At the first dawn of the morning of the 23rd of July Lord Wellington continued the pursuit of the defeated army of Marmont. He placed himself at the head of the Light Division, which opened the march, followed by the heavy German cavalry under General Bock, and Anson’s brigade of light horse. Those two superb brigades of dragoons had only joined the army the night before. The 1st Division of infantry, composed of the Guards and German Legion, followed the cavalry, and Lord Wellington, at the head of thirteen thousand men that had not pulled a trigger, or unsheathed a sabre in the battle, followed the enemy’s track; but the retreat was so quick that Marmont’s headquarters were thirty miles from Salamanca the day after the battle. Nevertheless, the corps that covered the retreat, consisting of three battalions of infantry and five regiments of cavalry, were overtaken near the village of La Serna. The infantry formed themselves into three squares, the cavalry were posted on the flanks for its support, but the panic with which all were infected by the defeat of the preceding day had taken such a fast hold of them, that the French horse in advance could not be prevailed upon to show a front. This threw those that were at hand to support them into disorder; confusion was communicated to the remainder, and the field of battle was precipitately abandoned by the cavalry, who, in the most unaccountable manner, left their companions, the infantry, to their fate. The cavalry having thus fled, Bock, with his German horse, galloped at the squares, and breaking through, slew or took prisoners the entire; and the contest ended in one dreadful massacre of the French infantry. Nevertheless, many of the troopers fell; for one regiment in particular, the 105th French, bravely stood their ground, but the ponderous weight of the heavy cavalry broke down all resistance; and arms lopped off, heads cloven to the spine, or gashes across the breast and shoulders, showed to those who afterwards passed the spot the fearful encounter that had taken place; and from this moment nothing more of the army of Portugal was to be seen. The overthrow of the rear-guard which covered the flight of the army of the Duke of Ragusa, and the rapid manner in which Clausel made good his retreat from the heights of La Serna, where that army for the last time made any show of a stand against the British troops that had defeated it on the plains of Salamanca, finished the campaign, so far, at least, as regarded the army of Portugal.