muleteers none for eight
months. He had no siege-train, his regiments were ragged and hungry,
and the French generals confidently reckoned the British army as, for
the moment at least, _une quantite negligeable_.

And yet at that precise moment, Wellington, subtle and daring, was
meditating a leap upon the great frontier fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo,
in the Spanish province of Salamanca. Its capture would give him a
safe base of operations against Spain; it was the great frontier _place
d'armes_ for the French; the whole siege-equipage, and stores of the
army of Portugal were contained in it. The problem of how, in the
depth of winter, without materials for a siege, to snatch a place so
strong from under the very eyes of two armies, each stronger than his
own, was a problem which might have taxed the warlike genius of a
Caesar. But Wellington accomplished it with a combination of subtlety
and audacity simply marvellous.

He kept the secret of his design so perfectly that his own engineers
never suspected it, and his adjutant-general, Murray, went home on
leave without dreaming anything was going to happen. Wellington
collected artillery ostensibly for the purpose of arming Almeida, but
the guns were trans-shipped at sea and brought secretly to the mouth of
the Douro. No less than 800 mule-carts were constructed without
anybody guessing their purpose. Wellington, while these preparations
were on foot, was keenly watching Marmont and Soult, till he saw that
they were lulled into a state of mere yawning security, and then, in
Napier's expressive phrase, he "instantly jumped with both feet upon
Ciudad Rodrigo."

This famous fortress, in shape, roughly resembles a triangle with the
angles truncated. The base, looking to the south, is covered by the
Agueda, a river given to sudden inundations; the fortifications were
strong and formidably armed; as outworks it had to the east the great
fortified Convent of San Francisco, to the west a similar building
called Santa Cruz; whilst almost parallel with the northern face rose
two rocky ridges called the Great and Small Teson, the nearest within
600 yards of the city ramparts, and crowned by a formidable redoubt
called Francisco. The siege began on January 8. The soil was rocky
and covered with snow, the nights were black, the weather bitter. The
men lacked entrenching tools. They had to encamp on the side of the
Agueda farthest from the city, and ford that river every