All the viceroys reported directly to Paris, and kept the Emperor fully employed with their perpetual bickerings. How Napoleon came to create and continue such a vicious system it is hard to conceive. Apparently the explanation must be sought in the fact that he feared servants with too great power, and acted on the principle of _divide et impera_, despite of the fact that he knew, as a soldier, that the want of a commander-in-chief is ruinous in practical war. At the bottom was the idea that he himself could manage everything, even when his armies were a thousand miles away, and when it took three weeks or a month to transmit orders to them. He sometimes acknowledged in a moment of self-realization that this was a bad arrangement, and that it was impossible for him to conduct or criticize the details of strategy at such a distance, or under such conditions. But after a lucid moment he would fall back into his usual ways of thought, and proceed to give orders and directions which were obsolete before the dispatches that conveyed them could be delivered to the hands of his marshals. To proceed to details--the old Army of Spain had come to a standstill after it had overrun Andalusia in February 1810. Three corps under Soult were absorbed by that new conquest, some 73,000 men in all[213]. Suchet with his 3rd Corps, 26,000 men, held Aragon; Augereau with the vast 7th Corps, 56,900 in all, did not hold down, but was executing military promenades in, the turbulent Catalonia. The 2nd and 6th Corps lay observing Portugal, the former with head quarters at Talavera, the latter with head quarters at Salamanca. Ney had now returned to take charge of the 6th Corps, and Reynier (an old enemy of the English, who had beaten him at Alexandria and Maida) was named chief of the 2nd Corps. This last had now been shorn of its third division,--that which had been composed of so many fractional units in 1809; these had been made over to the 6th Corps, which in 1810 possessed three divisions[214] and no longer two. Reynier had about 18,000 men, Ney no less than 38,000 after this rearrangement; he had been assigned Lorges’ dragoon-division as well as the troops transferred from the 2nd Corps. The King had 14,000 men in Madrid and New Castile: the old garrisons of the Northern Provinces, excluding the newly arrived reinforcements, made up nearly 20,000 men more. This 237,000 sabres and bayonets represents the old army of 1809[215]; the troops sent down by the Emperor after the termination of the Austrian War had not, for the most part, been absorbed into the old units, though they had crossed the Pyrenees in December and January. [213] Note that the 4th Corps had left behind in Madrid 6,000 men of its 1st division (the 28th Léger, 32nd and 75th Line) and taken on instead 8,000 men of the division Dessolles, properly forming part of the ‘Army of the Centre.’