So great was the fatigue endured by the troops, that, on the evening of the 10th, when the 3rd battalion of the Royal Scots entered Betanzos, it mustered, under the colours, nine officers, three sergeants, and _three_ privates; "all the rest had dropped on the roads, and many did not rejoin for three days." At this place, which is a village at the foot of a hill, where the Mandeo was crossed by a wooden bridge, on which the engineers were hard at work, they were attacked by Ribeaupierre's dragoons, who, however, were repulsed by the 23th Regiment; the bridge was destroyed, and its beams and planks hurled into the swollen stream, which swept them away to the Gulf of Ferrol. And here a party of straggling invalids, exhausted by fatigue, were closely pressed by the French cavalry; a Sergeant Newman, of the 2nd battalion of the 43rd, who was himself nearly worn out, rallied them with his pike, and gradually collected four hundred men of all regiments. With great presence of mind, he formed those poor fellows into subdivisions, and made them fire and retire by sections, each re-forming in rear of the others, so that he most effectually covered the retreat of the disabled men who covered all that fearful road--conduct so spirited that he was publicly thanked by Generals Fraser and Fane. The destruction of the bridge more decidedly secured the retreat; but more men perished between Betanzos and Lugo than anywhere else, since that rearward march began. Moore, by his energy, massed the army, now reduced to fourteen thousand infantry, which, on the morning of the llth January, fell back on Corunna, under his immediate and personal superintendence. "Stanhope," said he to his favourite aide-de-camp, who was almost ever by his side, "we are now within a few miles of Corunna; ride forward with me, as I am all anxiety to see if our fleet is in the bay--Kennedy will accompany us." Quentin bowed, put spurs to his horse, and quitting Paget's cavalry rearguard together, they rode rapidly along the line of march to the front. They soon reached the heights of Corunna, and saw the town beneath them about four miles distant; then a sad expression stole over Moore's handsome face, but no exclamation escaped him. Not a ship was visible in the Bays of Orsan or Betanzos, nor in the harbour of the town; the Roads of Ferrol and all the expanse of water were open and empty! Fortune was against him and his army, for contrary winds detained the fleet of men-of-war and transports at Vigo, a hundred and twenty miles distant by sea. The morning was sunny, and Corunna on its fortified peninsula--the _Corun_, or "tongue of land" of the Celts--was seen distinctly, with all its strong bastions and gothic spires; its almost land-locked harbour, guarded by the castles of San Martino and Santa Cruz, with the flag of King Ferdinand VII. flying on the fort of San Antonio (which crowns a high and insular rock), and on the Pharos of Hercules.