Dupont had hardly settled down in Cordova, and begun to substitute crushing military contributions for unsystematic pillage, when he found himself cut off from his base. The valley of the Upper Guadalquivir, and the slopes of the Sierra Morena, on both the southern and the northern sides of the passes, rose in arms in the second week of June. The French had left no detachments behind to preserve their communications: between Cordova and Toledo there were only a few posts where stragglers and sick had been collected, some isolated officers busy on surveying or on raising contributions, and some bodies of ten or twenty men escorting couriers or belated trains of wagons bearing food or ammunition to the front. Most of these unfortunate people were cut up by the insurgents, who displayed from the first a most ferocious spirit. The news of the sack of Cordova drove them to the commission of inhuman cruelties; some prisoners were blinded, others tortured to death: Foy says that the brigadier-general Réné, surprised while crossing the Morena, was thrown into a vat of boiling water and scalded to death[102]. The parties, which escaped massacre hastily drew back towards Madrid and Toledo, and soon there was not a French soldier within 150 miles of Dupont’s isolated division. That general did not at first realize the unpleasantness of his position. He had been sufficiently surprised by the opposition offered at Alcolea, and the rumours of the concentration of the army of Castaños, to make him unwilling to advance beyond Cordova. He wrote to Murat asking for reinforcements, and especially for troops to keep open his lines of communication. There were, he said, at least 25,000 regular troops marching against him: the English might disembark reinforcements at Cadiz: the whole province was in a flame: it was impossible to carry out the Grand-Duke of Berg’s original orders to push straight on to Seville. But matters were even worse than he thought: in a few days he realized, from the non-arrival of couriers from Madrid, that he was cut off: moreover, his foraging parties, even when they were only a few miles outside Cordova, began to be molested and sometimes destroyed. [102] Foy, iii. 233. Cabany (p. 96), on the other hand, says that he was sawn in two between planks. Gille, in his _Mémoires d’un Conscrit de 1808_ (p. 85), gives other distressing details.