Having completed the depressing chronicle of the leaguer of the Castle of Burgos, it is necessary that we should turn back for a week or two, to examine the changing aspect of external affairs, which had affected the general strategical position in Spain while the siege lingered on. It will be remembered that the original scheme for the campaign had been that, after the Army of Portugal had been pushed back to the Ebro, a great part of Wellington’s field force should return to Madrid, to pick up the divisions left there, and the corps of Hill, before Soult and King Joseph should begin to give trouble on the side of Valencia. Only a containing force was to have been left behind, to aid Castaños and his Galicians in keeping Clausel (or his successor Souham) out of mischief, while more important movements were on foot in New Castile[65]. As to the command of this containing force there was a difficulty: Wellington was not at all satisfied with the way in which Clinton had handled the troops left on the Douro in August, and it seems doubtful whether he wished to give him a far more important commission in the first half of October, when he was the natural person to be chosen for it. For at this time none of the other senior officers who had served in the recent campaigns were available: Beresford, Stapleton Cotton, and Picton were all three invalided at the moment. Graham, the best of them all, had returned to England. Hill could not be removed from the charge of his old army in the South. Of the five divisions before Burgos four were commanded by brigadiers acting in the position of _locum tenens_[66]: most of the brigades were, in a similar fashion, being worked by colonels for want of a sufficient number of major-generals to go round. But after October 11th the formal difficulty was solved: there was now available an officer whom it was fitting to leave in charge against Souham, viz. Sir Edward Paget, who came up to the front on that day, after having been three years absent from the Peninsula; he had last served under Wellington at the Passage of the Douro in 1809, where he lost an arm. He had now come out nominally to succeed Graham at the head of the 1st Division, but also with the commission to act as second-in-command in the event of the illness or disabling of the general-in-chief. Paget was known as a good soldier, and had served with distinction during the Corunna retreat; but he had never been trusted with the management of a large force, and had little knowledge either of the army which Wellington had trained, or of the parts of Spain in which the campaign was now going on. Moreover, Wellington disliked on principle the idea of having a second-in-command, occupying to a certain extent a position independent of his own.