French might make to turn the British position in this direction. The bulk of the cavalry was also placed on the right wing, to cover the end of the infantry line. Only the Portuguese horse of D’Urban and Campbell, Penne Villemur’s Spaniards, and Long’s brigade were on the left beyond Calvarisa de Arriba. The rest, five British brigades, lay out in the direction of Miranda de Azan and in front of Aldea Tejada. Bock’s brigade on the extreme right long remembered their position of this morning because they were placed on ‘Pakenham’s Hill’, the spot where the 3rd Division had fallen upon Thomières in the old battle. The ground was thickly strewn with the skeletons of the French who had then fallen, still lying unburied and in a horrible state of complete preservation: the horses’ hoofs were continually setting the skulls rolling[178]. Behind Bock were Ponsonby’s, Victor Alten’s, Anson’s, and Slade’s brigades, a formidable mass, yet far less in strength than the innumerable cavalry of the Armies of the South and Centre, which lay opposite them 7,000 strong[179]. Nothing was more uncertain than the move which the French would next make. If it should turn out to be one which did not fit in with Wellington’s plans, there would be no alternative but a retreat on Ciudad Rodrigo. Wherefore all the divisions were directed to send off their baggage half a march to the west, and preparations were made to destroy so much of the magazines in Salamanca city as could not be carried off. The commissariat officers were already packing up all for which transport could be found, and sending it forward. By an error of judgement on the part of the Quartermaster-General, James Willoughby Gordon--not the first of his blunders in this campaign--all this valuable store was started on the road Salamanca-Rollan-San Felices, which was the safest by far of all those open to the Army if a retreat should become necessary, and the farthest from any probable line of advance that the French could take. But it had the disadvantage of being far away from the other roads by which the Allied Army might have to move, and the unfortunate result followed on the 16th-17th-18th that the food was moving on the northern road, and the troops--starving for want of it--on three other roads parallel to it at a distance of twenty miles to the south. Soldiers must be fed, or they straggle and turn to marauding, and it is of no profit to have food if it be not in the right place at the right moment. These simple facts were to cause dire trouble during the next three days.