If he demanded food for his troops, he was answered by false statements of what had been supplied, and falser promises of what would be done; and the glorious services rendered at Talavera, far from exciting the gratitude or calling forth the activity of the Spanish authorities, seemed only to render them the more perverse. The soldiers in the ranks were weakened by hunger, the sick were dying for want of necessary succours, the commissaries were without the means of transport; and when sir Arthur Wellesley applied for only ninety artillery horses to supply the place of those killed in the action, Cuesta, on the very field of battle, and with the steam of the English blood still reeking in his nostrils, refused this request, and, two days after, abandoned the wounded men to an enemy that he and his countrymen were hourly describing as the most ferocious and dishonourable of mankind. The retreat of the allies across the Tagus increased the sufferings of the troops, and the warmth of their general’s remonstrances rose in proportion to the ill-treatment they experienced; but the replies, nothing abating in falseness as to fact, now became insulting both to the general and his army: “_The British were not only well but over supplied_:”--“_they robbed the peasantry, pillaged the villages, intercepted the Spanish convoys, and openly sold the provisions thus shamefully acquired_:”--“_the retreat of the army across the Tagus was unnecessary; Soult ought to have been destroyed; and the English general must have secret motives for his conduct, which he dare not avouch_:”--and other calumnies of the like nature. Now, from the 20th of July to the 20th of August, although the Spaniards were generally well fed, the English soldiers had not received ten full rations. Half a pound of wheat in the grain, and, twice a week, a few ounces of flour, with a quarter of a pound of goat’s flesh, formed the sole subsistence of men and officers; and this scanty supply was procured with much labour, for the goats were to be caught and killed by the troops; and it was, perhaps, upon this additional hardship that the accusation of selling provisions was founded, for, in such cases, it is in all armies the custom that the offal belongs to the men who slaughter the animals. But the famine in the camp was plainly proved by this very fact; for a goat’s offal sold, at this time, for three and even four dollars, or about double the usual price of the whole animal; and men and officers strove to outbid each other for the wretched food. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. 18.]