A word as to the tactical organization of the French army in 1808 is required. The infantry regiments of normal formation consisted, as we have seen, of four field battalions and one dépôt battalion; the last named never, of course, appeared at the front. Each field battalion was composed of six companies of 140 men: its two flank companies, the grenadiers and voltigeurs, were formed of the pick of the corps[77]: into the grenadiers only tall, into the voltigeurs only short men were drafted. Thus a battalion should normally have shown 840 and a regiment 3,360 men in the field. But it was by no means the universal rule to find the whole four battalions of a regiment serving together. In the modern armies of France, Germany, or Russia, a regiment in time of peace lives concentrated in its recruiting district, and can take the field in a compact body. This was not the case in Napoleon’s ever-wandering hosts: the chances of war were always isolating single battalions, which, once dropped in a garrison or sent on an expedition, did not easily rejoin their fellows. Many, too, of the new fourth battalions raised in 1807 had never gone forward to Germany to seek the main body of their regiments. Of the corps which were brought down to Spain in the late autumn of 1808 there were more with three battalions than with four concentrated under the regimental eagle. Some had only two present, a few no more than one[78]. But the Emperor disliked to have single isolated battalions, and preferred to work them in pairs, if he could not get three or four together. The object of this was that, if one or two battalions got much weakened in a campaign, the men could be fused into a single unit, and the supernumerary officers and sergeants sent back to the dépôt, where they would form a new battalion out of the stock of conscripts. But the fresh organization might very likely be hurried, by some sudden chance of war, to Flushing, or Italy, or the Danube, while the eagle and the main body remained in Spain--or vice versa. [77] French generals were much addicted to the pernicious practice of massing the grenadier companies of all the regiments of a division, or an army corps, in order to make a picked battalion or brigade, to be used as a reserve. Junot had four such battalions (_grenadiers réunis_) at Vimiero, and Victor three at Barossa. [78] To take a later example, of the three _corps d’armée_ (II, VI, VIII) with which Masséna invaded Portugal in 1810, there were only _three_ regiments with four battalions present; while seventeen had three, eight had two, and ten a single battalion only.