Pursuing Clauset’s rearguard through Valladolid, which fell back on Burgos, to be watched by Clinton, the victorious general entered Madrid in triumph, and there his temporary success suffered a check. There was the usual complaint; want of supplies and want of cash. The “troops are now five months in arrears,” he writes, “and we are in debt in all parts of the country.” Clauset, reorganised, had reoccupied Valladolid, and Wellington decided on turning against him, and, if possible, capturing Burgos. But the preparations were notoriously meagre, the defence bold; so that after five assaults the attempt was abandoned, and Wellington was compelled to once more retreat to Portugal. The army had become greatly demoralised by the failure of the Burgos siege. While the assaults had failed, all the sorties had been more or less successful. There were skirmishes in the retreat, but the conduct of the troops was, with the general exception of the Guards and the Light Division, bad. As in Moore’s retreat, drunkenness prevailed. At Torquemada 12,000 men were for a time useless. Doubtless the hardships were severe. “Sometimes divisions were moved too soon, more frequently too late, and kept standing on wet ground, in the rain, for two hours, perishing with cold, waiting the order to move. Their clothes were seldom dry for six hours together, and during the latter part of the retreat continually wet; sometimes they were bivouacked in a swamp when better ground was near, they lay down upon the wet ground, fell asleep from mere exhaustion, were roused to receive their meat, and had then no means of dressing it. The camp kettles had been sent on, or by some error were some miles in the rear, or the mules which carried them had foundered on the way, and no fire could be kindled on wet ground, with wet materials, and under a heavy rain.”[42] Meanwhile, the French were concentrating in superior numbers; and, with more and more indiscipline and suffering, the army, with a loss of 9000 men and much baggage, finally encamped exhausted under the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo. The first serious attempt to reconquer Spain had failed, save for the moral effect of the occupation of Madrid, the defeat of the French at Salamanca, and the restriction of the French armies now to the northern part of Spain. It was, none the less, the beginning of the end. That end, the “deliverance of Spain,” dawned in the early days of 1813, when all the Allied armies were reorganised, and had recovered their tone.