The stern and bloody fight of Talavera, with the movements that preceded and followed it, decided Wellington's whole after policy in the Peninsula. He had tested Spanish soldiership, and would never again risk a campaign in dependence on Spanish allies. Cuesta, as far as the English were concerned, though he had ample supplies in hand, would neither give food to the living nor help to bury the dead.

When Wellington marched to meet Soult, now threatening his rear, Cuesta took charge of the English wounded. But twelve hours afterwards there came a whisper that Victor was advancing. The English wounded, in defiance alike of good faith and humanity, were at once abandoned, and Cuesta and his troops, with all the tumult and confusion of a herd of cattle broken loose, came tumbling, as if for safety, on Wellington's track.

The English general abandoned his ammunition and stores to provide carriages for the wounded Cuesta had left; and that surprising general instantly produced vehicles sufficient to carry off Wellington's jettisoned stores as plunder, though he declared he had none for the service of the brave men who had been wounded in fighting for Spain.

"We are worse off," wrote Wellington, "than in a hostile country. Never was an army so ill-used. We were obliged to lay down our ammunition, to unload the treasure, and to employ the cars in the removal of our sick and wounded."

Wellington evaded Soult by an adroit movement. He crossed the Tagus at Arzobispo, marched down the left bank of the river, and seized the bridge at Almarez, thus interposing the broad stream of the Tagus betwixt himself and the enemy, and barring Soult's advance. With monumental stupidity, Cuesta now wanted to stand and fight while the French armies, in overwhelming numbers, were closing upon them. He had not generalship enough to understand the peril of the crisis: 90,000 French veterans were converging on the allies; Cuesta's troops, it was highly probable, would run at the first shot, and Wellington would thus be left with some 18,000 troops to meet the shock of well-nigh 100,000 veteran soldiers. The fate of the Peninsula hung by a thread. Wellington sternly told Cuesta he might do as he pleased, but the English army would fall back.

"That decision," says Napier, "saved the Peninsula. What could Wellington have done with 17,000. starving troops, encumbered with the terror stricken Spaniards, against the 70,000 French, that would have stormed their position on three sides at once."

So the English general fell back on Badajos and Elvas, standing on guard there to defend Portugal, and preparing for the overwhelming forces which he felt sure Napoleon would soon concentrate against him, but leaving the Spanish generals to their own absurd tactics, and Spanish juntas to their own ignoble squabbles.

"Until some great change shall be effected in the conduct of the military resources of Spain and in the state of her armies," he wrote, "No British army can attempt safely to co-operate with Spanish troops in the territories of Spain. No alliance can protect her from the results of internal disorders and national infirmity."

"If we can maintain ourselves in Portugal," he wrote again, "the war will not cease in the Peninsula; and if the war lasts in the Peninsula, Europe will be saved." And to that task, with iron resolve and luminous, farreaching sagacity, Wellington devoted himself.

Napoleon, meanwhile, had triumphed once more on the Continent. Wagram had been fought and won. Austria had been struck down, and the Treaty of Vienna gave to the French Emperor a mastery on the Continent more haughty and absolute than ever. The first use Napoleon made of his victory over Austria was to pour new armies into Spain. Once more the passes. Of the Pyrenees, rang to the tread of disciplined columns and the roll of artillery, as the victors of Wagram poured into Spain, eager, in Napoleon's own phrase, "to drive the terrified leopard into the sea."

The new forces included 17,000 of the Imperial Guard. on July 15, 1810, the French armies in the Peninsula had risen to 370,000 men and 80,000 horses. Spain was submerged under a hostile deluge. The Spanish armies had practically ceased to exist. Wellington's scanty forces guarding the Portuguese frontier, scarcely reaching 30,000 men, alone lifted themselves above the devastating flood. It was loudly rumoured that Napoleon was coming in person to complete the conquest of the Peninsula; and had he come, with his imperious will and amazing mastery of the art of war it is difficult to believe that even Wellington could have stood in his path. The course of history might have been permanently changed.

But Spain was for Napoleon a hateful field of war. He abhorred it. Fighting Spanish armies was like fighting ghosts. They were intangible and unkillable! On the Spanish side it was a campaign of assassinations rather than of battles, "and Napoleon," says Jomini, "hated a population which included so many fanatics."

But Napoleon devoted to the conquest of Spain, or rather to the destruction of the English in Spain, his choicest troops and his best general. Massena came to Spain to take up the task in which so many French marshals had failed.

We have Wellington's testimony that Massena had "the best military head of all Napoleon's generals." He was now old, idle, self-indulgent; but he was still, when roused, the victor of Zarich and of Rivoli, stubborn, resourceful, dangerous, with the fighting courage of an angry bear. He had won new fame in the great battles just fought in Germany, and was certainly the greatest master of way, next to Napoleon himself, France possessed.

Napoleon, it is to be observed, hold that, by expending such vast armies and employing such famous generals in the conquest of Spain, he was conferring imperishable benefits on that country, and was entitled to award himself some generous compensations. He appropriated, for this purpose, Spain up to the left bank of the Ebro.

This huge slice of unhappy Spain, Napoleon explained to the bewildered Joseph, must be annexed to France, "as an indemnity for the money, and for all that Spain has cost me up to this present moment."

A procession of massacres and a felonious attack on national freedom were thus, for the first time in history, transfigured into a title for almost weeping gratitude on the part of the nation thus vivisected.

The new French armies in Spain were grouped into three divisions. The army of the south, under Soult, numbered 73,000 men; Massena was chief of the army of Portugal, having under him Regnier, Ney, and Junot, and the cavalry of Montbrun, a total force of nearly 87,000. Joseph himself commanded the army of the centre, a force of 235,000 men. Drouet's Corps, 24,000 strong, stretched from Vittoria to Valladolid, but was destined to aid the operations of Massena, as were the corps of Serras and of Bonnet. Massena thus had 86,000 men under his immediate command, and could draw for reinforcements on 50,000 more. To meet this gigantic force, Wellington had a mixed force of less than 80,000, of which only 25,000 were British.

Division

The huge forces Napoleon thus set in operation in the Peninsula seemed irresistible. But, for one thing, these forces were fatally divided. No French general really trusted another, or was loyally bent on helping him. Joseph was almost as poor as the fabled King of Brentford, and he and Soult found in Andalusia an irresistible temptation. It was the one as yet unplundered province in Spain. Now that Spanish armies had practically vanished, like so much windblown chaff, the province seemed to lie defenceless, and it promised almost illimitable booty.

Napoleon realised that the Peninsula was unconquered while the English held a single square mile of its soil. "There is nothing dangerous in Spain," he said, "but the English;" and he was too good a soldier not to understand the folly of committing half his armies to what was a mere irrelevant adventure. But the predatory instinct was supreme in Napoleon's own mind, as well as in the imagination of the marshals trained in his school, and Soult, with 70,000 men, was allowed to march to the south of Spain.

Andalusia proved an easy prey. Seville fell on February 1, almost without a blow, its ridiculous junta flying, with loud, distracted screams, elsewhere.

On February 3 Soult wrote with exultation to Berthier, "One might consider the war as almost ended." Only Cadiz remained to be besieged. But an English force had entered Cadiz; English ships swept its shores with their guns, and Cadiz, as a matter of fact, proved impossible of capture. All Spain at that moment, however, seemed in the hands of France. There only remained the sandy peninsula on which Cadiz stands, and which Graham was now holding with soldierly resolution, and the rugged bills betwixt the Tagus and the Atlantic, where Wellington stood on guard.

But the invasion of Andalusia was a strategic blunder which went far to wreck Napoleon's plans. it divided the French strength in Spain. The task of conquering Andalusia was trifling; the business of holding it was stupendous. "Our soldiers," says Lanfrey, "seemed to hold Andalusia; but in reality it was Andalusia which held them."

Wellington's quick brain grasped the blunder of his opponents. "The French will soon discover," he wrote, "that they are not strong enough to blockade Cadiz and to attack us in Portugal at the same time."

While Spanish armies practically vanished in this fashion from the stage, an obstinate, cruel, and almost universal guerilla warfare broke out, which proved of infinite mischief for the French.

"Spaniards," Hill wrote, "often fight longer than they are expected to do when they got behind a wall." The typical Spaniard, it may be added, fights longest when he gets behind a bush or a rock. His genius, that is, lends itself to planless partisan warfare. He is patient, hardy, furtive, careless of method, strongly swayed by personal passion; and the same Spaniards who ran like sheep when ranked in battalions, recovered all their valour when they became wandering guerillas. Innumerable bands of partisans arose. They captured the French convoys, intercepted their couriers, slew their stragglers, cut off their detachments, and maintained a wasting and ferocious warfare that cost the French more lives than all the pitched battles fought with Spanish armies.

The French system of living by plunder both created the guerillas and gave them their opportunity. Every new village plundered sent a swarm of angry partisans to the hills; and, as the French could only subsist by plunder, their widely scattered detachments gave the guerillas ample opportunity for revenge. It not seldom took a regiment to convoy a despatch from one French general to another. When Massena sent Foy on a special mission to Paris from the lines at Torres Vedras, three infantry battalions had to escort his messenger as far as the Pyrenees.

The most ferocious cruelty was practised by the guerillas on the French, and these were only to eager to pay back their tormentors in kind, Soul when in Andalusia, issued a proclamation announcing that as no regular Spanish army existed, the war was to be regarded as closed, and all Spaniards found in arms should be shot as mere banditti. The Spanish Regency replied with a counter- decree, declaring that for every Spaniard thus shot three Frenchmen should be hanged, and three more for every house burned. When the authorities on either side were discharging such dreadful decrees at each other, it may be imagined with what ferocity war was carried on by countless bands of self-constituted guerillas. As ao result of this partisan warfare, French authority practically ceased outside their own camps.

Massena set his huge columns in motion in the beginning of June. His first task was to seize the two great frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. Ciudad Rodrigo was defended with obstinate courage by its governor, Harrasti, a gallant Spaniard. Wellington watched the siege from the hills of Beira, his outposts being so near the French lines that they could hear the sounds of musketry fire from the walls of the besieged city.

The most earnest appeals were made to Wellington for succour. Massena taunted him with abandoning his allies; the British soldiers themselves, watching how gallantly the fortress held out, were almost mutinous in their eagerness to advance. But Wellington's stern coolness never wavered. Better to lose a fortress than to lose a campaign! He knew that a single disaster, or even a victory too dearly bought, would bring him orders from the English Cabinet to abandon Portugal. After the tragedy of the Walcheren expedition, Ministers could not afford to risk the loss of another army. So Wellington looked on while Ciudad Rodrigo fell, and by doing so he showed himself to be a consummate general.

Marbot gives a picturesque account of the siege from the French side. Ney, he says, had drawn up a column of 1500 volunteers as a storming party, when one of the engineers expressed a fear that the breach was not practicable. Thereupon, he says, "three of our soldiers mounted to the top of it, looked into the town, made such examination as was useful, and fired their muskets, rejoining their comrades without being wounded, although this bold feat was performed in broad daylight."

This incident proves miraculously bad shooting on the part of the Spaniards, but the spectacle of that act of cool and desperate valour kindled the 1500 volunteers to flame. They were already sweeping like a torrent up the breach, when the Spanish flag fluttered down, Ciudad Rodrigo had surrendered.

Chapter XV: Battle of the Coa