But it would seem that the third of Wellington’s reasons for calling out the Ordenança was far more cogent, and lay nearer to the heart of his scheme than the other two. Throughout Portuguese history the summons to the levy _en masse_ had always been combined with another measure, from which indeed it could not be disentangled--the order to the whole population to evacuate and devastate the land in face of the advancing enemy. The use of the weapon of starvation against the French was an essential part of Wellington’s plan for defending Portugal. When he told the British Ministry that he would undertake the defence of the realm, this was one of the main conditions of his pledge. He had realized the great fact that the conduct of the war in the Peninsula depended on supplies: the old aphorism that ‘beyond the Pyrenees large armies starve and small armies get beaten’ was at the back of all his schemes for the year 1810. He calculated that the French would find the greatest difficulty in accumulating stores sufficient to feed an army of invasion large enough to attack Portugal, and that, even if such stores could be gathered, there would be a still greater difficulty in getting them to the front as they were needed. For not only would it be hard to collect the mass of transport required for an army of 70,000, 80,000, or 100,000 men, but the convoys which it formed would find it impossible to move over the vast stretch of bad roads between Salamanca and Lisbon, when the communications were cut and the Militia and Ordenança were infesting every pass and hillside. It was almost certain that the invaders would make no such attempt to feed themselves from the rear, but would start with a moderate train, carrying no more than provisions for a week or two, and hoping to subsist (in the usual French style) on the resources of the invaded country. Such resources Wellington was determined that they should not find. They would ere long be starved out, and forced to fall back on their magazines, certainly losing a large proportion of their men from privations by the way. If this scheme had been carried out with rigid perfection, Masséna’s invasion would have amounted to no more than a promenade to Torres Vedras, and a prompt return to the borders of Spain with a famished army. Unfortunately the device, though it worked well and was ultimately quite successful, was not perfectly executed in every corner and by every subordinate, so that the French, showing a magnificent obstinacy, and suffering untold privations, remained before the Lines for three months before they retired. But retire they did, and with a loss of a third of their army, and a deplorable decadence of their morale, so that Wellington’s scheme was fully justified[193].