SOULT’S HALT AT OPORTO: OPERATIONS OF WILSON AND LAPISSE ON THE PORTUGUESE FRONTIER: SILVEIRA’S DEFENCE OF AMARANTE Oporto had been conquered: the unhappy levies of the Bishop had been scattered to the winds: by the captures which it had made the French army was now, for the first time since its departure from Orense, in possession of a considerable store of provisions and an adequate supply of ammunition. Soult was no longer driven forward by the imperative necessity for finding new resources to feed his troops, nor forced to hurry on the fighting by the fear that if he delayed his cartridges would run short. He had at last leisure to halt and take stock of his position. The most striking point in the situation was that he was absolutely ignorant of the general course of the war in the other regions of the Peninsula. When he had been directed to march on Oporto, he had been assured that he might count on the co-operation of Lapisse, who was to advance from Salamanca with his 9,000 men, and of Victor, who was to stretch out to him a helping hand from the valley of the Tagus. It was all-important to know how far the promised aid was being given: yet the Marshal could learn nothing. More than two months had now elapsed since he had received any dispatches from the Emperor. It was a month since he had obtained his last news of the doings of his nearest colleague, Ney, which had been brought to him, as it will be remembered, just as he was about to leave Orense. At that moment the Duke of Elchingen had been able to tell him nothing save that the communications between Galicia and Leon had been broken, and that the insurrection was daily growing more formidable. After this his only glimpse of the outer world had been afforded by Portuguese letters, seized in the post-offices of Braga and Oporto, from which he had learnt that his garrisons left behind at Vigo and Tuy were being beleaguered by a vast horde of Galician irregular levies. ‘The march of the 2nd Corps,’ wrote one of Soult’s officers, ‘may be compared to the progress of a ship on the high seas: she cleaves the waves, but they close behind her, and in a few moments all trace of her passage has disappeared[295].’ To make the simile complete, Fantin des Odoards should have compared Soult to the captain of a vessel in a dense fog, forging ahead through shoals and sandbanks without any possibility of obtaining a general view of the coast till the mists may lift. To all intents and purposes, we may add, the fog never dispersed till May had arrived, and Wellesley hurtled down in a dreadful collision on the groping commander, ere he had fully ascertained his own whereabouts. [295] Fantin des Odoards, _Journal_, April 28, p. 226.