The next morning’s dawn renewed the pursuit; and every turn of the road, cumbered with broken vehicles and deserted baggage, shewed how severely the French army had been pressed. The bridge was nearly impassable from dead men and slain horses laid there in heaps by the grape and canister of the British guns. Arms, accoutrements, ham-strung mules, guns, tumbrils, knapsacks filled with silver plate, tapestry, and other valuable plunder, were strewn indiscriminately along the line. To add to this scene of waste and suffering, the villages the advancing army entered were either in a blaze, or already reduced to ashes; for between the French troops and peasantry a deadly war of extermination was being carried on--and on both sides, deeds of cruelty were every day perpetrated, that can hardly be credited or described. Indeed, the French retreat through the Gallician mountains was only paralleled by the British on Corunna; with this exception, that many a straggler from the British columns was saved by the humanity of the Spaniards, while the unhappy Frenchman who lagged but a few hundred yards behind the rear-guard, was butchered by the infuriated peasantry, bent on the work of slaughter and burning for vengeance on an enemy, who, in his day of conquest and dominion, had taught the lesson of cruelty now practised so unrelentingly on himself. Soult turning from Montalegre towards Orense, and a French corps from Estremadura having moved on Alcantara, induced Sir Arthur Wellesley to discontinue the pursuit. The French marshal crossed the frontier on the 18th with barely nineteen thousand men--his guns, stores, and baggage abandoned to the conquerors. Ten weeks, perfect in every arm, that army had passed through Orense on its march to Oporto, mustering twenty-six thousand veteran soldiers. A short period had wrought a fearful change--and even the _débris_ of that once splendid corps was only extricated from total destruction by the admirable tact and unbending _hardiesse_ of their brave and gifted leader. It was indeed full time for the British leader to move southward. Victor, joined by the division of Lapisse, had, after a splendid resistance from a Portuguese corps under Colonel Mayne, forced the passage of the Tagus at Alcantara, and threatened Lisbon. After a few forward movements, learning that Soult was retreating, Victor fell back himself to Merida, detached a division to observe the bridge of Almarez, and fixed his head-quarters at Torremocha.