This march occupied nine days. The distance from Bilboa, by the circuitous and difficult route we had taken, was about sixty leagues, which is, upon an average, about twenty English miles a day.
Breviesca is an ancient town of considerable extent, situated in an open plain, in the province of Castile; and is distant from Vittoria about forty miles, and twenty from Burgos; it is surrounded by a mud wall.
Head-quarters were now at Breviesca, but the town not affording accommodation sufficient for the whole Legion, several regiments were quartered in the adjacent villages.
The inhabitants of this and the neighbouring localities, had been much oppressed at different periods, and particularly by the French, during the Peninsular war. The old patrone of the house in which I was quartered, gave me a long recital of the exactions he had been subject to, during that period, by soldiers of different armies, these he related with the tears rolling over his aged cheeks, which, no doubt, his extraordinary sufferings had mainly contributed to wither. Indeed, the Spaniards, since my last sojourn amongst them, had made but very little progress towards improvement, the joint influence of foreign invasion, priestcraft, and civil strife, having so long, and so continually absorbed their energies, that they could scarcely be said to have recovered themselves: their beautiful country, rich as it was in natural resources, now bore the appearance of a desert, patched here and there only, by the hands of the cultivator, who planted in fear, and gathered in trembling, under the dreadful probabilities of having it uprooted, or trodden down by the soldiers of either party, and himself, perhaps, and his family stretched lifeless amid the ruin.
If there are any among my readers so lost to common sense and patriotism, as to glory in the prospect of revolution in their own favoured country, let me tell them that the “lopping” of the limb is a dangerous remedy, and that can scarcely ever be justifiable. Few can wander amid the realities of dissevered and disjointed Spain, and not feel the truth of my observation. Her treachery may be a good plea with some, but war, and especially those inappropriately called “civil” are enough to make any nation treacherous, especially when “pretended friends” ride rough-shod over the soil and feelings of the inhabitants.