The one thing that was abundant in the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo on January 8th, 1812, was artillery. Inside the place was lying the whole siege-train of the Army of Portugal, which Masséna had stored there when he started on his march into Portugal in September 1811. No less than 153 heavy guns, with the corresponding stores and ammunition, were parked there. A small fortress was never so stocked with munitions of war, and the besieged made a lavish and unsparing use of them during the defence: but though the shot and shell were available in unlimited quantities, the gunners were not--a fortunate thing for the besiegers. The details of the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo are interesting. This was the only one of Wellington’s sieges in which everything went without a serious hitch from first to last--so much so that he took the place in twelve days, when he had not dared to make his calculation for less than twenty-four[175]. Even the thing which seemed at first his greatest hindrance--the extreme inclemency of the weather--turned out in the end profitable. The sleet had stopped on the 6th, and a time of light frosts set in, without any rain or snow. This kept the ground hard, but was not bitter enough to freeze it for even half an inch below the surface; the earth was not difficult to excavate, and it piled together well. A persistent north-east wind kept the trenches fairly dry, though it chilled the men who were not engaged in actual spade work to the very bones. The worst memory recorded in the diaries of many of the officers present in the siege is the constant necessity for fording the Agueda in this cold time, when its banks were fringed each morning with thin ice. For the camps of all the divisions, except the 3rd, which lay at Serradilla del Arroyo, some miles south-east of the city, were on the left bank of the river, and the only bridge was so far off to the north that it was little used, the short cut across the ford to the south of the town saving hours of time: ‘and as we were obliged to cross the river with water up to our middles, every man carried a pair of iced breeches into the trenches with him[176].’ There being very few villages in the immediate neighbourhood of Rodrigo, many of the brigades had to bivouac on the open ground--life being only made tolerable by the keeping up of immense fires, round which the men spent their time when off duty, and slept at night. But for the troops in the trenches there could be no such comfort: they shivered in their great coats and blankets, and envied those of their comrades who did the digging, which at any rate kept the blood circulating. It is said that several Portuguese sentries were found dead at their posts from cold and exhaustion each morning. [175] Wellington to Liverpool, _Dispatches_, viii. p. 536, Jan. 7th, 1812, ‘I can scarcely venture to calculate the time that this operation will take, but I should think not less than twenty-four or twenty-five days.’