The wretched cattle had to be slaughtered, as our rations seldom arrived at their destination before the camp-kettles, and when both arrived, there was not one fire in our bivouac sufficient to boil a mess. Officers as well as soldiers had no covering except the canopy of heaven; we had not one tent, and the army never slept in a village. We thus lay in the open country; our clothes saturated with rain, half the men and officers without shoes, nothing to eat, or, at all events, no means of cooking it. What then could be much worse than the situation in which the army was placed? But this was not the worst, because, from the nature of the retreat, and the pursuit, neither the cavalry nor artillery horses could be supplied with forage. The retreat each day generally began at four in the morning, in the dead dark of night; towards eight the army had gained perhaps six miles', perhaps not five, start of the enemy. At ten they were at our heels. The rear, as a matter of necessity, for the preservation of the whole, was then obliged to face about and show a front, to enable the remainder to proceed on their retreat. The position taken up was, as a matter of course, according to the urgency of the moment, sometimes in a vast tract of ploughed land, where the troops were drawn up ankle deep in mud. In this position, those who were not fighting were obliged to remain, in their tattered uniforms, worn to rags after two years' service, scarcely a good pair of shoes or trousers on any, and the greater part without the former. The ague had also attacked the bulk of the army, and as the soldiers picked up the acorns that fell from the oak trees (these, by the way, are the property of the pigs in Spain, but the pigs, fortunately for themselves, had not yet appeared in the woods we now traversed), many were unable to eat them, so much were they enfeebled by the disorder.