Clauzel during the first confusion wrote that only twenty thousand men could be reorganised, but in this number he did not include the stragglers and marauders who always take advantage of a defeat to seek their own interest; a reference to the French loss proves that there were nearly thirty thousand fighting men left, and in fact Clauzel did in a fortnight reorganise twenty thousand infantry, two thousand cavalry and fifty guns, besides gaining a knowledge of five thousand stragglers and marauders. In fine no soldiers rally quicker after a defeat, than the French, and hence as Joseph brought to Blasco Sancho thirty guns and fourteen thousand men of which above two thousand were horsemen, forty thousand infantry, and more than six thousand cavalry with a powerful artillery, might then have been rallied behind the Duero, exclusive of Caffarelli’s divisions. Nor would Madrid have been meanwhile exposed to an insurrection, nor to the operation of a weak detachment from Wellington’s army; for the two thousand men, sent by Suchet, had arrived in that capital on the 30th, and there were in the several fortified points of the vicinity, six or seven thousand other troops who could have been united at the Retiro, to protect that dépôt and the families attached to the intrusive court. Thus Wellington without committing any fault, would have found a more powerful army than Marmont’s, again on the Duero, and capable of renewing the former operations with the advantage of former errors as warning beacons. But his own army would not have been so powerful as before, for the reinforcements sent from England did not even suffice to replace the current consumption of men; and neither the fresh soldiers nor the old Walcheren regiments were able to sustain the toil of the recent operations. Three thousand troops had joined since the battle, yet the general decrease, including the killed and wounded, was above eight thousand men, and the number of sick was rapidly augmenting from the extreme heat. It may therefore be said that if Marmont was stricken deeply by Wellington the king poisoned the wound. The English general had fore-calculated all these superior resources of the enemy, and it was only Marmont’s flagrant fault, on the 22d, that could have wrung the battle from him; yet he fought it as if his genius disdained such trial of its strength. I saw him late in the evening of that great day, when the advancing flashes of cannon and musketry, stretching as far as the eye could command, shewed in the darkness how well the field was won; he was alone, the flush of victory was on his brow, and his eyes were eager and watchful, but his voice was calm, and even gentle. More than the rival of Marlborough, since he had defeated greater warriors than Marlborough ever encountered, with a prescient pride he seemed only to accept this glory, as an earnest of greater things. BOOK XIX. CHAPTER I. [Sidenote: 1812.]