Sir Harry’s decision was certainly erroneous, but error is common in an art which at best is but a choice of difficulties. The circumstances of the moment were imposing enough to sway most generals; for although the French were beaten in the attacks, they rallied with surprising quickness under the protection of a strong and gallant cavalry; sir Harry knew that his own artillery carriages were so shaken as to be scarcely fit for service; that the draft horses were few and bad, and that the commissariat parc on the plain was in the greatest confusion. The hired Portuguese carmen were making off with their carriages in all directions; the English cavalry was totally destroyed, and finally, general Spencer had discovered a line of fresh troops on the ridge behind that occupied by the French army. Weighing all these things in his mind with the caution natural to age, Burrard was reluctant to hazard the fortune of the day upon what he deemed a perilous throw. The duke of Abrantes, who had displayed all that reckless courage to which he originally owed his elevation, profited by this unexpected cessation of the battle, and re-formed his broken infantry. Twelve hundred fresh men joined him at the close of the contest, and, covered by his cavalry, he retreated with order and celerity until he regained the command of the pass of Torres Vedras, so that when the day closed, the relative position of the two armies was the same as on the evening before. [Sidenote: Thiebault.] One general, thirteen guns, and several hundred prisoners fell into the hands of the victors, and the total loss of the French was estimated at three thousand men, an exaggeration, no doubt, but it was certainly above two thousand, for their closed columns had been exposed for more than half an hour to sweeping discharges of grape and musquetry, and the dead lay thickly together. General Thiebault indeed reduces the number to eighteen hundred, and asserts that the whole amount of the French army did not much exceed twelve thousand men, from which number he deducts nearly three thousand for the sick, the stragglers, and all those other petty drains which form the torment of a general-in-chief. But when it is considered that this army was composed of men selected and organized into provisionary battalions expressly for the occasion; that one half had only been in the field for a fortnight, and that the whole had enjoyed three days rest at Torres Vedras, it is evident that the number of absentees bears too great a proportion to the combatants. A French order of battle found upon the field gave a total of fourteen thousand men present under arms, of which thirteen hundred were cavalry, and this amount agrees too closely with other estimates, and also with the observations made at the time, to leave any reasonable doubt of its authenticity or correctness. [Sidenote: Proceedings of the Board of Inquiry.]