Marshal Soult arrived with his army at Llerena on April 3rd, and on the 4th Lord Wellington made arrangements to receive him. His plan was to leave ten thousand men in the trenches and fight the marshal with the remainder of his army; but Soult, either feeling diffident of his strength or still in the hope that Marmont would bend his course southerly, arrived at Villa Franca, but thirty miles from Llerena and the same distance from Badajoz, only on the 7th, thus taking four days to march thirty miles in haste to relieve a beleaguered fortress. On his arrival at Villa Franca on the 7th, he was informed that Badajoz had fallen that morning, or rather the night before, and that Phillipon had surrendered at discretion. He then, like Marmont, retired and moved into Andalusia. CHAPTER XXV. AFTER SOME ADVENTURES BY SEA AND LAND I JOIN MY NEW REGIMENT IN THE PYRENEES. All the troops, except those left to repair and garrison Badajoz, having moved off, I proceeded immediately to Lisbon. Here I remained as short a time as possible, not from over anxiety to see England, but because, although I had the horrors of the sacking of Badajoz in painful recollection, I felt greater horror at the idea that I might be taken for a Belemite. During the splendid campaigns which took place in the Peninsula from 1808 to 1813 many British officers were collected at Belem, and with peculiar tact so contrived as always to remain in the rear of the army. Some were unwillingly kept back from debility of constitution or through wounds, but a large majority were inflicted with a disease which, baffling the skill of learned doctors, loudly called for a remedy far different from that of medical treatment. This patrician band, amounting to the incredible number of upwards of a thousand, were formed into an inefficient depôt at Belem, a suburb of Lisbon, distant thence about five miles. That this over prudent body was not exclusively composed of wounded will appear when it is known that the greater number of its members had never seen nor heard a shot fired during the whole of the eventful period mentioned, far more cautions indeed than the smooth-faced Roman patricians who fled from the slingers at Pharsalia. This careful band did not venture so far even as the skirts of the fight; and it might truthfully be said that the movement of the whole army was attended with less difficulty than the movement of a single Belemite to the front. The complaint or disease of which they complained they invariably attributed to the liver; but medical men after careful analysis attributed it to an affection of the heart, founding their conclusions on the fact that whenever any of those backward patients came forward, the violent palpitations of that organ clearly proved that it was much more affected by the artificial fire in the field than was the liver by the physical heat of the sun.