[97] Mr. Fortescue writes: ‘This was unfair. Perceval and Liverpool had deliberately turned their backs upon Pitt’s old policy of spasmodic efforts all over the world, in favour of a steady and persistent feeding of the war in one quarter--the Peninsula. Wellington himself had approved the change in his letters of 1810, had named the amount of money that he wanted, and fixed the figure of the reinforcements that he asked. But in 1811 he never ceased to ask for more men and more money, till Liverpool was obliged to remind him very gently, that he was going far beyond his own estimates.’ He had got to the stage of writing that Government having embarked on the contest, and chosen the best officer they could find, must give him the largest army they could collect, and reinforce it to the utmost, without asking precisely how many men were wanted, and for what precise objects. It was Mr. Fortescue who indicated to me two important passages about Liverpool which are omitted from the printed version of Wellington’s letters to Pole of January 11 and March 31, 1811, in _Supplementary Dispatches_, vii. pp. 40-3 and 93. [98] See especially Wellington to Dudley Perceval (the premier’s son), June 6th, 1835, a protest against Napier’s wild misrepresentations. During all these weeks of waiting Wellington was also troubled by problems with regard to the internal state of Portugal. Two main sources of worry can be traced in his correspondence. The first was the inefficiency of the Portuguese commissariat, which bid fair to cause absolute starvation among those brigades of the national army which were not incorporated with British divisions and supplied from the British stores. Slow and irregular forwarding of provisions to the corps stationed in advanced or remote positions led to a dreadful increase in the number of sick. We find Wellington complaining that regiments which had 1,200 men in line at Bussaco could only show 1,000 or 900 under arms in February, although they had received considerable drafts from their dépôts at midwinter. D’Urban’s daily notes bear out the statements of the Commander-in-Chief. He asserts with indignation that by ‘the villany of commissaries,’ the same quantity of flour which provided 15½ rations for the British soldier was returned as having given only 9 to the Portuguese--the balance having been embezzled. Allowances, of course, must be made for the difficulties of a government of whose territory a good third had been depopulated by the orders of Wellington. But the trouble does not seem to have been so much the actual want of food-stuffs at head quarters[99]--great quantities were got from the Alemtejo and the north--as the inefficiency of distribution, which left outlying brigades sometimes foodless for two or three days at a time. Clothing and shoes were also very slow in arriving at the front. At the bottom the cause of all this