Such were the pastimes of Cabrera, such was the faith he kept with those who confided in his word. The barbarous execution detailed above was one of many that occurred in the first year of his command. Up to the month of February 1836, the number of his victims, slain after the battle, in cold blood, often in defiance of capitulation, sometimes on mere suspition of liberalism, amounted to one hundred and eighty-one. This does not include murders committed on the highways and in the mountains, but those only of which there were abundant witnesses, and that are proved by dates and documents. Amongst the slaughtered, were children and old men. Two lads of sixteen and seventeen years of age were shot at Codoñera in presence of their mother. When she implored Cabrera’s mercy, he told her that her sons should be spared if her husband would give himself up and take their place. On hearing this reply, worthy of a Caligula or a Nero, the unhappy woman swooned away, and the infant at her breast fell dead from her arms as if struck by lightning. The shock to the mother had killed the child. All these atrocities were committed whilst Cabrera’s mother yet lived unmolested in Tortosa.
Meanwhile the Christino general Nogueras, busied in the pursuit of the rebels, passed his whole time in the mountains, often not entering a town for a month together, except to get pay or shoes for his troops. Wherever he went, he was assailed by the tears and lamentations of bereaved wives and mothers. If he paused at Calatayud, they told him of the death of nine national guards shot at Castejoncillo; at Caspe, the weeping widows and orphans of five others presented themselves before him; at Teruel he was horrified by the narrative of the massacre of the Dehesa; when he traversed the plains of Alpuente, the Carrascal of Yesa, where forty prisoners had been bayoneted, was pointed out to his notice; in the Maestrazgo he found universal mourning for sixty-one nationals, pitilessly butchered at Alcanar; in each hamlet where he halted for the night, the authorities complained to him of the most barbarous ill-treatment at the hands of Cabrera. Not a village did he pass through, whose alcalde had not been brutally bastinadoed. From his companions, his visitors, his guides, he heard continually of Cabrera’s cruelties. In the whole district nothing, else was talked of. The sole thought of the liberal party was how to put a period to them, and to be avenged upon their perpetrator. The most humane and peaceable men urged a system of reprisals, as both legitimate and likely to be efficacious. Such a system, Nogueras, yielding to the public voice, and enraged at the murder of two alcaldes, whom Cabrera had causelessly shot, at last resolved to adopt. He demanded the execution of Cabrera’s mother, in the vain hope that it would strike terror into the rebel chief, and check his excesses. Most unhappy was the impulse to which he yielded. The act itself was cruel and hasty; its consequences were terrible. But such was the state of feeling in Arragon at that time, that, until those consequences were felt, many approved the deed. The captain-general of Arragon, Don Francisco Serrano, a man noted for humanity and mildness, deemed the measure advisable, and even announced it with satisfaction in a proclamation, by which he declared a similar fate to be in reserve for Cabrera’s sisters, and for the relatives of the other rebel chiefs, if the Carlists persisted in their atrocities. Hitherto the whole odium of the fate of a forlorn old woman, who perhaps deplored as much as any one the enormities committed by her son, has rested upon Nogueras. This is hardly fair. Ill-advised, and in a moment of just irritation, he urged a request, too hastily complied with, speedily repented, and which, according to the conviction of Señor Cabello, he would himself have retracted had he not been absent from Tortosa when its accomplishment took place. A more unfortunate act, to whomsoever it may chiefly be imputed, could not have been devised. It was at once repudiated by the Spanish government, by the Cortes and the nation. In the eyes of Europe, it went far to convert Cabrera from a pitiless butcher into an injured victim. At a distance from the theatre of war, the nine score unfortunates whom he had massacred in cold blood were forgotten or overlooked. Pity for the mother’s fate procured oblivion for the previous crimes of the son. Filial affection and regret, working upon an impassioned nature, were urged in extenuation of his subsequent excesses. His massacres became holocausts, offered by a pious child to the manes of a murdered parent.