The evening of the 21st of July was calm, and appeared settled, but persons well versed in the symptoms of the horizon, which were unobserved by those intensely occupied with the anticipations of the events which the morrow was to produce, pronounced that a hurricane was not far distant. Pakenham’s division was occupied, as I have before said, in entrenching itself, when about ten at night a torrent of rain fell in the trenches, and so completely filled them with water that the soldiers were obliged to desist from their labour. Later in the night a storm arose, and the wind howled in long and bitter gusts. This was succeeded by peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, so loud and vivid that the horses of the cavalry, which were ready saddled, took alarm, and forcing the pickets which held them, ran away affrighted in every direction. The thunder rolled in rattling peals, the lightning darted through the black and almost suffocating atmosphere, and presented to the view of the soldiers of the two armies the horses as they ran about from regiment to regiment, or allowed themselves to be led back to their bivouac by the troopers to whom they belonged. The vivid flashes of lightning, which seemed to rest upon the grass, for a few moments wholly illuminated the plain, and the succeeding flashes occurred with such rapidity that a constant blaze filled the space occupied by both armies. It was long before the horses could be secured, and some in the confusion ran away amongst the enemy’s line and were lost. By midnight the storm began to abate, and towards morning it was evidently going farther: the lightning flashed at a distance through the horizon; the rain fell in torrents, and the soldiers of both armies were drenched to the skin before the hurricane had abated. Towards five o’clock the storm was partially over, and by six the dusky vapour which had before veiled the sun disappeared, and showed the two armies standing in the array they had been placed the evening before. All doubts were now set at rest as to which side of the river the battle would be fought. The entire army of Marmont remained on the left bank, and Pakenham was ordered to move across the Tormes with the 3rd Division, by the bridge of Salamanca, with as much speed as possible; but it was one o’clock before he reached the station allotted to him—the extreme right of the British.