There were only two rational plans of campaign open to the French: the one was to march on Tarragona with a siege-train, and to complete the conquest of Catalonia by the capture of its greatest fortress. The other was to mask Tarragona, and to strike across the principality westward, in order to get into communication with Suchet and the Army of Aragon, by way of Igualada, Cervera, and Lerida. If the two corps could meet, Northern Catalonia would be completely isolated from Tarragona, Tortosa, and Valencia. It was this latter plan which Augereau had been ordered to carry out by his master. He was directed to march on Lerida, and to join Suchet before that place. By a dispatch of February 19 he had been informed that on March 1 the Army of Aragon would have arrived before Lerida, and would be forming its siege[345]. This prophecy was false: for Suchet, as we have seen, had gone off on his Valencian expedition, and was at Teruel on the appointed day. It was impossible to direct from Paris a combined movement depending on accurate timing for its success. But Augereau should have attempted to carry out the order sent him by his master with proper zeal and dispatch. This he failed to do: his own inclination was to strike a blow at Tarragona, and the movements of his corps show that this was the operation which he had determined to carry out. Instead of marching in person with his main body, on Cervera and Lerida, he directed his brother to take his own and Severoli’s divisions and to move by Villafranca on Reus, a large town twelve miles to the north-west of Tarragona, and suitable as a base of operations against that city (March 29). A battalion and a half was dropped at Villafranca, to keep open the communications between Reus and Barcelona, while a brigade of Rouyer’s newly arrived Germans, under the ever-unlucky Schwartz--the vanquished of Bruch and Esparraguera[346]--was placed as a sort of flank-guard at Manresa. On March 27 a summons was sent in to Tarragona demanding surrender. This was, of course, refused--the town was full of troops, for Henry O’Donnell had just strengthened its garrison by retiring into it himself, with the 6,000 men who represented the remains of his field army. [345] Napoleon to Clarke, Feb. 19, from Paris. Cf. another dispatch of Feb. 26, no. 16294 of the _Correspondance_. [346] See vol. i. pp. 309-11.