the want of power in the government and their officers.” ♦DISPUTES WITH CUESTA CONCERNING SUPPLIES.♦ Cuesta’s unaccommodating temper aggravated the evil. He was applied to after the battle for ninety mules to draw the British artillery in place of those lost in the action; there were at that time hundreds in his army employed in drawing empty carts, and yet he refused to part with any. Five guns belonging to Alburquerque’s division having been taken at Arzobispo, the Duke endeavoured to make over to the British army the mules attached to them; but Cuesta took them for himself. His own cavalry were plentifully supplied with barley, while hundreds of the British horses died for want of it. In other respects, his men suffered as many privations as the English; and vexation at this and at the untoward issue of the campaign, combined with bodily infirmity, seems to have bewildered him: he lent ear to every complaint against the allies; and at a time when they were literally starving, both men and horses, he wrote to their General, stating that his own troops were in want of necessary food, because all that he ordered for their use was intercepted by the British and their commissaries. The English, he said, actually sold biscuit and meat; and he heard continual complaints and saw continual traces that they plundered all the places through which they passed, and even followed the peasantry to the mountains, for the purpose of stripping them even to the shirt. Sir Arthur positively denied that any thing going to the Spanish army had been stopped by the British; as for the tale of his soldiers selling provisions, he observed, that it was beneath the dignity of his Excellency’s situation and character to notice such things, and beneath his own to reply to them. He was concerned that General Cuesta should conceive there was any reason for complaining of the British troops; but, continued he, “when troops are starving, which those under my command have been, as I have repeatedly told your Excellency since I joined you, and particularly when they had no bread from the 3d to the 7th, it is not astonishing that they should go to the villages and even to the mountains to look for food where they think they can get it. The complaints of the inhabitants, however, should not have been confined to the conduct of the British; here in Deleitosa I have seen Spanish soldiers, who ought to have been elsewhere, take off the doors of the houses which were locked up, in order that they might plunder the houses; and they afterwards burnt the doors.”