[230] Note Pelet’s _Aperçu sur la Campagne de Portugal_, nearly forty pages in the Appendix to _Victoires et Conquêtes_, vol. xxi: for his disputes with Baron Fririon see the _Spectateur Militaire_ for 1841. Pelet says, ignoring the chief of the staff entirely, ‘qu’il était investi de la confiance _absolue_ du maréchal: qu’il faisait _seul_ auprès de lui tout le travail militaire et politique, qu’il dirigeait la haute correspondance avec le major-général (Berthier) et les chefs de corps, etc., etc.’ For Fririon’s comparative impotence see a story on p. 387 of Marbot’s vol. ii, which may or may not be true--probably the former. Pelet’s writings give a poor impression of his brain-power and his love of exact truth. He says, for example, in his _Aperçu_ that Masséna had only 40,000 men in his army of invasion, when it is certain that he had 64,000. See Baron Fririon’s remarks on him in _Spectateur Militaire_, June 1841, pp. 1-5. Failure or success is not the sole criterion of merit. Masséna’s campaign was a disastrous business; yet on investigating the disabilities under which he laboured, we shall be inclined in the end to marvel that he did so much, not that he did no more. The fundamental error was the Emperor’s, who gave him too few men for the enterprise with which he was entrusted. Napoleon refused to take the Portuguese troops into consideration, when he weighed the needs of the expedition. He repeatedly wrote that ‘it was absurd that his armies should be held in check by 25,000 or 30,000 British troops,’ as if nothing else required to be taken into consideration. He did not realize that Wellington had turned the Portuguese regular army into a decent fighting machine, capable of holding back French divisions in line of battle--as was shown at Bussaco. He had not foreseen that the despised militia required to be ‘contained’ by adequate numbers of troops on the line of communications. Still less had he dreamed of the great scheme for the devastation of Portugal, which was to be not the least effective of the weapons of its defender. But of this more will be said in the proper place. SECTION XIX: CHAPTER IV THE MONTHS OF WAITING: SIEGE OF ASTORGA (MARCH-MAY 1810)