Though Suchet had successfully pacified the plains of Aragon during the autumn of 1809, and though Augereau in the last month of that year had received the surrender of the much-enduring garrison of Gerona, the position of the French in North-Eastern Spain was still far from satisfactory. It was not yet possible for the 3rd and the 7th Corps to combine their operations. While the broad strip of territory in Western Catalonia reaching from the foot of the Pyrenees to the sea--whose places of strength were Lerida, Tarragona, and Tortosa--still remained intact, Augereau and Suchet could still communicate only by the circuitous route through France: a letter from Saragossa to Barcelona took a fortnight or more to arrive at its destination. It was high time that they should endeavour to get into touch with each other, by cutting through the Spanish line of defence. Both of the corps-commanders had now a comparatively free hand, and could assemble a considerable force for offensive operations. Suchet’s position was the happier: he had no Spanish army opposed to him at the moment. His only opponents were--to the West the bold guerrillero Mina the Younger on the borders of Navarre; to the South Villacampa with the dilapidated remains of his band on the side of the Sierra de Albaracin and Molina; and to the East the governor of Lerida, who kept a flying force under Colonel Perena on foot between the Cinca and the Segre, for the encouragement of the insurgents of Eastern Aragon. None of these three opponents could do any serious mischief to the 3rd Corps, which had risen by the New Year of 1810 to a strength of 24,000 men[329], now that its drafts from France were beginning to arrive. Mina was the most tiresome of the three: he was a young man of untiring energy, and kept the borders of Navarre in a perpetual ferment, till he was finally put down by mere force of numbers. For while Suchet sent a number of columns under General Harispe to hunt him, Lagrange’s division of the newly arrived 8th Corps came down from the side of Pampeluna, and swept the valleys of the Arga and the Aragon from the other quarter. Pursued from one refuge to another by 12,000 men, Mina ended by bidding his followers disperse. He did not appear again as a combatant till the 8th Corps had passed on into Castile in the month of February 1810. [329] Suchet in his _Mémoires_ (i. 77) says that in Jan. 1810 his corps was only 20,000 strong. But the imperial muster-rolls show that it had 23,000 _présents sous les armes_, besides 1,819 men in hospital and 973 detached, in that month.