The average strength of a French cavalry regiment during the years 1809-14 was four squadrons of about 150 men each. It was very seldom that a corps showed over 600 men in the ranks: not unfrequently it sank to 450[84]. When it grew still further attenuated, it was usual to send back the _cadres_ of one or two squadrons, and to complete to full numbers the two or three which kept the field. These figures do not hold good for the raw ‘provisional regiments’ which Bonaparte used during the first year of the war: they sometimes rose to 700 or even 800 strong, when the dépôts from which they had been drawn chanced to be exceptionally full of recruits[85]. But such large corps are not to be found in the later years of the war. By 1812, when Napoleon, busied in Central Europe, ceased to reinforce his Spanish armies, the average of a cavalry regiment had shrunk to 500 men. In 1813 it was seldom that 400 effective sabres could be mustered by any mounted corps. [84] In Masséna’s army of 1810 the largest cavalry regiment (25th Dragoons) had 650 men. In Suchet’s army in the same year there was one exceptionally strong regiment (4th Hussars) with 759 sabres. [85] The 2nd Provisional Dragoons of Moncey’s corps had no less than 872 men in June, 1808. As to the scientific arms of the French service, the artillery and engineers, there is no doubt that throughout the war they deserved very well of their master. Artillery cannot be improvised in the manner that is possible with infantry, and the batteries which accompanied Dupont’s and Moncey’s conscripts into Spain in 1808 were veterans. Without them the raw infantry would have fared even worse than it did, during the first year of the struggle. The proportion of guns which the French employed during the wars of the Empire was generally very large in comparison with the size of their armies--one of the many results of the fact that Bonaparte had originally been an artillery officer. He raised, as was remarked, the number of gunners in the French service to a figure as large as that of the whole regular army of Louis XVI at the moment when the Revolution broke out. But in Spain the difficulties of transport and the badness of the roads seem to have combined to keep down the proportion of guns to something very much less than was customary in the more favourable _terrain_ of Italy or Germany. A large part, too, of the pieces were of very light metal--four- and even three-pounders, which were found easier to transport across the mountains than six- or eight-pounders, though much less effective in the field. In many of the campaigns, therefore, of the Peninsular War the French artillery stood in a proportion to the total number of men present, which was so low that it barely exceeded that customary among the British, who were notoriously more ‘under-gunned’ than any other European army save that of Spain. Junot at Vimiero had twenty-three