When this disposition was made, the English general arranged his other measures of offence. The conduct of the Portuguese government and the new positions of the French armies had, as Napoleon had foreseen, left him no means of undertaking any sustained operation; but, as he was ignorant of the great strength of the army of the north, he hoped to find an opportunity of taking Ciudad Rodrigo before Marmont could come to its assistance. For this purpose he had caused a fine train of iron battering guns, and mortars, together with a reinforcement of British artillery-men, which had arrived at Lisbon from England, to be shipped in large vessels, and then with some ostentation made them sail as it were for Cadiz; at sea they were however shifted on board small craft, and while the original vessels actually arrived at Cadiz and Gibraltar, the guns were secretly brought first to Oporto and then in boats to Lamego. During this process, several engineer, artillery, and commissariat officers, were sent to meet and transport these guns, and the necessary stores for a siege, to Villaponte near Celerico; and as one of the principal magazines of the army was at Lamego, and a constant intercourse was kept up between it and Celerico, another great depôt, the arrival, and passage of the guns and stores to their destination was not likely to attract the attention of the French spies. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. V. Section 1.] Other combinations were also employed, both to deceive the enemy and to prepare the means for a sudden attack, before the troops commenced their march for Beira; but the hiding of such extensive preparations from the French would have been scarcely possible, if the personal hatred borne to the invaders by the peninsulars, combined with the latter’s peculiar subtlety of character, had not prevented any information spreading abroad, beyond the fact that artillery had arrived at Oporto. The operation of bringing sixty-eight huge guns, with proportionate stores, across nearly fifty miles of mountain, was however one of no mean magnitude; five thousand draft bullocks were required for the train alone, and above a thousand militia were for several weeks employed merely to repair the road. [Sidenote: General Harvey’s Journal.]