory, even afar off. Everybody knows that in those days Saragossa and the Saragossans had obtained a fabulous renown, that their heroism stimulated the imagination. Everything referring to the famous siege of the immortal city partook on the lips of narrators of the proportions and colors of the heroic age. With distance, the actions of the Saragossans acquired great dimensions. In England and Germany, where they were considered the Numantines of modern times, those half-naked peasants, with rope sandals on their feet and the bright Saragossan kerchief on their heads, became like figures of mythology.
“Surrender, and we will give you clothes,” said the French in the first siege, admiring the constancy of a few poor countrymen dressed in rags.
“ We do not know how to surrender ,” they made answer; “ and our bodies shall be clothed with glory. ”
The fame of this and other phrases has gone round the world.
But let us go back to my enlistment. There was an obstacle in the way, Palafox’s manifesto of the thirteenth of December, in which he ordered the expulsion of all strangers within a period of twenty-four hours. This measure was taken on account of the numbers of people who made trouble, and stirred up discord and disorder; but just at the time of my arrival another order was given out, calling for all the scattered soldiers of the Army of the Centre which had been dispersed at Tudela, and so I found a chance to enlist. Although I did not belong to that army, I had taken a place in the defence of Madrid and the battle of Bailén. These were reasons which, with the help of my protector Montoria, served me in entering the Saragossan forces. They gave me a place in the battalion of volunteers of the Peñas of San Pedro, which had been badly weakened in the first siege, and I received a uniform and a gun. I did not enter the