After having, as he thought, demonstrated to his master that it would be useless to send Mortier alone, with 10,000 or 12,000 men, to make an impossible dash at the Tagus, Soult made another proposal. He would undertake not a mere raid, but the capture of Badajoz, the conquest of Estremadura, and the destruction of the army of that province; but he must take with him a force much greater than the mere 5th Corps. ‘The enterprise is a big one, but ought to succeed--at least it will produce a happy diversion in favour of the imperial army in Portugal[40].’ It would call back La Romana from Lisbon, and possibly cause Wellington to detach troops in his aid, and Masséna would have less in front of him in consequence, and might resume the offensive. [40] Soult to Berthier, December 1, 1810, from Seville. There was of course another course possible: Soult might have marched for Estremadura not with the 13,000 men of the 5th Corps alone, nor yet with the 20,000 men whom he actually took thither in January, but with the greater part of the French Army of Andalusia, 35,000 or 40,000 men. To do so he would have had to abandon Granada, Malaga, and Jaen on the one side, and his hold on the Condado de Niebla and the west upon the other. He might even possibly have had to raise the siege of Cadiz, though this is not quite certain. Many months after, in the end of March, when all chance of the conquest of Portugal was over, the Emperor told him that this would have been his proper course, and read him an _ex-post-facto_ lecture on the advantages that might have followed, if he had evacuated two-thirds of his viceroyalty and taken an imposing force to sweep across the Alemtejo and assail Lisbon from the southern side[41]. But it must be remembered that in December and January all the orders that were sent him directed him to move no more than a small corps--in one dispatch the Emperor calls it only 10,000 men. A supreme commander-in-chief present on the spot might have seen his way to make the temporary sacrifice of the provinces which had cost so many men to conquer and to hold, in order that every available man might be sent against Lisbon, and the English might at last be expelled from the Peninsula. But Soult was not such a commander-in-chief; he was only one of the many viceroys whom Napoleon preferred to a single omnipotent lieutenant. Was it likely that he would sacrifice half his own territory, when no order to do so lay before him, in order that a colleague, sent on a separate task with forces no less than his own, might have every possible advantage? Soult is often blamed for not having seen that the crushing of Wellington’s army was the end to which all others should have been subordinated, and that it would have been cheap in the end to surrender half or three-quarters of Andalusia, and even to raise the siege of Cadiz, in order to secure that point. He might have replied that his master was no less blind than himself: