and that they were brought round by sea to Pasages or St. Sebastian, for personal diaries mention them as in use again, in at least some regiments, by December. Oddly enough, there appears to be no official record of the revocation of the order given in May. Another innovation of the period was the introduction of a new unit into the British Army--called (after the idiotic system of nomenclature used at the Horse Guards) the ‘Staff Corps Cavalry.’ They were really military mounted police, picked from the best and steadiest men in the cavalry regiments, and placed under the command of Major Scovell, the cypher-secretary on Wellington’s head-quarters staff, of whose activities much has been said in the last volume. There were two troops of them, soon raised to four, with a total strength of about 300 of all ranks[356]. The object of the creation of the corps was to make more effectual the restraint on marauding, and other crimes with which the Provost-Marshal and his assistants were too few to deal. Wellington had railed with almost exaggerated emphasis on the straggling, disorder, and looting which had distinguished the Burgos retreat, and the Duke of York had licensed the formation of this police-cavalry as the best remedy for the disease. They had plenty to do after Vittoria, when the British Army had the greatest orgy of plunder that ever fell to its lot during the war. Wellington’s own view was that the slackness of discipline in certain regiments, rather than privations or casual opportunity, was the main source of all evil. But he welcomed any machinery that would deal with the symptoms of indiscipline, even if it did not strike at the roots of the disease. Over-leniency by courts martial was another cause of misconduct according to his theory--with this he strove to cope by getting from home a civilian Judge-Advocate-General, whose task was to revise the proceedings of such bodies, and disallow illegal proceedings and decisions. The first and only holder of this office, Francis Larpent, has left an interesting and not always discreet account of his busy life at Head-Quarters, which included a strange episode of captivity in the French lines on the Bidassoa[357]. SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER IV THE PERPLEXITIES OF KING JOSEPH. FEBRUARY-MARCH 1813