Note 157 — Chapter I

For the perilous adventure among these cuttings of a small French column which crossed the Estrada Nova, that which escorted Foy back to Santarem in Feb. 1811, see the autobiography of General Hulot, pp. 325-33. A considerable number of men and horses fell down these cuttings in a forced night-march, and in all several hundred men of Foy’s column perished, starved and storm-beaten on this inhospitable road. The survivors only got through by cutting a slippery foot-track along the precipices: nothing on wheels could have passed that way.