Soult was strongly affected. “_Tell the emperor_,” he wrote to the minister of war, “_tell him when you make your next report that on the very soil of France, this is the situation of the army destined to defend the southern provinces from invasion; tell him also that the unheard-of contradictions and obstacles I meet with shall not make me fail in my duty_.” The French troops suffered much, but the privations of the allies were perhaps greater, for being on higher mountains, more extended, more dependent upon the sea, their distress was in proportion to their distance from the coast. A much shorter line had been indeed gained for the supply of the centre, and a bridge was laid down at Andarlassa which gave access to the roots of the Bayonette mountain, yet the troops were fed with difficulty; and so scantily, that lord Wellington in amends reduced the usual stoppage of pay, and invoked the army by its military honour to sustain with firmness the unavoidable pressure. The effect was striking. The murmurs, loud in the camps before, were hushed instantly, although the soldiers knew that some commissaries leaguing with the speculators upon the coast, secretly loaded the provision mules with condiments and other luxuries, to sell on the mountains at enormous profit. The desertion was however great, more than twelve hundred men went over to the enemy in less than four months; and they were all Germans, Englishmen or Spaniards, for the Portuguese who abandoned their colours invariably went back to their own country. This difficulty of feeding the Anglo-Portuguese, the extreme distress of the Spaniards and the certainty that they would plunder in France and so raise the people in arms, together with the uneasy state of the political affairs in the Peninsula, rendered lord Wellington very averse to further offensive operations while Napoleon so tenaciously maintained his positions on the Elbe against the allied sovereigns. It was impossible to make a formidable and sustained invasion of France with the Anglo-Portuguese alone, and he had neither money nor means of transport to feed the Spaniards, even if policy warranted such a measure. The nature of the country also forbad a decisive victory, and hence an advance was attended with the risk of returning to Spain again during the winter, when a retreat would be dangerous and dishonouring. But on the 20th of October a letter from the governor of Pampeluna was intercepted, and lord Fitzroy Somerset, observing that the compliment of ceremony at the beginning was also in numerals, ingeniously followed the cue and made out the whole. It announced that the place could not hold out more than a week, and as intelligence of Napoleon’s disasters in Germany became known at the same time, lord Wellington was induced to yield once more to the wishes of the allied sovereigns and the English ministers, who were earnest that he should invade France.