One brigade of Girard’s division, having marched at four o’clock by the road of Medellin, was already safe, but Dombrouski’s brigade and the cavalry of Briche were still in the place; the horses of the rear-guard, unbridled, were tied to the olive-trees, and the infantry were only gathering to form on the Medellin road outside the village. Girard himself was in his quarters, waiting for his horse, when two British officers galloped down the street, and in an instant all was confusion; the cavalry bridled their horses, and the infantry run to their alarming posts. But a thick mist rolled down the craggy mountain, a terrifying shout, drowning even the clatter of the elements arose on the blast, and with the driving storm came the seventy-first and ninety-second regiments, charging down the street. Then the French rear-guard of cavalry, fighting and struggling hard, were driven to the end of the village, and the infantry, hastily forming their squares, covered the main body of the horsemen which gathered on their left. The seventy-first immediately lined the garden walls, and opened a galling fire on the nearest square, while the ninety-second filing out of the streets formed upon the French right; the fiftieth regiment closely following, secured the prisoners in the village, and the rest of the column, headed by the Spanish cavalry, skirted the outside of the houses, and endeavoured to intercept the line of retreat. The guns soon opened on the French squares, the thirteenth dragoons captured their artillery, the ninth dragoons and German hussars, charged their cavalry and entirely dispersed it with great loss; but Girard, an intrepid officer, although wounded, still kept his infantry together, and continued his retreat by the Truxillo road. The right column of the allies was however already in possession of that line, the cavalry and artillery were close upon the French flank, and the left column, having re-formed, was again coming up fast; Girard’s men were falling by fifties, and his situation was desperate, yet he would not surrender, but giving the word to disperse, endeavoured to escape by scaling the almost inaccessible rocks of the sierra. His pursuers, not less obstinate, immediately divided. The Spaniards ascended the hills at an easier part beyond his left, the thirty-ninth regiment and Ashworth’s Portuguese turned the mountain by the Truxillo road; the twenty-eighth and thirty-fourth, led by general Howard, followed him step by step up the rocks, and prisoners were taken every moment, until the pursuers, heavily loaded, were unable to continue the trial of speed with men who had thrown away their arms and packs. Girard, Dombrouski, and Briche, escaped at first to San Hernando, and Zorita, in the Guadalupe mountains, after which, crossing the Guadiana at Orellano on the 9th of November, they rejoined Drouet with about six hundred men, the remains of three thousand. They were said to be