While the British took their position behind Soito, the French retired to Ciudad Rodrigo, and then separated, Dorsenne’s army toward Salamanca and Valladolid, Marmont’s towards the pass of Baños and Plasencia. Marmont boasted in his dispatches of having forced Lord Wellington to abandon an intrenched camp, and driven him back with great loss ♦MARMONT BOASTS OF HIS SUCCESS.♦ and confusion; “The Spanish insurgents,” he added, “have felt the greatest indignation at seeing themselves thus abandoned in the north as well as in the south; and this contrast between the conduct of the English, and the promises which they have incessantly broken, nourishes a natural hatred, which will break out sooner or later.” “We should have followed the enemy,” said Marshal Marmont, “to the lines of Lisbon, where we should have been able to form a junction with the army of the south, ... which is completely entire, and has in its front only the division of General Hill, ... had the moment been come which is fixed for the catastrophe of the English.” Soult, of whose unbroken strength Marmont thus boasted, was at this time devising measures for destroying the army which Castaños had recruited, or rather remade, since it had been so miserably wasted after Romana’s death. General Girard therefore, with a division of about 4000 foot and 1000 cavalry, was sent into that part of Extremadura which was still free, thus to confine Castaños within narrower limits, and deprive his army of those rations which it still, though with difficulty, obtained, and which were its sole means of subsistence; for in the miserable state of the Spanish commissariat and Spanish Government, their armies subsisted upon what they could find, and had little or nothing else to depend upon.
Girard took his position at Caceres, extending as far as Brozas. Of the spirit in which his detachment acted, one instance will suffice. He sent a party against the house of D. Jose Maria Cribell in Salvatierra, an officer in the service of his country; they carried off his wife in the fifth month of her pregnancy; plundered the house, even to the clothes of her two children, one five years old, the other three, and left these children naked to the mercy of their neighbours. The presence of such a force greatly distressed the country, and produced the intended inconvenience to Castaños; that general, therefore, concerted with Lord Wellington a movement for relieving this part of Extremadura by striking a blow against the enemy. The execution was entrusted to general Hill, with whom a Spanish detachment was to co-operate under Camp-Marshal D. Pedro Augustin Giron.