Baylen, as we shall see, taught Napoleon his lesson, and the second army which he brought into the Peninsula in the autumn of 1808, to repair his initial disasters, was very differently constituted from the heterogeneous masses which he had at first judged to be sufficient for his task. It was composed of his finest old regiments from the Rhine and Elbe, the flower of the victors of Jena and Friedland. Even when the despot had half a million good troops at his disposition, he could not be in force everywhere, and the transference of 200,000 veterans to Spain left him almost too weak in Central Europe. In the Essling-Wagram campaign of 1809 he found that he was barely strong enough to conquer the Austrians, precisely because he had left so many men behind him in the Peninsula. In the Russian campaign of 1812, vast as were the forces that he displayed, they were yet not over numerous for the enterprise, because such an immense proportion of them was composed of unwilling allies and disaffected subjects. If the masses of Austrians, Prussians, Neapolitans, Portuguese, Westphalians, Bavarians, and so forth had been replaced by half their actual number of old French troops from Spain, the army would have been far more powerful. Still more was this the case in 1813: if the whole of the Peninsular army had been available for service on the Elbe and Oder at the time of Lützen and Bautzen, the effect on the general history of Europe might have been incalculable. Truly, therefore, did the Emperor call the Spanish War ‘the running sore’ which had sapped his strength ever since its commencement.