Wellington had always been aware that Burgos was fortified, but during his advance he had spoken freely of his intention to capture it. On September 3rd he had written, ‘I have some heavy guns with me, and have an idea of forcing the siege of Burgos--but that still depends on circumstances[29].’ Four days later he wrote at Valladolid, ‘I am preparing to drive away the detachments of the Army of Portugal from the Douro, and I propose, if I have time, to take Burgos[30].’ Yet at the same moment he kept impressing on his correspondents that his march to the North was a temporary expedient, a mere _parergon_; his real business would be with Soult, and he must soon be back at Madrid with his main body. It is this that makes so inexplicable his lingering for a month before Dubreton’s castle, when he had once discovered that it would not fall, as he had hoped, in a few days. After his first failure before the place, he acknowledged it might possibly foil him altogether. Almost at the start he ventured the opinion that ‘As far as I can judge, I am apprehensive that the means I have are not sufficient to enable me to take the Castle.’ Yet he thought it worth while to try irregular methods: ‘the enemy are ill-provided with water; their magazines of provisions are in a place exposed to be set on fire. I think it possible, therefore, that I have it in my power to force them to surrender, although I may not be able to lay the place open to assault[31].’ The cardinal weakness of Wellington’s position was exactly the same as at the Salamanca forts, three months back. He had no sufficient battering-train for a regular siege: after the Salamanca experience it is surprising that he allowed himself to be found for a second time in this deficiency. There were dozens of heavy guns in the arsenal at Madrid, dozens more (Marmont’s old siege-train) at Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. But Madrid was 130 miles away, Rodrigo 180. With the army there was only Alexander Dickson’s composite Anglo-Portuguese artillery reserve, commanded by Major Ariaga, and consisting of three iron 18-pounders, and five 24-pounder howitzers, served by 150 gunners--90 British, 60 Portuguese. The former were good battering-guns; the howitzers, however, were not--they were merely short guns of position, very useless for a siege, and very inaccurate in their fire. They threw a heavy ball, but with weak power--the charge was only two pounds of powder: the shot when fired at a stout wall, from any distance, had such weak impact that it regularly bounded off without making any impression on the masonry. The only real use of these guns was for throwing case at short distances. ‘In estimating the efficient ordnance used at the Spanish sieges,’ says the official historian of the Burgos failure, ‘these howitzers ought in fairness to be excluded from calculation, as they did little more than waste invaluable ammunition[32].’ This was as well known to Wellington as to his