This last plan was rash, seeing that Bessieres was well provided with horsemen, and that the Spaniards had scarcely any; but Cuesta, assuming the chief command, left a division at Benevente to protect his stores, and advanced, much against Blake’s wishes, with twenty-five thousand infantry (regular troops), a few hundred cavalry, and from twenty to thirty pieces of artillery, in the direction of Palencia. His march, as we have seen, dismayed Savary. To use Napoleon’s expressions, he who had been “_hitherto acting as if the army of Gallicia was not in existence_,” now acted “_as if Bessieres was already beaten_;” but that marshal, firm and experienced, rather than risk an action of such importance with insufficient means, withdrew even the garrison from the important post of St. Ander, and having quickly collected fifteen thousand men and thirty pieces of artillery at Palencia, moved forward on the 12th of July to the encounter. His line of battle consisted of two divisions of infantry, one of light cavalry, and twenty-four guns, his reserve was formed of four battalions and some horse grenadiers of the imperial guards, with six pieces of artillery. [Sidenote: S. Journal of Bessieres’ Operations.] The 13th he halted at Ampudia and Torre de Mormojon, from thence advancing on the 14th in two columns, he drove in an advanced guard of one hundred and fifty Spanish cavalry, and arrived about nine o’clock in front of Rio Seco, where Cuesta’s army was drawn up like a heavy domestic animal awaiting the spring of some active wild beast. BATTLE OF RIO SECO. The first line of the Spaniards was posted along the edge of a step of land, with an abrupt fall towards the French; the heaviest guns were distributed along the front. The second line, composed of the best troops, strengthened, or rather weakened, by seventeen or eighteen thousand peasants, was displayed at a great distance behind the first; the town of Rio Seco was in rear of the centre. [Sidenote: S. Journal of Bessieres’ Operations.] [Sidenote: Ibid.]