While Ciudad Rodrigo still held out against the besieging French,--its battered walls and breached ramparts sadly foretelling the fate inevitably impending,--we were ordered, together with the 16th Light Dragoons, to proceed to Gallegos, to reinforce Crawfurd's division, then forming a corps of observation upon Massena's movements.
The position he occupied was a most commanding one,--the crown of a long mountain ridge, studded with pine-copse and cork-trees, presenting every facility for light-infantry movements; and here and there gently sloping towards the plain, offering a field for cavalry manoeuvres.

Beneath, in the vast plain, were encamped the dark legions of France, their heavy siege-artillery planted against the doomed fortress, while clouds of their cavalry caracoled proudly before us, as if in taunting sarcasm at our inactivity.
Every artifice which his natural cunning could suggest, every taunt a Frenchman's vocabulary contains, had been used by Massena to induce Sir Arthur Wellesley to come to the assistance of the beleagured fortress: but in vain.

In vain he relaxed the energy of the siege, and affected carelessness.

In vain he asserted that the English were either afraid or else traitors to their allies.

The mind of him he thus assailed was neither accessible to menace nor to sarcasm.