War to the Death: the Sieges of Saragossa 1808-1809

The intensity of Spanish resistance to French occupation of their country during the Napoleonic Wars is vividly portrayed in this classic account of the sieges of Saragossa in 1808 and 1809. The French army expected to have little difficulty in taking this key Spanish city, but they encountered ferocious opposition from Spanish soldiers and civilians. They were embroiled in a murderous, long-drawn out operation that lasted for almost a year. Casualties were very heavy on both sides, as was the suffering of the citizens of Saragossa, and the city was ruined by weeks of hand-to-hand, room-to-room fighting. Raymond Rudorff's classic account, reissued in paperback, of one of the defining events in the Peninsular War gives a vivid insight into the siege and the street-fighting, and into the fierce determination of the Spanish to expel the French from their country.