Joseph, thinking to prevent Hill’s junction, had gained Arevalo by the Segovia road, and on the 8th, Souham’s scouts being met with at Medina del Campo, the king, for the first time since he had quitted Valencia, obtained news of the army of Portugal. One hundred thousand combatants, of which above twelve thousand were cavalry, with a hundred and thirty pieces of artillery, were then assembled on plains, over which, three months before, Marmont had marched with such confidence to his own destruction; and Soult, then expelled from Andalusia by Marmont’s defeat, was now, after having made half the circuit of the Peninsula, come to drive into Portugal that very army whose victory had driven him from the south. Wellington had foreseen, and foretold, that the acquisition of Andalusia, though politically important and useful, would prove injurious to himself at the moment. The prophecy was fulfilled. The French had concentrated a mighty power, from which it required both skill and fortune to escape. Meanwhile the Spanish armies let loose by this union of all the French troops kept aloof, or, coming to aid, were found a burden rather than a help. On the 7th Hill passed the Tormes at Alba, and the bridge there was mined; for Wellington, holding Christoval and being still uncertain of the real numbers of the enemy, was desirous to maintain the line of the Tormes permanently and give his troops repose. His own retreat had been of two hundred miles; Hill had marched a greater distance; Skerrett had come from Cadiz; the soldiers who besieged Burgos had been in the field with scarcely an interval of repose since January; all were barefooted, their equipments were spoiled, the cavalry were weak, the horses out of condition, and discipline was generally failing. The excesses committed on the retreat from Burgos have been touched upon; and during the first day’s march from the Tagus to Madrid, five hundred of the rear-guard, chiefly of one regiment, finding the inhabitants of Valdemoro had fled, plundered the houses; drunkenness followed and two hundred and fifty fell into the hands of the enemy. The conduct of an army can never be fairly judged by following in the wake of a retreat. Here there was no want of provisions, no hardships to exasperate, yet the author of this history counted on the first day’s march from Madrid seventeen bodies of murdered peasants; by whom killed, or for what, whether by English or Germans, by Spaniards or Portuguese, whether in dispute, in robbery, or in wanton villany, was unknown; but their bodies were in the ditches, and a shallow observer might thence have drawn most foul and false conclusions against the English general and nation.