The junta, on their part, always protesting that the welfare of the British army was the principal object of their care, did not fail to prove, very clearly upon paper, that the troops, ever since their entry into Spain, had been amply supplied: and that no measure might be wanting to satisfy the English general, they invested don Lorenzo Calvo, a member of their body, with full powers to draw forth and apply all the resources of the country to the nourishment of both armies. This gentleman’s promises and assurances, relative to the supply, were more full and formal than M. de Garay’s, and equally false. He declared that provisions and forage, in vast quantities, were actually being delivered into the magazines at Truxillo, when, in fact, there was not even an effort making to collect any. He promised that the British should be served, although the Spanish troops should thereby suffer; and, at the very time of making this promise, he obliged the alcaldes of a distant town to send, into the Spanish camp, provisions which had been already purchased by an English commissary. In fine, lord Wellesley had arrived too late; all the mischief that petulance, folly, bad faith, violence, and ignorance united, could inflict, was already accomplished, and, while he was vainly urging a vile, if not a treacherous government, to provide sustenance for the soldiers, sir Arthur withdrew the latter from a post where the vultures, in their prescience of death, were already congregating. The 20th, the main body of the British army quitted Jaraicejo, and marched by Truxillo upon Merida. The light brigade, under Craufurd, being relieved at Almaraz by the Spaniards, took the road of Caceres to Valencia de Alcantara. But the pass of Mirabete bore ample testimony to the previous sufferings of the troops; Craufurd’s brigade, which, only three weeks before, had traversed sixty miles in a single march, were now with difficulty, and after many halts, able to reach the summit of the Mirabete, although only four miles from their camp; and the side of that mountain was covered with baggage, and the carcases of many hundred animals that died in the ascent. The retreat being thus commenced, the junta, with the malevolence of anger engendered by fear, calumniated the man to whom, only ten days before, they had addressed the most fulsome compliments, and to whose courage and skill they owed their own existence. “_It was not the want of provisions_,” they said, “_but some other motive that caused the English general to retreat_.” This was openly and insultingly stated by Garray, by Eguia, and by Calvo, in their correspondence with lord Wellesley and sir Arthur; and at the same time the junta industriously spread a report that the true reason was their own firm resistance to the ungenerous demands of the English ministers, who had required the cession of Cadiz and the island of Cuba, as the price of furthur assistance.