Masséna, then, was sent to accomplish an impossible task, and his merit was that he came nearer to his end than Wellington had believed possible, before he was forced to recoil. Many of the French marshals would never have got to Coimbra: certainly none of them would have succeeded in holding on at Santarem for three months. There can be no doubt that the Prince of Essling did not exaggerate when he wrote to Berthier[262], on March 31st, that it was his own iron will alone which had kept the army so long and so far to the front--that but for him it would have recoiled on to Spain many weeks earlier. His heroic obstinacy gave his adversary many an uneasy day, while it seemed in January and February as if the calculation for famishing the French had failed. Masséna, in short, had done all that was possible, and the general failure of the campaign was not his fault, any more than it was that of Soult, on whom the blame has always been laid by the elder marshal’s advocates. We have shown in an earlier chapter[263] that Soult did all and more than all that Napoleon had directed him to accomplish. If he had literally obeyed the tardy orders that reached him from Paris he would only have exposed the 5th Corps to defeat, if not to destruction. The _ex post facto_ rebukes that the Emperor sent him were unjust. We are once more driven back to our old conclusion that the determining factors in the failure of the campaign of Portugal were firstly that Napoleon refused to appoint a single commander-in-chief in the Peninsula, to whose orders all the other marshals should be strictly subordinate, and secondly that he persisted in sending plans and directions from Paris founded on facts that were seven weeks late, or more, when his dispatches reached the front. On this we have enlarged at sufficient length on an earlier page. [262] Dispatch printed in Fririon, p. 157. [263] See above, pp. 24-5. SECTION XXV EVENTS IN NORTHERN, EASTERN, AND CENTRAL SPAIN CHAPTER I KING JOSEPH AND HIS TROUBLES While following the fortunes of Wellington and Masséna, during the first four months of 1811, we have been compelled to leave almost untouched the sequence of events in the rest of Spain; not only the doings of Suchet and Macdonald in the far east, which had no practical connexion with the campaign of Portugal, but also the minor affairs of the southern and central provinces. Only Soult’s expedition to Estremadura, which came into close touch with Wellington, has been dealt with. It is time to explain the general posture of the war in the Peninsula, during the time when its critical point lay between Lisbon and Abrantes, where Masséna and Wellington stood face to face, each waiting for the other to move.