Their front was protected by a convent, by ditches, mud walls, breastworks, and felled trees; their cavalry was behind their line, and in rear of all, nearly touching on the town, was a wood with a large house, well placed for and designed by the English general to cover a retreat on the main roads leading from Talavera to Arzobispo and Oropesa. From the large redoubt, on the mound closing the Spanish left, the line was prolonged by the British army. Campbell’s division, in two lines, touched the Spaniards; Sherbrooke’s touched Campbell’s, but arrayed in one line only, M^cKenzie’s division, then on the Alberche, being to form the second. Hill’s division should have closed the left, by taking post on the highest of the isolated heights which bounded the plain, but from some error only the flat ground was occupied, and the height was left naked, an error afterwards felt. The English left wing was covered in front by a watercourse, which, shallow at first, went deepening and widening as it passed the round hill, and became a formidable chasm in the valley. The cavalry, originally placed along the front, was destined to take post, partly behind the British left wing, partly behind the redoubt on the Spanish left, and the whole front of battle was two miles long. The Spaniards, reduced by their recent action to thirty-four thousand combatants, but still having seventy guns, occupied one-third of it, and were nearly inattackable from the nature of the ground. The British and Germans held the remainder of the position, and the weakest part, although they were but nineteen thousand sabres and bayonets with thirty guns. The combined armies therefore, with forty-four thousand infantry, ten thousand cavalry, and one hundred pieces of artillery, offered battle to the king, who was coming on with eighty guns and fifty thousand men, seven thousand being cavalry. Before daylight the French were in march to attack, and at one o’clock Victor reached the heights of Salinas overhanging the Alberche, from whence he could see the dust raised by taking up the position, though the forest masked the dispositions. The ground was however known to him, and the king, at his instance, sent Sebastiani at once against the allies’ right, the cavalry against the centre, and Victor himself against the left-supporting the two first with his guards and the reserve. COMBAT OF SALINAS. (July, 1809.)