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As the French forces deployed from the passes they formed a mighty host more than 300,000 strong, of whom 40,000 were cavalry, while in equipment, in discipline, in martial ardour, in that gay and reckless valour which is the note of the French character, they formed one of the most terrible fighting instruments known to history.

There is no space to describe here the sudden and terrible fashion in which the tempestuous strategy of Napoleon struck down the Spanish forces. Napoleon swept over them, in fact, with something of the breathless speed and resistless fury of a tropical whirlwind. The Emperor reached Bayonne on November 3; within three weeks three Spanish armies were not so much overthrown as annihilated. They had been smitten at Espinosa, at Burgos, at Tudela; and scattered fugitives, without artillery, supplies, or ammunition, had taken refuge in the rugged mountains at the head-waters of the Ebro, or amongst the Guadarrama Hills, or behind the walls of Saragossa. On December 2 the cavalry of the French Guard were gathered like a threatening cloud on the hills which overlook Madrid from the north-west; and on December 4 the French eagles flew over Retiro, and Madrid was captured!

Spain lay, in a word, at Napoleon's mercy. His cavalry could swoop, almost without check, over the fertile southern provinces. On December 20 the sixth corps under Ney, the Imperial Guard, and the reserve, under the personal command of Napoleon, stood ready to begin that great triumphant march to the south-west, which was to end at Lisbon. The Imperial muster-roll showed at that moment that the French forces in Spain

numbered more than 330,000 men, with 60,000 horses and 400 guns; and Spain was, in Sir John Moore's terse phrase, "without generals, without armies, without a government." What human force could arrest a strategy framed by what Napier calls "the mightiest

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genius of two thousand years," and carried out by more than 300,000 of the finest soldiers of that period, with a glow of victory in their very blood?

It is a matter of sober history that the daring resolve of a single British soldier arrested the whole of Napoleon's designs, diverted the march of all his mighty

and crowded battalions, and, in the darkest hour of its fortunes, saved Spain! "I will sweep the English armies from the Peninsula," said Napoleon, as, from under the walls of Madrid, he set out on what he meant to be the swiftest and most dazzling campaign of his life. Terrible is the irony of history! As a matter of fact, the British armies chased the French from the Peninsula, and in turn poured through the passes of the Pyrenees on France; and defeat in Spain finally overthrew Napoleon's throne. "It was the Spanish ulcer," as he himself said in wrathful anguish, “that destroyed me." But there would have been no "Spanish ulcer" —there might have been no storming of Badajos, no Vittoria, no Salamanca, and perhaps no Waterloo and no St. Helena-if, at the moment when Napoleon was about to set out on his march to Lisbon at the head of what seemed resistless forces, Sir John Moore, with 20,000 British soldiers, had not made that famous march—a thrust as with the point of a glittering rapier at Napoleon's flank-which threatened the Emperor's communications. That audacious stroke made him stay his march through Spain-a march never to be resumed-while he swung round to crush the tiny but daring foe that menaced him.

Moore's strategy was, indeed, of a singularly daring quality. The Spanish armies with whom he was directed to co-operate, had simply vanished, like a cluster of eddying wind-driven leaves before a tempest. Napoleon, at the head of an apparently overwhelming force, was about to invade the rich provinces to the south, and the march of his victorious columns would not cease till their feet were wet with the waves of the

Atlantic beyond Lisbon. Moore by this time had partially concentrated the scattered divisions of the British army, but his total force numbered not more than 26,000 men, of which 2000 were cavalry, with sixty guns. Moore's position was in the angle that forms the north-west shoulder, so to speak, of Spain, on Napoleon's right flank. Napoleon never doubted that Moore, when he learned the disasters which had overtaken the Spanish armies, and knew the resistless tide of war which was about to sweep across Spain to Lisbon, would instantly fall back to Corunna, or Vigo, on the sea-coast, and take ship to Lisbon. He would thus pluck his army out of deadly peril, and transport it south in readiness to meet Napoleon in front of Lisbon ; if, indeed, the British Government had the courage to face the French standards there.

Moore himself, at first, resolved on that plan, but a bolder strategy took shape in his brain. He had the power of striking at Napoleon's communications with France. If he thrust boldly eastward, and menaced Napoleon's communications on the side of Burgos, he made no doubt that the Emperor would instantly swing round upon him, and a force outnumbering his by ten to one, and urged by the fiery genius of the greatest soldier of the century, would be hurled upon him. But Moore believed that he could strike at Napoleon's communications sufficiently to arrest the southward march of his columns, and so secure for Spain a breathing space, and yet pluck back his tiny army in safety before Napoleon's counter-stroke could crush it. He would draw, that is, Napoleon's whole power upon himself, would thrust his head, so as to speak, into the lion's

As Napier

very jaws, and yet cheat the lion's fury. puts it, he saw the peril for his own army. He knew that “it must glide along the edge of a precipice: must cross a gulf on a rotten plank; but he also knew the martial quality of his soldiers, felt the pulsation of his own genius; and, the object being worth the deed, he dared essay it even against Napoleon."

Moore was indeed a great soldier, and with better fortune might have anticipated and outshone even the fame of Wellington. He was of Scottish birth, and was one of the very finest soldiers that martial race has in modern times produced. He had a vivid, commanding personality that made him a sort of king amongst men. His eyes were dark and searching, and were set beneath a forehead of singular breadth and aspect of power. His mouth had a womanly sweetness about it, while the curve of his chin and the general contour of his face gave an extraordinary expression of energy. He lacked, perhaps, that iron quality of blood and will which augmented Wellington's capacity as a general, while it won for him an unpleasant reputation for cold-bloodedness as a friend. Moore, in fact, had a strain of gentleness in him that made him adored by his own circle. He was generous, high-minded, with a passionate scorn of base things and of base men-a quality which made mean men hate him, and evil men afraid of him. Of his signal capacity for war there is no room to doubt. His ideal of soldiership was very noble, and he had the art of stamping it on all those around him.

"No man

with a spark of enthusiasm," says Charles Napier, afterwards the conqueror of Scinde, "could resist the influence of Moore's great aspirings, his fine presence, his

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