remarked, were so carelessly laid that two commissariat officers were killed by the first of them that went off, and the last nearly made an end of Captain Cleeves, K.G.L., the artillery officer in charge of the business. He was severely scorched, and barely escaped with his life[136]. The rearguard of the British Army quitted the mourning city by noon on the 31st October: the head of the column was already on that day at the Escurial. On November 1st the passage of the Guadarrama began, and on the 3rd the last cavalry brigade, bringing up the rear, was over the mountains. Not a sign had been seen of the enemy, whose advanced light cavalry only reached Galapagar, five miles south of the Escurial upon the 2nd. The weather, however, was very bad, rain falling day after day, and this must serve as an inadequate excuse for the fact that straggling had already begun, and that a certain number of men dropped so far behind that they fell into the hands of the tardily-appearing enemy. But the loss of these laggards, for the most part the selected bad characters of each battalion, was a small price to pay for an unmolested retreat. Hill’s spirits rose, hour by hour, as he received no letter from Wellington to say that the retreat to Arevalo had become impossible, or that the line of the Douro had been lost. These terrible possibilities might--so far as he knew--have come into existence at any moment on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd of November. On the 4th the whole army from Madrid was concentrated at Villacastin, so close to Wellington’s position behind the Douro at Rueda that dispatches could now get through from him to Hill in less than twelve hours. The cavalry of the extreme rearguard--the 2nd Hussars K.G.L., who had left the Escurial only on the 3rd, had barely seen the enemy’s advanced vedettes on that day, and were not overtaken by them till late on the 4th. The pursuit was slow, cautious, and not executed by any very large body of horse. Hill, therefore, granted his troops a very necessary rest of twelve hours at Villacastin.