[320] There is an account of this rout from the French side in the _Mémoires_ of Parquin, of the 13th Chasseurs, an officer mentioned in Marmont’s dispatch as having taken one of the flags. Parquin calls it that of the regiment of _Eurillas_. There was no such corps: those which lost standards were Aveiro, Oliveira, and Penafiel. A lengthy account may be found also in Beresford’s _Ordens do Dia_ for May 7, where blame and praise are carefully distributed, and the curious order is made that the disgraced regiments are to leave their surviving flags at home, till they have washed out the stain on their honour by good service in the field. The day after the ‘Rout of Guarda’ Marmont pushed an advanced guard to Lagiosa, half-way to Celorico, where Trant and Wilson had taken refuge, with their ranks short of some 2,000 men scattered in the hills. Thereupon the militia generals set fire to the stores, and evacuated Celorico, falling back into the hills towards Trancoso. But finding that the French were not coming on, they halted; and when they ascertained that the enemy was actually returning to Guarda, they came back, extinguished the fires, and rescued great part of the magazines. Marmont’s unexpected forbearance was caused by the fact that the news of the fall of Badajoz reached him on the 15th, along with a report from Clausel (who had just evacuated Castello Branco) that Wellington’s army had already started northward, and that its advanced guard was across the Tagus at Villa Velha. This was startling, nay appalling, intelligence. Badajoz had been reckoned good for a much longer resistance, and the news had come so slowly--it had taken nine days to reach Marmont--that it was possible that the British army was already in a position to cut off his expeditionary force from its base on the Agueda. Wherefore Marmont hastily evacuated Guarda, and was back at Sabugal by the 16th, where Clausel and the other dispersed fractions of his army joined him. Here he regarded himself as reasonably safe, but determined to retire behind the Spanish frontier ere long, raising the blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo. ‘My troops,’ he wrote to Berthier on that day, ‘have used up the little food to be gathered between the Tagus and the Zezere; and now that the enemy is on the Tagus I cannot possibly remain on the Mondego, as I should be leaving him on my line of communications. I shall fall back to the right bank of the Agueda. If the enemy resolves to pursue me thither I shall fight him. If not I shall fall back on Salamanca, because of the absolute impossibility of feeding an army between the Agueda and the Tormes.’