have the French had so little temptation to exaggerate. Their own loss was about 1700. This miserable defeat was the more mournful, because the troops that day gave proof enough both of capacity and courage to show how surely, under good discipline and good command, they might have retrieved the military character of their country. No artillery could have been better served. The first battalion of guards, which was 900 strong, left upon the field fourteen officers, and half its men. Four hundred and fifty of a Seville regiment, which had distinguished itself with Wilson at Puerto de Baños, entered the action, and only eighty of them were accounted for when the day was over. Miserably commanded as the Spaniards were, there was a moment when the French, in attempting to deploy, were thrown into disorder, by their well-supported fire, and success was at that moment doubtful. The error of exposing the army in such a situation must not be ascribed wholly to incapacity in Areizaga, who had distinguished himself not less for conduct than courage at Alcañiz; it was another manifestation of the national character, of that obstinacy which no experience could correct, of that spirit which no disasters could subdue. ♦TREATMENT OF THE PRISONERS.♦ There was none of that butchery in the pursuit by which the French had disgraced themselves at Medellin. The intrusive government had at that time acted with the cruelty which fear inspires; feeling itself secure now, its object was to take prisoners, and force them into its own service; and for this purpose a different sort of cruelty was employed. While the Madrid Gazette proclaimed that the French soldiers behaved with more than humanity to the captured Spaniards, that they might gratify their Emperor’s brother by treating his misled subjects with this kindness, the treatment which those prisoners received was in reality so brutal, that if the people of Madrid had had no other provocation, it would have sufficed for making them hate and execrate the Intruder, and those by whom his councils were directed. They were plundered without shame or mercy by the French troops, and any who were recognized as having been taken before, or as having belonged to Joseph’s levies, were hurried before a military tribunal, and shot in presence of their fellows. Even an attempt to escape was punished with death by these tribunals, whose sentence was without appeal! They were imprisoned in the Retiro, and in the buildings attached to the Museum, where they were ill fed and worse used; and they who had friends, relations, or even parents, in Madrid, were neither allowed to communicate with, nor to receive the slightest assistance from them. By such usage about 8000 were forced into a service, from which they took the first opportunity ♦RIGEL, 2. 406.♦ to desert, most of them in the course of a few months having joined the guerillas.