The baggage was generally far in the rear, and the troops were without tents or other means of shelter from the inclemency of the weather. The _vivas_ that greeted the British advance were no longer heard--gloom, sombre desperation, and scowling famine were in every eye. The arrears of pay were in many instances beyond parallel. Many regiments had not received a penny for nine months--nine months of constant fighting! (How many tradesmen in England would have worked for that period without wages?) The officers were reduced to about a shirt each; most of the men had only the collars or wrists of their linen remaining--many had not a vestige. "Their jackets were so patched," says an officer of the Gordon Highlanders, in his narrative, "that I know nothing to which I can so aptly compare them as parti-coloured bed-covers; for there were not fifty in my own regiment but had been repaired with cloth of every colour under the sun." So admirably is the kilt adapted for marching and activity, that the Highland corps were the only battalions _without stragglers_. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, bearded and grisly, emaciated and miserable in aspect, footsore and shoeless, their jackets turned to black and purple, their feather bonnets reduced to quills, and all trace of pipeclay long since washed out of their belts, yet heavily laden with knapsacks, great-coat, blanket, havresack, wooden canteen, camp-kettle, sixty rounds of ball-cartridge, their arms and accoutrements covered with mud and mire--after many days' of incessant alarm, halting and forming square to repel the enemy's cavalry, who at times charged into the rivers up to their very holsters--the Black Watch defiled along the quaint old streets of Valladolid, with their pipes playing a fiery _spaidsearach Gaelhealach_, or Highland march; but it failed to rouse either the spirit or bearing of the men. As our troops were retreating, their entrance excited no enthusiasm in the sullen and ungrateful Spaniards. They gazed apathetically from under their heavy eyebrows and broad sombreros, as battalion after battalion defiled past, nor manifested the smallest interest until some Highland regiment approached, when cries of--"Look at the Scots," broke from every quarter. "Mira los Escosses! Viva los voliantes! Viva los Escosses--los hombres valerosos." Others, who knew the number of the Black Watch, varied the cry with-- "Viva la Regimento Quarenta Dos!"