July, mainly owing to the fact that the master-mind of Wellesley has been brought to bear upon the situation. When the British general attempted to combine with the Spanish armies of Estremadura and La Mancha for a common march upon Madrid, the whole of the hostile forces in the Peninsula [with the exception of those in Aragon and Catalonia] were once more drawn into a single scheme of operations. Hence the Talavera campaign is the central fact in the annals of the Peninsular War for the year 1809. I trust that it will not be considered that I have devoted a disproportionate amount of space to the setting forth and discussion of the various problems which it involved. The details of the battle of Talavera itself have engaged my special attention. I thought it worth while to go very carefully over the battle-field, which fortunately remains much as it was in 1809. A walk around it explained many difficulties, but suggested certain others, which I have done my best to solve. In several other chapters of this volume I discovered that a personal inspection of localities produced most valuable results. At Oporto, for example, I found Wellesley’s passage of the Douro assuming a new aspect when studied on the spot. Not one of the historians who have dealt with it has taken the trouble to mention that the crossing was effected at a point where the Douro runs between lofty and precipitous cliffs, towering nearly 200 feet above the water’s edge! Yet this simple fact explains how it came to pass that the passage was effected at all--the French, on the plateau above the river, could not see what was going on at the bottom of the deeply sunk gorge, which lies in a ‘dead angle’ to any observer who has not come forward to the very edge of the cliff. I have inserted a photograph of the spot, which will explain the situation at a glance. From Napier’s narrative and plan I am driven to conclude that he had either never seen the ground, or had forgotten its aspect after the lapse of years. A search in the Madrid _Deposito de la Guerra_ produced a few important documents for the Talavera campaign, and was made most pleasant by the extreme courtesy of the officers in charge. It is curious to find that our London Record Office contains a good many Spanish dispatches which do not survive at Madrid. This results from the laudable zeal with which Mr. Frere, when acting as British minister at Seville, sent home copies of every Spanish document, printed or unprinted, on which he could lay his hands. Once or twice he thus preserved invaluable ‘morning states’ of the Peninsular armies, which it would otherwise have been impossible to recover. Among our other representatives in Spain Captain Carroll was the only one who possessed to a similar degree this admirable habit of collecting original documents and statistics. His copious ‘enclosures’ to Lord Castlereagh are of the greatest use for the comprehension of the war in the Asturias and Galicia.