Cabrera. The Spanish government, which could barely supply its own armies in the field, was unable to properly take care of the prisoners. Cannibalism was alleged to have occurred during times when the supply ships failed to arrive. On 6 July 1814, the remaining survivors of Bailén returned to France: fewer than half remained, most having perished in captivity. Many of the survivors never recovered their health after the experience. Analysis Bailén was a triumph for the Spanish Bourbon regime's regular army, successor to the glorious tercios, which Napoleon had derided as "the worst in Europe" (while dismissing the Spanish militia as packs of "bandits led by monks"). Castaños conceded that the greater part of his troops had been "raw and inexperienced; but they were Spaniards, and Spaniards are heroes" and indeed this maligned army, largely untouched by French Revolutionary innovations—a relic of 18th-century absolutism—outfought the Imperial citizen-soldiers. Spain's ancien regime military, however, was soon eclipsed by the growing scale of the war—crippled by the infusion of untrained conscripts and caught up in the competing designs of the juntas. "Not only had many officers perished in the uprising of May 1808, but the authority of the army had been severely reduced and the autonomy of the military estate invaded in an unprecedented manner. Following the uprising, meanwhile, new officers and old had found themselves waging a desperate war against a powerful aggressor in the most unfavourable circumstances. Hostile to military discipline, the troops had been prone to riot and desertion just as the populace had done all it could to resist the draft. Meanwhile, unscrupulous and irresponsible propagandists had created false expectations of victory, whilst equally unscrupulous and irresponsible politicians had interfered in the conduct of military operations, failed to supply the army with the sinews of war, fomented alternative structures of military organisation that hindered the war effort as much as they assisted it, and made general after general scapegoats for disasters which were often none of their making." Subsequent attempts to replicate Bailén proved particularly dangerous for Spanish units recruited and equipped in the chaos of French military occupation and counterinsurgency: "The raw levies that formed the bulk of the Spanish forces proved incapable of manoeuvring in the face of the enemy, whilst many of them barely knew how to use their weapons, having sometimes only been issued with muskets the day before they went into action." These