The general feeling in the army was that nearly all the loss and mischief had happened in the inclement days of November 15-18, previous disorders having been comparatively insignificant; and as regards those days they questioned the justice of Wellington’s indictment of the troops. To say that ‘the army had suffered no privations which but trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented’ was simply not true. What ‘trifling attention’ on the part of the regimental officers could have made up for the fact that some divisions had received absolutely no distribution of food of any sort for four continuous days, and others in the same four days nothing but two rations of beef, and no biscuit or other food at all?[218] It was useless to tell them that they had suffered no privations, or that they could by care have avoided them. As an intelligent general officer wrote on November 20: ‘During the whole of this retreat from the 15th inclusive, not only has the weather been dreadfully severe, but the commissariat arrangements having failed, the troops have been mostly without any issue of rations, and have suffered the extremity of privation, having lived upon acorns and hogs killed occasionally in the woods. The natural result of this has been great disorder and confusion, and the roads in the rear of the columns of march are covered with exhausted stragglers left to the enemy. In fact, by some inconceivable blunder, which the Quartermaster-General’s department attribute to that of the Commissary-General, and which the latter throw back on the former, the supplies of the army, which were adequate for much larger numbers, on the morning that we broke up from the Arapiles were sent down the Tormes, by Ledesma toward Almeida, while the army marched on Ciudad Rodrigo--_hinc illae lachrymae_[219].’ There is no doubt that sheer lack of food during inclement weather, and in a desolate and thinly peopled forest-country did most of the mischief. As an indignant subaltern writes: ‘The officers asked each other, and asked themselves, how or in what manner they were to blame for the privations of the retreat. The answer uniformly was--in no way whatever. Their business was to keep the men together, and if possible to keep up with their men themselves--and this was the most difficult duty--many of these officers were young lads badly clothed, with scarcely a shoe or a boot left--some attacked with dysentery, others with ague, more with a burning fever raging through their system; they had scarce strength to hobble along in company with their more hardy comrades, the rank and file[220].’