The crisis in front of Madrid, where Hill stood exposed to attack from the mass of French forces in the kingdom of Valencia, developed late. We have already seen that the first dispatch from the South which disquieted Wellington only reached him on the 19th October, and that it was not till the 21st that he realized that all his plans for hindering a French advance on Madrid were ineffective, and that Hill was in serious danger. The long delay in Soult’s evacuation of Andalusia was--as has been already remarked--the ultimate cause of the late appearance of the advancing columns of the enemy in front of Madrid. It was not till September 30 that the advanced cavalry of the Army of the South got into touch with the outlying vedettes of Treillard’s dragoons, at Tobarra near Hellin. Four days later Soult was in conference with King Joseph, and the Marshals Jourdan and Suchet who had come out to meet him, at Fuente la Higuera, some fifty miles farther on the road toward Valencia. They met with various designs, though all were agreed that the Allies must be driven out of the capital as soon as possible. Suchet was mainly anxious to get the Army of the South, and the King also, out of his own viceroyalty. Joseph’s troops were wasting his stores, and harrying the peasantry, whose shearing he wished to reserve for himself. Soult’s men were notoriously unruly, and at the present moment half famished, after their long march through a barren land. The Duke of Albufera was anxious to see them all started off for Madrid at the earliest possible moment. His only personal demand was that he should be allowed to borrow a division from one or the other army; for, when they should be gone, he thought that he would have barely enough men to hold off Mackenzie and the Spaniards of the Murcian army. He promised, and produced, large convoys of food for the service of the Armies of the South and Centre, but pleaded that in order to make his only base and arsenal--the city of Valencia--quite safe, it was necessary that they should leave him 5,000 extra troops: in especial he pleaded for Palombini’s division, which had originally been borrowed from his own army of Aragon. Jourdan--as he tells us in his memoirs[111]--maintained that it was necessary to turn every possible man upon Madrid, and that Suchet could defend himself against his old enemies with his own army alone. He might, if hard pressed, call down some troops from Catalonia.