This was lord Wellington’s plan, and his firmness and resolution in conceiving it were the more signal because his own troops were not in good plight. The army had indeed received reinforcements, but the infantry had served at Walcheren, and exposure to night air, or even slight hardship, threw them by hundreds into the hospital, while the new regiments of cavalry, inexperienced, and not acclimated, were found, men and horses, quite unfit for duty, and were sent to the rear. The pay of the army was three months in arrear, and the supplies, brought up with difficulty, were very scanty; half and quarter rations were often served, and sometimes the troops were without any bread for three days consecutively, and their clothing was so patched, that scarcely a regiment could be known by its uniform. Chopped straw, the only forage, was so scarce that the regimental animals were dying of hunger; corn was rarely distributed save to the generals and staff, and even the horses of the artillery and of the old cavalry suffered; nay, the very mules of the commissariat were pinched by the scarcity, and the muleteers were eight months in arrears of pay. The cantonments on the Coa and Agueda were unhealthy from the continued rains, above twenty thousand men were in hospital; and deduction made for other drains, only fifty-four thousand of both nations, including garrisons and posts of communication, were under arms. To finish the picture, the sulky apathy produced in the Portuguese regency by the prince regents letter, was now becoming more hurtful than the former active opposition. [Sidenote: 1811. Dec.] But even these distresses so threatening to the general cause, Wellington turned to the advantage of his present designs; for the enemy were aware of the misery in the army, and in their imagination magnified it; and as the allied troops were scattered, for relief, from the Gata mountains to the Douro, and from the Agueda to the Mondego, at the very moment when the battering train entered Almeida, both armies concluded, that these guns were only to arm that fortress, as a cover to the extended country quarters which necessity had forced the British general to adopt. No person, not even the engineers employed in the preparations, knew more than that a siege or the simulation of a siege was in contemplation; but when it was to be attempted, or that it would be attempted at all, none knew; even the quarter-master general Murray, was permitted to go home on leave, with the full persuasion that no operation would take place before spring.