Siege warfare followed most of the practice established before, but a larger use of guns, the improvement of gunpowder and sometimes orders to fight to the last stand led to an escalation in violence. This was enhanced too by the growing involvement of civilians, especially in Spain, which gave a more exacerbated dimension to the fights

This chapter explores the British sack of stormed towns from the perspective of Wellington’s command. Throughout his career, Wellington was not always consistent in how he dealt with sacks. He learnt lessons in India, but seemingly those lessons had to be learnt again in Spain. From Wellington’s perspective, the challenge was to manage and contain sack rather than prevent it entirely, something that he considered nigh on impossible. Given the centuries long tradition of plundering stormed towns, the chaotic circumstances of storming operations, and the prevailing articles of war, Wellington had only a very limited capacity to control the behaviour of his troops once beyond the breaches. Still, during the Peninsular War, as had been the case in India, a clear trend emerges: Wellington made progressively greater efforts to prevent or minimise sack plunder, with the growing encroachment of the military justice system into the space of sack itself. Moreover, Wellington cared about the welfare of civilians within besieged and stormed towns: it was not the breakdown of troop discipline alone that concerned him about sack – there was a humanity at play, too, as guarded and infrequently expressed as it was, in this most demonstrably unsentimental of soldiers.

Chapter 1, “Warsaw Besieged: September 1939,” describes the September 1939 siege of Warsaw during Case White (the September Campaign or Polish Defensive War) by the German Wehrmacht and Nazi SS personnel and the city’s eventual capitulation. The first of four chapters on how Nazi Germany dismantled the Polish state and nation for long-term occupation by targeting the Warsaw intelligentsia, the description of the siege frames the project. The military invasion revealed German brutality and weak Polish military performance, and provoked a Polish government evacuation crisis. The evacuation created chaos, ruptured Poles’ faith in their government, and triggered the creation of a Polish government-in-exile in western Europe far from occupied Warsaw. The people of Warsaw, led by Mayor Stefan Starzyński, coordinated military-civilian cooperative defense efforts, setting the tone for elite behavior during the coming occupation. This chapter argues that the siege-time cooperation was the foundational experience of the capital’s intelligentsia, and framed responses to the persecutions of the coming occupation.