There was a touch of mystery in Napoleon's sudden abandonment at Astorga of the pursuit of Moore's army. The usual reason assigned is that he had received news Austria was preparing for war, and that a conspiracy was fermenting in Paris. But, as a matter of fact, Napoleon lingered ten days at Valladolid, after turning his back on Moore, before he finally started for France; and war with Austria did not break out till April 6.

Wellington always declared that Napoleon's surrender of the pursuit of the British army puzzled him. He judged Napoleon with hard and unfriendly common-sense.

Discussing the matter with Croker long afterwards he said: "Was he disinclined de se frotter against Moore? Did he wish that Soult should try what stuff our people were made of before he risked his own great reputation against us? Or did he despair of driving us out of Corunna? And was the bad news from Vienna (he generally kept bad news a profound secret) now invented or promulgated to excuse his evident reluctance to follow us up? I cannot account for his not having subtracted from the three weeks he spent in Spain after his return from Astorga, and the three months that, I think, he spent in Paris, half-a-dozen days for so great an object as a victory over the English army, won by himself in person. My own notion is that he was not sure of the victory."

Lanfroy, it is to be noted, agrees in substance with Wellington, that the reason assigned by Napoleon for the abandonment of the pursuit at Astorga was not the real one. The scene of the sudden arrival and reading of urgent despatches was a mere trick. Nothing had happened either in Paris or Vienna to change Napoleon's plans.

"His real motive in halting," says Lanfrey, "was that he no longer perceived any way of hindering the embarkation of the English. The decisive blow which he had announced with so much clamour had failed, and he did not care to go forty or fifty leagues farther, over terrible roads, merely to witness their escape, and to bring back, as the only trophy of so toilsome an expedition, 3000 or 4000 stragglers, vanquished by hardship rather than by the sword. He left this unenviable kind of success to Marshals Soult and Ney, and returned himself to Valladolid."

There is no doubt that Napoleon was personally tired of the struggle in Spain. It did not suit his genius. The problem was not merely how to overthrow armies, but how to pacify a nation. This needed gentleness, tact, unfailing equity, unhurrying patience, and, above all, time. Napoleon loved to dazzle, to strike sudden blows, to crush his enemies as with a mere volition. He could "persuade" only from the cannon's mouth. He was wearied with the slow uncertainties of the Spanish war -- a war in which victory seemed to yield no result, and in which he had to contend with a stubborn, smouldering insurrection which knew neither how to resist nor how to yield.

In such a war Napoleon could reap no shining laurels. He flew to a more dramatic field of action, and declared he would "conquer Spain on the Continent." But he carried from Spain a new resentment against the English. He had pledged himself in the eyes of Europe to "Plant his eagles on the towers of Lisbon;" and this feat he had certainly not performed. He who had struck down Prussia in a campaign of eight days, after spending three months in Spain, contending with a nation in a sense without armies or generals, had to leave it still unsubdued. And the explanation of it all was found in "those miserable English!" Moore's march to Sahagun had spoiled Napoleon's march on Lisbon.

The temper in which Napoleon left Spain found expression in many ways. He charged Joseph to shoot, hang, or despatch to the galleys, a sufficient number of the population of Madrid to strike a whole some terror into the city.

"The rabble," he explained to his milder-tempered brother, "like and respect only those whom they fear." Joseph, too, was directed to collect from Spanish monasteries and art galleries fifty masterpieces of the Spanish school and send them to Paris. Then, having executed this characteristic bit of theft, and having despatched his Guard and the bulk of his veterans through the Pyrenees, Napoleon turned his disgusted back on Spain. Joseph was left in nominal command of the French forces in the Peninsula, which still numbered 270,000 men.

In a sense Joseph's position was stronger than before. He was again in Madrid, and nearly 30,000 heads of families in that city had voluntarily taken the oath of allegiance to him. But Joseph's court, like the French armies, had to subsist on the country it had invaded. Little French coin was allowed to trickle through the Pyrenees to his help, and the unhappy Joseph could not, like a French general, live by open plunder. "I have not a penny to give any one," he wrote pathetically to his brother; "I see my guards still wearing the same coats I gave them four years ago."

A king of Spain who was guilty, not only of the offence of -not being a Spaniard, but of the crime of empty pockets, could hardly expect to be comfortable in Madrid.

Fatal Division of Authority

The French marshals in Spain, too, were consumed by jealousy of each other. Napoleon's keen brain taught him that success in Spain was impossible without concert amongst his generals; yet his suspicious nature made it impossible for him to give absolute power of control to any one, even to Joseph. Nominally Joseph was in supreme command; but each French general was instructed to communicate independently with Paris, and took direct instructions from Napoleon.

Here, then, was a fatal division of authority. A French marshal received one set of instructions from Joseph, whom he despised, and another from Napoleon, whom he feared, but who was a long way off. Orders, too, which were a fortnight old by the time they reached the general to whom they were addressed, very naturally lost much of their value in the course of transmission. They might not fit the facts which had arisen in the interval.

How bitter were the feuds betwixt the French marshals themselves is not easily realised. It is a curious and significant fact that Soult, Napoleon's ablest and most trusted lieutenant in the Peninsula, seriously entertained the plan of setting up a kingdom of his own in Portugal. He actually printed at Oporto a proclamation announcing himself as "Nicholas I., King of Lusitania and Algarves."

Later still Joseph accused him to Napoleon of a design for making himself king of Andalusia. French officers representing Soult, it is known, approached Wellington to learn whether he would aid in such plans.

Napoleon, in a word, wrecked French strategy in Spain because he could never bring himself to entrust to any agent power to enforce a common plan on his generals. He tried, after a fashion which the Aulic Council had made ridiculous, to direct operations in the field from a cabinet 500 miles distant.

Before leaving Spain Napoleon dictated a plan of operations to be pursued. The supreme business was to drive the English out of Portugal and hoist the French flag at Lisbon. Soult was to march from Corunna upon Oporto and thence to Lisbon. All other operations in Spain were made subordinate to this task. Ney was to cover Soult's communications in Galicia; Victor was to stand on guard at Merida ready to aid him in the swoop on Lisbon. Soult, Napoleon calculated, would reach Oporto on February 5, and Lisbon on February 15.

Soult reorganised his troops-sorely tried by the hardships of their pursuit of Moore and the shock of their defeat by him-at Corunna, where he found ample warlike supplies, sent from. England for the use of Spanish patriots. But the weather was still against him. The difficulty of supporting troops in a country smouldering with insurrection was great, and Soult only reached Oporto on March 27. He stormed that city; his soldiers broke loose, and no less than 10,000 citizens or soldiers were slain in the horrors of that wild day.

The second city in Portugal was thus in French hands, and on the very day Soult entered Oporto -- March 28 -- Victor overthrew Cuesta with great slaughter at Medelin, while Sebastiani destroyed a second Spanish army at Ciudad Real. But it was now the beginning of April. The task of the French marshals had proved harder than Napoleon had guessed. Soult was to have been in Lisbon on February 5; that date was nearly two months past and he had only reached Oporto!

Saragossa

Spanish heroism, too, had flamed up, a portent visible to the whole world, in the second siege of Saragossa. Here a city, without fortifications in a scientific sense, was besieged by 35,000 French troops, commanded in succession by Moncey, by Junot, and by Lannes. But Saragossa lent itself perfectly to the characteristic methods of Spanish warfare-the dogged and furious defence of street after street and house after house.

"Every house in Saragossa," says Napier, "was a fort, and every family was a garrison." The city became one vast complex entangled fortress, and never was defence more ferocious and more heroic.

The siege lasted fifty-two days of open trenches, and for twenty-three of these handto-hand fighting raged in the streets and houses. Disease slow more of the unhappy and desperate citizens than even the sword. According to Southey, during those fifty-two days 52,000 of the inhabitants of Saragossa perished. The French threw 17,000 bombs into the city, and expended on it more than 160,000 lbs. of gunpowder, and when, on February 21, the city surrendered, the population of Saragossa had shrunk to some 12,000 or 15,000 haggard and pestpoisoned wretches.

The story of Saragossa is one of the classic examples of human courage, and yet it illustrates the eccentric quality of Spanish valour. Spain produced no second Saragossa. And no one can explain why, out of 11 million Spaniards, 50,000 in a particular locality should be found on fire with a courage which recalls Thermopylae or Albuera, whilst the remainder of the 11 million, as far as military exploits were concerned, chiefly distinguished themselves by the promptitude and agility with which, on the slightest occasion, or on no occasion at all, they ran away! Another Saragossa would have saved Spain; but none emerged.

Meanwhile England was ruefully considering whether she should continue her efforts to help Spain. How generous those efforts had been may be judged from the circumstance that, in the six months between June 1808 and January 1809, England had despatched for the help of Spain £ 3.1 million in hard cash, more than 200,000 muskets, 150,000 sabres and pikes, 136 cannon and mortars, and 150,000 barrels of gunpowder, besides vast stores of clothing and equipment.

Two British armies had been employed in Spain. The first, indeed, won a respectable victory, but sharply pricked British pride by the Convention of Cintra. The second had spoiled the strategy of Napoleon himself, and had ended a dreadful retreat by winning the victory of Corunna. But the wrecks of Moore's army landed in England -- ragged, hunger-bitten, bare-footed, visibly dying of hardship and disease -- had sent a thrill of horror across the three kingdoms. Was it worth while maintaining a struggle so cruel and desperate, and one in which success seemed so remote?

But the British temper is stubborn; and Castlereagh, whatever his faults as a statesman, reflected that quality of the British temper perfectly. It was clear, too, that war was about to break out again on the Continent, where Austria believed that at last, in the person of the Archduke Charles, it had discovered a general whose genius might rebuke that of Napoleon himself, This would give English arms in Spain a new opportunity. The French Emperor, fighting for existence on the Rhine or the Danube, could spare no reinforcements for his legions on the Douro or the Tormes.

Craddock was in command of the scanty and scattered British troops still in Portugal, but the British Cabinet turned to Wellesley for counsel. In a memorandum dated March 9, 1809, Wellesley declared that Portugal "might be defended, whatever the result of the contest in Spain."

The Portuguese troops, he advised, should be placed under British leadership, and with 30,000 British troops, not only could Portugal be held, but the French power in Spain be shaken. The British Cabinet accepted Wellesley's judgment, and on April 22 Wellesley himself landed in Lisbon to begin those great campaigns which have won for him immortal fame.

Chapter XI: A Great Soldier