Marshal Soult, meantime, was receiving a considerable reinforcement of conscripts. Papers in all the languages of the allies were thrown into the outposts, and distributed wherever it was likely they might be found, inviting deserters, and denouncing vengeance if France should be invaded: the whole French nation, it was said, was in arms, and if the English and Spanish and Portugueze should set foot upon their territory, they should meet with nothing but death and destruction. Some expectation the French commander placed upon the hardships to which the troops must be exposed, at that season, in the Pyrenees, upon the weather, and in consequence the increased difficulty of supplying the allied armies. Forage, indeed, had become so scarce that some of the cavalry were reduced to graze their horses, which of course could not long have been kept in condition without better food. The cattle brought for the consumption of the troops through a great part of Spain arrived in a jaded and lean condition, ... those which lived to reach the place of slaughter, ... for the roads along which they had been driven might easily be traced by their numerous carcasses, ♦NOVEMBER.♦ lying half-buried or unburied by the way-side, ... sad proofs of the wasteful inhumanity of war! The weather had been more stormy than was usual even on that coast and at that season. The transports at Passages were moored stem and stern in rows, and strongly confined by their moorings; yet they were considered in danger even in that land-locked harbour: some were driven forward by the rising of the swell, while others, close alongside, were forced backward by its fall, so that the bowsprits of some were entangled in the mizen-chains of others. The cold on the mountains was so intense that several men perished. A piquet in the neighbourhood of Roncesvalles was snowed up: the parties who were sent to rescue it drove bullocks before them as some precaution against the danger of falling into chasms, and the men were brought off; but the guns could not be removed, and were buried under the snow in the ditch of the redoubt. Soult, since his failure in the Pyrenees three months before, had been fortifying a formidable line of works in them. The right rested upon the sea in front of S. Jean de Luz, and on the left of the Nivelle; the centre on La Petite Rhune, and the heights behind the village of Sarré; the left, consisting of two divisions of infantry, under General Drouet, was on the right of the river, on a strong height behind the village of Ainhoue, and on the mountain of Mondarin, which protected the approach to that village. Two divisions, under Generals Foy and Paris, were at St. Jean de Pied-de-Port. This position described half a circle through Irogne, Ascain, Sarré, Ainhoue, Espelette, and Cambo, the centre projecting very much at Sarré. La Petite Rhune, though overtopped by the greater hill of the same name, from which it is separated by a narrow valley,