extending their line and maintaining a constant fire, compelled the French to abandon the captured guns and fall back. Fresh troops came up at 10:00 a.m. and Dupont immediately launched a third attack, with General Claude Marie Joseph Pannetier's brigade leading the charge. One last formation joined them; d'Augier's marines of the Imperial Guard, in theory the best troops present: "They were only three hundred men", Foy remarks, "but they were three hundred whom no fears could ever make falter." Dupont, himself wounded in the hip, grouped his exhausted and worn-out regiments around the Guard battalion in a last effort to break through to Bailén. At this point reserves may have pierced the badly shaken Spanish line: Dupont had none; and the French columns, mercilessly raked by the Spanish artillery, were forced back down the slope for the third time. Dupont's Swiss regiments, originally in Spanish service, defected, arms and baggage, to their former masters; and lastly, Castaños' force finally arrived, overtaking Barbou along the Rumblar (a small tributary flowing from the Morena into the Guadalquivir), with La Peña's division sounding its guns and preparing to storm the French rearguard. The day was lost. Closing moves An unexpected Spanish reinforcement appeared suddenly in the last minutes of the battle, slipping south out of the foothills along the Rumblar and taking up positions among the rocks on the French left flank: Colonel de la Cruz. Driven off into the mountains in the attack of 16 July, de la Cruz had regrouped 2,000 sharpshooters at Peñas del Moral and climbed back down towards the battle, directed by the sound of firing. Dupont was now hopelessly surrounded on three sides. Towards noon, as Dupont's guns went quiet, Vedel continued from Guarromán onto Bailén and observed napping troops which he assumed to be Dupont's vanguard returning from Andújar—in fact they were Reding's Spaniards. Vedel and Reding prepared for battle, the former pulling up Legrange's cuirassiers, Cassagne's legion, and Dufour's brigade for the attack. On the Spanish side, Reding deployed Coupigny's division to meet the threat, with an Irish battalion and two guns on a knoll leading up to the mountains; a regiment of regular troops, the Órdenes militares, at the San Cristóbal monastery; militia in support; and the other battalions drawn up behind, in the centre. Two Spanish officers approached Vedel under a flag of truce, announcing that Dupont had been badly defeated and