Till he had seen Spain with his own eyes Napoleon might perhaps have been excused for ignoring the fact that his ordinary method of ‘making war support itself’ was not in this case possible. But even after he had marched from Bayonne to Madrid, and then from Madrid to Astorga, in 1808, he persisted in refusing to see facts as they were. We find him on his way back to Paris from the campaign uttering the extraordinary statement that ‘Spain is a much better country than he had ever supposed, and that he had no idea what a magnificent present he had made to his brother Joseph till he had seen it[70].’ Of his utter failure to grasp the difficulties of the country we may get a fair conception from his orders, given at the same time, to Marshal Soult, who was at that moment occupied in pushing Sir John Moore towards Corunna. He told the Duke of Dalmatia that if he reached Lugo on January 9, and the English got away safely by sea, he was to march on Oporto, where he ought to arrive on the first of February; after seizing that city he was to go on to Lisbon, which he might reach on or about February 10. As a matter of fact Soult saw the English depart, and occupied Corunna on January 19, but his army was so utterly worn out, and his stores so entirely exhausted, that with the best will in the world he could not move again till February 20, only took Oporto on March 29, and had not yet started for Lisbon when Wellesley suddenly fell on him and drove him out of the country on May 12, 1809. The Emperor, in short, had given Soult orders executable perhaps, according to the distance, in Lombardy or Bavaria, but utterly absurd when applied to a country where roads are few and bad, with a defile or a river crossing the path at every few miles, and where food has to be carefully collected before a move, and taken on with the army by means of enormous convoys. Moreover the month was January, when every brook had become a raging mountain stream, and every highland was covered with snow! With such conceptions of the task before him, it is not wonderful that Napoleon was continually issuing wholly impracticable orders. The one that we have just quoted was sent out from Valladolid: how much worse would the case be when the Emperor persisted in directing affairs from Paris or Vienna, the last news that had reached him from the front being now several weeks old! With all his genius he never thoroughly succeeded in grasping the state of affairs, and to the very last continued to send directions that would have been wise enough in Central Europe, but happened to be inapplicable in the Iberian Peninsula. [70] He said this to De Pradt (_Révolutions d’Espagne_, p. 224).