30,000 efficients for the expedition against Lisbon[198]. Considering that the Portuguese army was still in the making, and that no more than 8,000 British troops remained in and about Lisbon, the task assigned to the Duke of Dalmatia did not on the face of it appear unreasonable. [197] It was composed of the few battalions of the 8th Corps which had not been drafted into the 2nd. [198] When the Emperor looked at the half-monthly returns of the army, which were forwarded to him as regularly as possible, and which pursued him wheresoever he might go, he must have seen the following statistics--those of Jan. 15 in the French War Office--for the 2nd Corps, taking the gross totals:-- Infantry: Merle 12,119; Mermet 11,810; Delaborde 5,038; Heudelet 6,592: Total 35,559. Cavalry: Lorges 1,769; Lahoussaye 3,087; Franceschi 2,512: Total 7,368. Artillery and Train 1,468. Total of the whole corps 44,395. By Jan. 30, it had risen to 45,820. But in Spain the old saying that ‘nothing is so deceptive as figures--except facts,’ was pre-eminently true. No map--those of 1809 were intolerably bad--could give the Emperor any idea of the hopeless condition of Galician or Portuguese mountain-roads in January. No tables of statistics could enable him to foresee the way in which the population would receive the invading army. We may add that even an unrivalled knowledge of the realities of war would hardly have prepared him to expect that the campaign of Galicia would, in one month, have worn down Soult’s available effectives to a bare 23,000 men. Such was the modest figure at which the 2nd Corps stood on January 30, for it had no less than 8,000 men detached, and the incredible number of over 10,000--one man in four--in hospital. For this figure it was not the muskets of Moore’s host which were responsible: it was the cold and misery of the forced marches from Astorga to Corunna, which seem to have tried the pursuer even more than the pursued. The 8,000 ‘detached’ were strung out in small parties all the way from Leon to Lugo--wherever the Marshal had been obliged to abandon stores or baggage that could not travel fast, he had been forced to leave a guard: he had also dropped small garrisons at Villafranca, Lugo, and Betanzos, to await Ney’s arrival; but the most important drain had been that of his dismounted dragoons[199]. In his cavalry regiments half the horses had foundered or perished: the roads so deadly to Moore’s chargers had taken a corresponding toll from the French divisions, and at every halting-place hundreds of horsemen, unable to keep up with the main body, had been left behind. In any other country than Spain these involuntary laggards would have found their way to the front again in a comparatively short time. But Soult was commencing to discover that one of the main features of war in the Peninsula was that isolated men, or even small parties, could not move about in safety. The peasantry were already