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156
COPENHAGEN.
Chap. X.
hopes of personal aggrandisement in the formation of a
kingdom of Scandinavia. Strange to say, the inhabitants
themselves, though threatened for three weeks, could
never bring themselves to believe that the
bombardment would take place. The first rocket thrown into the
town killed a little girl sitting working at her bedroom
window; the second killed her mother, nursing her
child at the street-door. These missiles seemed to have
a particular spite against the female sex. Fires broke
out in every direction; the conduct of the pompiers and
fire-brigade was admirable, though few, very few,
survived to tell the tale. On the second day the
inhabitants fled to Christianshavn in the island of Amak,
100 persons lodging in the same house; 305 houses
were consumed by the flames, the cathedral was totally
destroyed. Of the number of women, children, and the
aged who fell victims to the power of our guns, without
counting those who died in defending the city, I decline
giving any account: the statistics vary, and are, we
may hope, exaggerated. On the fourth day, at eleven
o’clock, the capitulation of the city was signed by
General Peymann, who was afterwards disgraced,
deprived of his decorations, and dismissed the Danish
service by the petulant Crown Prince, as a reward for
his continued brave defence of the capital and his
humanity in preventing further loss of life and its entire
reduction to ashes by the cannon of the enemy—a capital,
too, which the prince himself had deserted and left to
undergo its fate, unsupported in its calamity by the
presence of its actual sovereign, for Christian had long
before sunk into a state of lunacy and mental
aberration. Whatever may have been the conduct of the
English Government, that of the Crown Prince tells—
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