this, Lannes was to be tested as a commander-in-chief, for Napoleon sent him to Spain in 1808 and gave him a detached wing of the army to command, with which he won a crushing victory over General Francisco Castaños at Tudela on 22 November. In January 1809, he was sent to capture Zaragoza, and by 21 February, after one of the most stubborn defences in history, Lannes was in possession of the place. He later said, "this damned Bonaparte is going to get us all killed" after his last campaign in Spain. In 1808, Napoleon made him Duke of Montebello, and in 1809, for the last time, gave him command of the advance guard. He took part in the engagements around Eckmühl and the advance on Vienna. With his corps, he led the French Army across the Danube River and bore the brunt, with Marshal André Masséna, at the Battle of Aspern-Essling. Death On 22 May 1809, during a lull in the second day of the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Lannes went and sat down at the edge of a ditch, his hand over his eyes and his legs crossed. As he sat there, plunged in gloomy meditation on having seen his friend, General Pierre Charles Pouzet, decapitated mid-conversation by a cannonball, a second cannonball fired from a gun at Enzersdorf ricocheted and struck him just where his legs crossed. The knee-pan of one was smashed, and the back sinews of the other torn. The marshal said, "I am wounded; it's nothing much; give me your hand to help me up." He tried to rise, but could not. He was carried to the tête de pont, where the chief surgeons proceeded to dress his wound. One of Lannes' legs was amputated within two minutes by Dominique Jean Larrey. He bore the painful operation with courage; it was hardly over when Napoleon came up and, kneeling beside the stretcher, wept as he embraced the marshal. On 23 May, he was transported by boat to the finest house in , now a part of Simmering district of Vienna. Eight days later, Lannes succumbed to his painful wounds at daybreak on 31 May. He was initially buried in Les Invalides, Paris, but in 1810, he was exhumed and reinterred in the Panthéon national after a grandiose ceremony. Family Lannes married twice, in Perpignan on 19 March 1795 to Paulette Méric, whom he divorced because