On this day (March 25) the first convoy of provisions from the new base established at Coimbra reached the camps on the Alva, and Wellington was at last able to set the 1st and 5th Divisions and Ashworth’s Portuguese in motion[234]. They started on the Celorico road, and reached Galliges that night. No news had yet come in of the southward movement of the French from Guarda, which had begun on the preceding day. The vanguard of the army had now established itself in Celorico, which was reached by the Light and 3rd Divisions on the 25th-26th: they had come up very slowly, being sadly distressed for food, and therefore forced to make very short stages. Only one ration of bread had been given out in the last four days. [234] Pack’s Portuguese were so exhausted and sickly that they were left behind for a rest, and to wait for more food, at Mangualde on the upper Mondego. On the 26th the cavalry pushed out from Celorico[235], Arentschildt’s brigade took the Almeida road, Hawker’s (this colonel was in temporary command of the 1st and 14th, while Slade managed the whole vanguard) pushed towards Guarda. Each swept the villages on the flanks of its route. The result of the exploration was to show that a very large body of the enemy had retired on Guarda, and a very small body on Almeida. A patrol of the 16th Light Dragoons hit on Mermet’s rearguard and took an officer and eighteen men from it. The reports of the following day came to much the same--it began to be clear that almost the whole French army must have gone to Guarda, and at last Wellington began to have the first news of Masséna’s southward movement, though he did not yet grasp its meaning. ‘The French appear to stick about Guarda,’ he wrote to Beresford, ‘and yesterday they had some people well on towards Manteigas: but I have heard nothing of them from Grant [the famous scout and intelligence officer] and I conclude they were only a patrol.’ Now Manteigas is at the source of the Zezere, near Covilhão, and this ‘patrol’ was nothing less than Junot’s flank cavalry, exploring out from Belmonte, which the 8th Corps had reached on the preceding day. But so little did Wellington guess what was running in Masséna’s mind, that he wrote on this day that he was proposing to take a short turn to the Alemtejo to supervise Beresford’s operations (which were hanging fire in the most discouraging fashion), as soon as the French were over the frontier[236]. [235] ‘General Slade had been in Celorico the whole of yesterday,’ complains Tomkinson of the 16th, ‘and yet had not the least idea where the French had retired to.’ Diary, p. 89. [236] Wellington to Henry Wellesley, March 27, from Gouvea.