It is only fair to Napoleon to add that his Spanish enemies, who ought at least to have known the limitations of their own road-system, and the disabilities of their half-starved armies, used habitually to produce plans of operations far more fantastically impossible than any that he ever drafted. They would arrange far-reaching schemes, for the co-operation of forces based on the most remote corners of the Peninsula, without attempting to work out the ‘logistics’ of the movement. The invariable result was that such enterprises either ended in disaster, or at the best came to a stop after the first few marches, because some vital point of the calculation had already been proved to have been made on erroneous data. SECTION II: CHAPTER II THE SPANISH ARMY IN 1808 When the English student begins to investigate the Peninsular War in detail, he finds that, as regards the Spanish armies and their behaviour, he starts with a strong hostile prejudice. The Duke of Wellington in his dispatches, and still more in his private letters and his table-talk, was always enlarging on the folly and arrogance of the Spanish generals with whom he had to co-operate, and on the untrustworthiness of their troops. Napier, the one military classic whom most Englishmen have read, is still more emphatic and far more impressive, since he writes in a very judicial style, and with the most elaborate apparatus of references and authorities. When the reader begins to work through the infinite number of Peninsular diaries of British officers and men (for there are a very considerable number of writers from among the rank and file) the impression left upon him is much the same. It must be confessed that for the most part they had a very poor opinion of our allies. Before allowing ourselves to be carried away by the almost unanimous verdict of our own countrymen, it is only fair to examine the state and character of the Spanish army when the war broke out. Only when we know its difficulties can we judge with fairness of its conduct, or decide upon its merits and shortcomings. The armed force which served under the banners of Charles IV in the spring of 1808 consisted of 131,000 men, of whom 101,000 were regulars and 30,000 embodied militia. The latter had been under arms since 1804, and composed the greater part of the garrisons of the seaports of Spain, all of which had to be protected against possible descents of English expeditions[71]. [71] See Appendix, containing the state of the Spanish army in 1808.