bear out the view that he believed the back of the resistance to be broken. But if he had routed the Spanish armies, and if for the moment Andalusia seemed at his mercy, Moore's stroke had, nevertheless, been most successful. The main field force of the French had been drawn off to the rugged remoteness of Galicia, and so southern Spain was given an invaluable breathing space to reorganise her resistance. It is true that the mania for pitched battles, which possessed nearly every Spanish general except la Romana, led to Cartoajal's ruining the Army of La Mancha at Ciudad Real on March 27 and to Victor's routing Cuesta's Army of Estremadura at Medellin next day; but neither victory could be followed up, nor could Soult improve upon his capture of Oporto (March 29). Everywhere the French came to a standstill for want of reinforcements and through the impossibility of co-operation.

Napoleon's plan for the simultaneous invasion of Portugal by Soult from the north and Victor from the east betrays his failure to realise the conditions under which his lieutenants had to operate. 'It is impossible,' as Mr Oman says (ii, 176), ' to give effective aid to a colleague whose condition and whose whereabouts are unknown.' The insurgent peasantry were far more formidable than the organised armies of Spain; the greater the disaster suffered by the national troops,' so Marshal Jourdan declared, the more willing were the population to rise and take arms.' The French could not subdue the country as they had subdued Italy and Germany. As they passed on, the peasants rose behind them, cut their communications and intercepted their messengers, until, in the words of a French officer-diarist, Fantin des Odoards,' the march of the Second Corps was like the progress of a ship on the high seas: she cleaves the waves, but they close behind her, and in a few moments all trace of her passage has disappeared.' The French could only subdue Spain by actually occupying not only the chief towns but every village, since, if left unoccupied, it became a centre of active resistance. But while any hostile army remained ' in being' such dispersion was impossible. And by April 1809 such a force was in effective existence. When Moore advanced into Spain some 10,000 British had remained in Portugal under Sir John Cradock, and when,

6

towards the end of February, Castlereagh decided to continue the struggle in the Peninsula and carried his colleagues with him, this handful formed the nucleus of the army he entrusted to Wellington. Prof. Oman criticises Cradock severely. Instead of concentrating his force round Lisbon as though about to evacuate Portugal, Cradock, he argues, should have advanced to Abrantes or Almeida and made all possible show (ii, 202). But Mr Fortescue has come across some of Cradock's letters which Prof. Oman was unable to find, and by their aid makes out a good defence (pp. 117-19). Cradock's instructions were obscure and seemed to point rather to evacuation than to the continuation of the contest. Mr Fortescue is not quite so successful in his efforts to minimise the differences between the views of Moore and Wellesley as to the defensibility of Portugal (pp. 126 ff.). He argues that Moore was treating the Portuguese army as valueless, whereas its restoration to efficiency was the basis of Wellesley's readiness to undertake the defence. This is so; but there is still an enormous difference between Wellesley's 'I have always been of opinion that Portugal might be defended, whatever the result of the contest in Spain,' and Moore's 'If the French succeed in Spain it will be vain to attempt to resist them in Portugal.'

Wellesley came out to Portugal with a definite plan, based upon a really remarkable insight into the prevailing conditions (Oman, ii, 290 ff.). He had gauged perfectly well the situation and the difficulties of the French,' he had grasped the fundamental truth that the more ground the French hold down, the weaker will they be at any given point.' 'The Emperor could not send to Spain a force sufficient to hold down every province and also to provide a field army large enough to beat the AngloPortuguese and capture Lisbon. If the French dispersed and kept down the vast tracts of conquered territory, they had no force left with which to take the offensive against Portugal: if they massed their armies, they had to give up broad regions which immediately relapsed into insurrection.' Thus, when in June 1811 a French concentration forced Wellington to abandon his second siege of Badajoz, the French had to pay for their success : promptly as Soult hurried back to Seville, he never quite

regained the hold on eastern and southern Andalusia which he had had before the relief of Badajoz.

Those who write Wellington down as a mere defensive general, inclined to over-caution, fortunate beyond the average and of not more than mediocre capacity, will have their eyes opened if they read either Prof. Oman or Mr Fortescue on 1809. There was nothing of Fabian methods about the offensive against Soult with which Wellesley opened his operations. As Mr Fortescue justly remarks (p. 163) the passage of the Douro demanded 'no ordinary audacity,' and if the element of luck entered into the campaign, it was Soult who was fortunate. Had the Ponte Nova been properly destroyed, or had General Tilson or the Portuguese commander Silveira done all that might have been reasonably expected, Soult would never have extricated the wrecks of his army from the Tras os Montes. Wellington missed capturing Soult, but he achieved more than he had calculated upon, and freed himself to tackle the more urgent danger-Victor's corps on the eastern frontier.

About Talavera both authors are in substantial agreement. Both, we are glad to see, assign to Mackenzie's brigade (24th, 31st, 45th) its fair share for the credit in saving the day, a service Napier had overlooked. If Wellington's advance up the Tagus proved a fiasco, and if in the week after the battle he found himself in a position of grave peril, the blame belongs mainly to Venegas, the commander of the Army of La Mancha, whom Mr Fortescue gibbets as 'irresolute for any good purpose, but unswerving in the pursuit of folly' (p. 264). Prof. Oman (pp. 480 ff.) criticises the 'double exterior lines' on which operations were planned and the trust placed in the Spaniards; on this Mr Fortescue also is severe, arguing that Wellington was impetuous and over-confident and should have been warned by Moore's experience of Spanish co-operation (p. 285 ff.). But what other course was open to Wellington? To have refused to co-operate with Cuesta and Venegas would have been most impolitic and unjustifiable before he had had positive proof of what co-operation entailed and of what reliance could be placed on Spanish commissaries. He received a severe lesson which was not lost on him, but to blame him for having made the venture is most unreasonable. More

over, success was nearly achieved. But for Cuesta, Victor could hardly have escaped destruction on the Alberche on July 23: had Venegas shown ordinary vigour he had Madrid at his mercy for six days. French writers have represented Wellington as escaping destruction only by a miracle; but the miraculous is rather to be found in Ney's unexpected evacuation of Galicia, which alone made Soult's move on Plasencia and Almaraz possible (Fortescue, p. 237). All Wellington's information led him to suppose Soult's corps still hors de combat, and Ney's committed to subjugating Galicia. And it is clear that by August 6, when he was in the MirabeteMeza d'Ibor position, Wellington was perfectly safe. The French concentration had foiled his move on Madrid; but Ney's corps had to return at once to protect Salamanca against del Parque and la Romana, Sebastiani had to hasten eastward against Venegas, and Soult could attempt nothing against Wellington, much less advance into Portugal. It was only because starvation drove Wellington back from Mirabete to Badajoz that the Talavera campaign proved comparatively barren. If I could only have fed,' wrote Wellington, 'I could, after some time, have struck a brilliant blow either at Soult at Plasencia or at Mortier in the centre.'

But was Talavera fruitless? To check Wellington the French had had to effect a concentration resembling on a smaller scale that which in 1812 forced him to retreat from Burgos. But concentration involved evacuation; in 1809 of Galicia and the Asturias, in 1812 of Andalusia. Moreover, while Wellington lay at Badajoz, he at once covered Portugal and flanked any advance into Andalusia; and for the rest of the year the French could not resume their main offensive, having to tell off a strong force to watch him. Meanwhile Beresford's vigorous reorganisation was rapidly making the Portuguese army an effective fighting machine, and already, under Colonel Fletcher's direction, the great lines in front of Lisbon were taking shape.

Between the close of the Talavera campaign and Soult's invasion of Andalusia the Junta launched the armies at its disposal in a new and utterly futile advance upon Madrid, from which Wellington wisely held aloof. Del Parque with la Romana's old Army of Galicia defeated Marchand at Tamames, but the utter rout of Ocana, in

which Areizaga's 'combination of rashness and vacillation' involved the unfortunate Army of La Mancha, destroyed Andalusia's poor chance of repulsing invasion. Its only good result was the overthrow of the utterly incompetent Central Junta. And in December the French gained another important success by finally overcoming the magnificent resistance which the Catalan fortress of Gerona had been making ever since May. Alvarez's heroic defence of that place had delayed the progress of the French on the east coast for eight months. Hardly anywhere does Prof. Oman appear to so much advantage as when describing the operations in Catalonia and Aragon. He might well despair of so complicated a subject, but he contrives, nevertheless, to give us a wonderfully clear picture. Despite a wealth of detail the main theme is never lost sight of, and the military lessons are admirably brought out. Except that it absorbed a large number of French troops, the struggle in the east was really quite a separate affair. Together Suchet's Third Corps in Aragon and the Seventh in Catalonia, successively, but none too successfully, commanded by St Cyr, Augereau and Macdonald, usually amounted to over 60,000 men, and, while the constant minor reverses which the Catalans and the guerillas of Aragon inflicted on isolated detachments involved in the aggregate enormous losses, the reduction of Gerona alone cost 14,000 casualties. Nowhere was the resistance more stubborn and bitter than in Catalonia, and though Suchet made steady progress, reducing Lerida in May 1810, Tortosa in January 1811, and Tarragona in June, the indomitable Catalans persisted in resisting, though their fortresses fell and their field armies were routed repeatedly.

Soult's invasion of Andalusia achieved immediate success. Areizaga's feeble resistance collapsed at once; his troops dispersed ; Seville tamely opened her gates; and only the judgment and promptitude of Albuquerque in marching at full speed to Cadiz saved that all-important but ungarrisoned city. Albuquerque's action is applauded both by Prof. Oman and Mr Fortescue as the saving of the south. Soult found himself committed to the siege of Cadiz, an enterprise particularly difficult without command of the sea. Ten days after the French arrived outside the city, the entry of a British garrison, soon