Agueda and the protection of Ciudad Rodrigo. Fortunately there turned out to be no necessity for this heart-breaking move. Marmont came forward on July 15th, without having received any of the assistance that he had expected from the other armies, and involved himself in the manœuvres that were to end in complete disaster. By his first movement, the ingenious demonstration on the side of Toro, ending by the passage of the whole French army over the Douro at the distant Tordesillas, he distinctly scored a point over his adversary. Wellington was only prepared to fight a defensive battle at this moment; and when the Duke of Ragusa refused, on the Guarena (July 18), to indulge him in such a fashion, and continued to turn his right flank on several successive days, he always gave back, awaiting an opportunity that seemed never about to arrive. The head-quarters staff of the allied army marvelled at their leader’s caution, on the days (July 19-20) when the two armies were executing their parallel marches about Vallesa and Cantalapiedra. At any moment a battle on equal terms could have been brought about, but it was refused. Yet Wellington had recently acquired the knowledge that King Joseph was just starting from Madrid to join Marmont with 15,000 men; and a victory over the Army of Portugal before it should be reinforced was the only way out of the dangerous situation. He would not commit himself to the chance of an offensive battle, and--as his dispatches show--made up his mind to abandon Salamanca and fall back upon the Agueda, unless his adversary should oblige him by making some obvious blunder. The psychology of the moment--as has been shown above--was that he considered that an indecisive victory, entailing heavy loss in his own ranks, would have availed him little. Unless he could put Marmont completely out of action by a very crushing blow, the Marshal would be joined by the Army of the Centre and other reinforcements, and would still be able to make head against him. At the bottom of his mind, it is clear, lay the consideration that he had in his hands the only field-army that Great Britain possessed, that in risking it he would risk everything--even the loss of Portugal,--and that the total force of the French in the Peninsula was so great that he must not fight save at a marked advantage. His own 50,000 men were the sole hope of the allied cause--Marmont’s Army was but one of several bodies whose existence he had to bear in mind. As long as he kept his army intact, the enemy could do no more than push him back to the Agueda: when they had got him thus far, they would have to disperse again, for they could not feed on the countryside, nor invade Portugal with less than 100,000 men. But if he were to wreck his army by suffering a check, or even by winning a bloody and indecisive success, he could not calculate where his retreat might end, or how great the disaster might be.