The French on the 14th of June retreated to Vittoria. The garrison in Madrid and the civil authorities now abandoned the capital and took refuge with the army. Here a short but terrible battle ensued. The English had eighty thousand combatants on the field; the French, according to their statement, had but half as many. Alison states their force at sixty-five thousand. It was an awful battle. Both parties fought desperately. The loss of the French was six thousand nine hundred and sixty; that of the English five thousand one hundred and eighty.[Z] The French army was impoverished after weary months of warfare, in a land stricken by famine, and wasted by the sweep of armies and the plundering of banditti. It was with very great difficulty that Joseph could support his destitute troops. Yet Alison, in that strain of exaggeration which sullies his often eloquent pages, writes: [Footnote Z: King Joseph, writing to Clarke, under date of July 6, 1813, says: "Our army at Vittoria was but thirty-five thousand. That fact can not be contested. The enemy had certainly seventy thousand combatants. I can not be deceived when I say that his force was double of ours."] "Independent of private booty, no less than five millions and a half of dollars in the military chest of the army were taken; and of private wealth the amount was so prodigious that for miles together the combatants may almost be said to have marched upon gold and silver, without stooping to pick it up." In the hour of victory Wellington seemed to have no control over his soldiers, whom his pen describes as drunken and brutal. Reeling in intoxication, they wandered at will. Wellington states that three weeks after the battle above twelve thousand of his soldiers had abandoned their colors. "I am convinced," he says in a dispatch to Lord Bathurst, "that we have out of our ranks doubled our loss in the battle, and have lost more men in the pursuit than the enemy have." The retreat of the French was conducted with the firmness and admirable discipline characteristic of French soldiers. As the troops slowly and sullenly retired toward the French frontier, pressed by superior numbers, they turned occasionally upon their pursuers, and the advance-guard of the foe encountered several very bloody repulses. We have not space to allude to these various conflicts, which only checked for a moment the onrolling tide of the victorious allied army. Wellington's troops took the town of San Sebastian by storm. This was a beautiful Spanish city, through which the French retreated, and where they made a short and desperate stand. We will leave it to Mr. Alison to describe the conduct of Lord Wellington's troops.