weak to cover the whole country, or to stop possible bolt-holes. Mina was therefore able to rally part of his men there, and called in the help of scattered _partidas_. Clausel swept all North-Western Aragon with his three divisions, making arrests and destroying villages which had harboured the insurgents. But he did not wish to pursue Mina to the borders of Catalonia, where he would have been quite out of his own beat, and inconveniently remote from Pampeluna and Vittoria. But meanwhile the division which he had left under Taupin in Navarre was having much trouble with Mina’s four battalions in the Amescoas, and parties drifting back from the rout in the Roncal vexed the northern bank of the Ebro, while Longa and Mendizabal, abandoning their old positions in front of Bilbao, had descended on to the Bayonne _chaussée_, and executed many raids upon it, from the pass of Salinas above Vittoria as far as the Ebro (April 25-May 10). The communications between Bayonne and Burgos were once more cut, and the situation grew so bad that Lamartinière’s division of the Army of Portugal had to be moved eastward, to clear the road from Burgos to Miranda, Sarrut’s to do the same between Miranda and Bilbao, while Maucune detached a brigade to relieve Lamartinière at Burgos. Of the whole Army of Portugal there was left on May 20th only one single infantry brigade at Palencia which was still at Reille’s disposition. Five and a half divisions had been lent to Clausel, and were dispersed in the north. And Wellington was now just about to move! The worst thing of all for the French cause was that the communications of the North were as bad in May as they had been in January: after Clausel had taken off the main field-army to the Roncal, and had led it from thence far into Aragon, the roads behind him were absolutely useless. Only on the line Bayonne-Vittoria, where the new blockhouses were beginning to arise, was any regular passing to and fro possible. Clausel himself was absolutely lost to sight, so far as King Joseph was concerned--it took a fortnight or twenty days to get a dispatch through to him. Meanwhile, before turning to the great campaign of Wellington on the Douro, it is necessary to dispose of the chronicle of affairs in Biscay. Foy and his division, as we have seen, had marched from Vittoria to Bilbao and reached the latter place on April 21st[394]. On the way they had nearly caught Mendizabal at Orduña, where he chanced to be present with a guard of only 200 men; but, warned just in time, he had the luck to escape, and went back to pick up his subordinates Longa and Campillo nearer the coast.