the advantages, save one, were on the side of the French. Soult was
the ablest of the French marshals. If he had not Ney's _elan_ in attack,
or Massena's stubborn resource in retreat, yet he had a military genius,
since Lannes was dead, second only to that of Napoleon himself. He had
under his command 20,000 war-hardened infantry, 40 guns, and 4000
magnificent cavalry, commanded by Latour Maubourg, one of the most
brilliant of French cavalry generals. Beresford, the British commander,
had the dogged fighting courage, half Dutch and half English, of his name
and blood; but as a commander he was scarcely third-rate. Of his army of
30,000, 15,000 were Spanish, half drilled, and more than half
starved--they had lived for days on horse-flesh--under Blake, a general
who had lost all the good qualities of Irish character, and acquired all
the bad ones peculiar to Spanish temper. Of Beresford's remaining troop
8000 were Portuguese; he had only 7000 British soldiers.

Beresford ought not to have fought. He had abandoned the siege at
Badajos, and no reason for giving battle remained. The condition of
Blake's men, no doubt, made retreat difficult. They had reached the
point at which they must either halt or lie down and die. The real force
driving Beresford to battle, however, was the fighting effervescence in
his own blood and the warlike impatience of his English troops. They had
taken no part in the late great battles under Wellington; Busaco had been
fought and Fuentes de Onoro gained without them; and they were in the
mood, both officers and men, of fierce determination to fight _somebody_!
This was intimated somewhat roughly to Beresford, and he had not that
iron ascendency over his troops Wellington possessed. As a matter of
fact, he was himself as stubbornly eager to fight as any private in the
ranks.

The superiority of Soult's warlike genius was shown before a shot was
fired. Beresford regarded the bridge that crossed the Albuera and the
village that clustered at the bridge-head as the key of his position. He
occupied the village with Alten's German brigade, covered the bridge with
the fire of powerful batteries, and held in reserve above it his best
British brigade, the fusileers, under Cole, the very regiments who, four
hours later, on the extreme right of Beresford's position, were actually
to win the battle. Soult's sure vision, however, as he surveyed his
enemies on the evening of the 15th, saw that B