The only food that the southern marching column got this day was procured from the celebrated raid upon the swine, which so much enraged Wellington. It is recorded in many 3rd and 4th Division diaries. The main wealth of the peasantry of this forest region lay in their pigs, which had been driven into the heart of the woods, to hide them from the passing armies. From some unknown cause a stampede broke out in one vast herd of the creatures, which ran across the road cutting through the middle of the 3rd Division. The starving soldiers opened up a lively fusillade upon them, and whole battalions broke their ranks and pursued them with the bayonet, cutting up the creatures before they were dead, each man going off with a gory limb or rib. Many officers farther to the rear thought from the firing that the French had cut into the head of the column. Later in the day the same or another herd charged the camp of a brigade of the 2nd Division, and gave many a hungry man an unexpected meal[196]. The southern column had no enemy but hunger and cold on the 17th, but the experiences of the centre column were more military. This corps, consisting of the 1st, 6th, 5th, 7th, Light Divisions, moving in that order, had a tiresome alarm before the rearguard had started in the morning from behind the Matilla brook. By some blunder--on the part of Gordon the Quartermaster-General as was said[197]--the covering cavalry marched off before the Light Division, the rear of the infantry column, had left its ground. There was nothing but the picquets from the 95th Rifles between the camp, where the battalions were just getting under arms, and two divisions of French Dragoons, cautiously advancing along the road and with their flanking parties out in the woods. There was barely time to form close column and start off before the enemy were riding in from all sides. They did not attempt to close, but while keeping their main body on the road, at a safe distance, sent out many detached squadrons, along by-paths in the woods, which from time to time came out unexpectedly not only upon the flank of the Light Division, acting as rearguard, but much farther up the line, where the 7th Division, and the 5th in front of them, were moving along the road to San Muñoz. Hardly any of the allied cavalry appeared to curb these incursions--the main body appears to have gone off too much to the south, in the direction of Hill’s column. Hence came the extraordinary chance that small bodies of the French got into the interval between the Light Division and the 7th, and even into that between the 7th Division and the 5th, though the troops themselves were all closed up and perfectly safe in their dense columns. Great part of the baggage of the 7th Division was intercepted and plundered by one party. But the most tiresome incident was that a patrol of three men from Vinot’s light cavalry captured the one-armed General Edward Paget, the newly-arrived second-in-command of the Army, as he was