On the 16th the allies halted, partly because the Ceira was swollen and unfordable, partly from the extreme exhaustion of the troops who had suffered far greater privations than the enemy. The latter, following his custom, carried fifteen days’ bread; the allies depended upon a commissariat, which broke down under the difficulties; not from any deficiency in the chief (Mr. Kennedy), who was distinguished alike for zeal, probity, and talent; but from the ill conduct of the Portuguese government; who, deaf to the repeated representations of lord Wellington and Beresford, would neither feed the Portuguese troops regularly while at Santarem, nor fill their magazines, nor collect the means of transport for the march. Hence, after passing Pombal, the greater part of the native force had been unable to continue the pursuit; and the brigades under general Pack and colonel Ashworth, which did keep up and engaged daily with the enemy, were actually four days without food of any sort. Numbers died of inanition on the roads, and to save the whole from destruction, the British supplies were shared with them. The commissary-general’s means were thus overlaid, the whole army suffered, and an imperative necessity obliged lord Wellington to halt. Nevertheless he had saved Coimbra, forced the enemy into a narrow, intricate, and ravaged country, and, with an inferior force, turned him out of every strong position; and this, by a series of movements, based on the soundest principles of war. For, noting the skill and tenacity with which Massena and Ney clung to every league of ground and every ridge defensible, against superior numbers, he seized the higher slopes of the mountains by Picton’s flank march on the 13th; and again by Cole’s on the 14th; and thus, continually menacing the passes in rear of the French, obliged them to abandon positions which could scarcely have been forced: and this method of turning the strength of the country to profit is the true key to mountain warfare. He who receives battle in the hills has always the advantage; and he who first seizes the important points chooses his own field of battle.