their own vision, and the soldier who brought home much booty was not too closely questioned as to the manner in which he had obtained it. When a foraging party had turned over many bushels of wheat or maize, or a hundred sheep, to the store of their battalion, it could hardly be expected that their colonel would show his gratitude by inquiring whether the happy find had been procured by torture or by simple murder. [13] ‘Les détachements se subdivisent à mesure qu’ils s’éloignent: et il en résulte que les hommes isolés des chefs se livrent à toute espèce de rapines et même à des cruautés sur les pauvres paysans,’ says Noël (p. 128). [14] The story of the marauding sergeant ‘Maréchal Chaudron’ and his band, given by Marbot (ii. pp. 418-19), is probably exaggerated by that lively narrator--the scale is too large. But there was undoubtedly some foundation for the tale; see Lemonnier-Delafosse, _Mémoires_, p. 103. [15] Guingret, pp. 124-6. Of the three corps which formed Masséna’s army, that of Reynier, in the Santarem entrenchments, seems to have suffered most, because it was concentrated on a narrow position, with no unexhausted country around it, and with other troops immediately in its rear, who had sucked dry the resources of the plain of Golegão. Its foraging parties had to go thirty miles away before they had a chance of finding ground that had not been already picked over most carefully by the men of the 6th or the 8th Corps. Junot’s men were a little better off, as they had the Leiria-Alcobaça country immediately on their flank, and could plunder there without molestation, unless they pressed in too closely upon the outposts of Trant’s or Blunt’s detachments. Nevertheless the 8th Corps lost more men by disease than either of the others during this hard winter. It was composed to a great extent of conscript battalions new to Spain, young and unacclimatized, whose men died off like flies from cold, dysentery, and rheumatism. Clausel’s division, which contained all these raw units, sank from 6,700 to 4,000 men in the three months that preceded the New Year, without having been engaged in any serious fighting--a loss of forty per cent.: while the case-hardened troops of Reynier, who had been in the Peninsula since 1808, and had already gone through the privations of Soult’s marches to Corunna and Oporto, only shrank from 17,000 to 12,000 bayonets in the same three months. Moreover, of the 5,000 lost by them, 2,000 were the casualties of Bussaco, not the victims of Wellington’s scheme of starvation. Ney’s corps and the cavalry reserve were better off than either Junot’s or Reynier’s troops, having at their disposition the fertile country between Golegão, Thomar, and Abrantes, where, at the commencement of their sojourn, food was to be got with comparative ease--many fields of maize were still standing unreaped when they first arrived, and it was not till after the New Year of 1811 that they began to be seriously