Drouet’s solution of the problem was that with Conroux’s division and Gardanne’s detachment, some 8,000 men, he would march down the Mondego by Celorico and Ponte de Murcella, and cut his way to join Masséna, but that he would leave his second division under Claparéde behind him, about Celorico and Trancoso, to keep in touch with Almeida and maintain his communications. This was about as much as could be done to carry out Napoleon’s instructions, which were essentially impossible to execute. For the Portuguese militia, with which the 9th Corps had to deal, were, when properly managed, a very intangible enemy, who could retire whenever a column passed, and return to block the way when it had gone by. It is impossible to see how Drouet could have kept open the whole road from Almeida to Thomar, without leaving all along the way a couple of battalions, entrenched in a good position, at distances of fifteen or twenty miles from each other. And if he had done this, he would have had no force left at the moment when he joined Masséna. It was useless for Napoleon to tell him in one breath to keep the road open from end to end, and in the next to forbid him to make any small detachments[27]. But the Emperor neither fully understood the military situation in Portugal, nor grasped the relative merits of its roads or the relative resources of its various regions. In a dispatch sent out to Masséna on December 4th (but not delivered till February) he advised that Marshal to try to open his communications with Spain by the awful mountain road from the Zezere by Cardigos and Belmonte to Guarda, and at the same time to use the desolate Castello Branco country ‘pour faire des vivres.’ Ferey’s fruitless expedition up that very road and into that very region, carried out a fortnight before the Emperor’s dispatch was even written, had sufficiently proved the futility of the suggestion. [27] ‘Il est donc important qu’il ne fasse point de petits pacquets.’ Ibid. But to return to Drouet: he left Almeida on December 14th, and crossed the Coa with both his divisions and Gardanne’s detachment. The only enemy near him was Silveira, who with his six militia regiments and the reorganized 24th of the Line (the absconding garrison of Almeida, which had eluded its forced oath to Masséna in the preceding autumn[28]) was lying at Trancoso. To that place the Portuguese general had retired (abandoning the blockade of Almeida) when the 9th Corps arrived on the frontier. Of the other militia brigades of the north Miller with four battalions was at Vizeu, Trant with seven at Coimbra; Baccelar, the Commander-in-Chief, lay at Oporto with the small remainder. [28] See vol. iii. p. 276.