At every mile the enemy, on their retreat, had fixed finger posts with directions to the road the “grande armée” had taken, they sufficiently directed us also. But after all, these were of little service, for straggling groups of the unfortunate enemy strewed the road as we advanced over it. The poor fellows, at first, would greet the English with a faint hope of protection, and turned up their swollen and pallid countenances to us with expressions that needed not words to explain them. But we were obliged to pass on and leave them, for aught I know, to be butchered by the inhabitants, who fearfully retaliated for all the scenes we had witnessed. At night we encamped on the outskirts of a small village, the name I do not recollect, but the sights within it I never can forget. In searching for a stream from which I might procure water, I fell upon a small fountain, close to which lay two or three murdered Portuguese; their brains and blood, which seemed freshly to have oozed from their mangled remains, had even streamed into the spring, and turned me away with disgust from the water. Proceeding onward, I observed a gaunt ghastly figure in a cloak stealing towards a group of cadaverous looking Frenchmen—on his getting a little nearer to them, he suddenly spat in his hands and throwing his cloak aside, produced a heavy club, with which, I suppose, he was going to beat their brains out. Struck with horror, I instantly seized the stick from his half-famished grasp, drove him away, and assisted by one or two comrades got the poor men into a house, and pursued my search. As I, however, approached into the Plaza, the desolation thickened; all the havoc that can possibly be imagined in so small a compass lay before me—murdered and violated women—shrieking and dying children—and, indeed, all that had possessed life in the village, lay quivering in the last agony of slaughter and awful vengeance. These became every-day scenes until we overtook the French rear-guard at Pombal, which we did on the 11th, my company had been hurried forward by the cavalry, each dragoon mounting a rifleman behind him on his horse—a method of riding peculiarly galling to the infantry, but which we frequently had to experience during the war. From the friction alone produced on the legs and seat by the dragoon’s saddle-bags, it was some time before the foot-soldier, when placed upon his legs, could move with anything like dispatch. Besides, this method of riding was generally attended by the loss of the men’s mess-tins, which became shaken off by the jolting. There were, indeed, few of our men who would not have preferred marching twice the distance on foot to being thus carried.[7]