When his 20,000 men, collected from all the three corps which formed the Army of the South, set out on the last day of the old year 1810, Soult left behind him three problems, each of which (as he was well aware) might assume a dangerous aspect at any moment. We have already indicated their character[127]. Would Victor, with 19,000 men left to him for the blockade of Cadiz, be able to hold with security the immense semicircle of lines and batteries which threatened the island stronghold of the Cortes? Would the provisional garrison which had been patched up for Seville prove strong enough to defend that capital and its arsenals against any possible attack of roving Spanish detachments, from the mountains of the west and south? Would Sebastiani and the 4th Corps be able to beat back any attempt by the Army of Murcia to trespass upon the limits of the broad and rugged province of Granada? We may add that it was conceivable that all these three problems might demand a simultaneous solution. For if all the Spanish forces had been guided by a single capable brain, nothing would have been more obvious to conceive than a plan for setting them all to work at once. If a sortie from Cadiz were taken in hand, it would have the best chance of success supposing that Sebastiani were to be distracted by an invasion of Granada, and Seville threatened by any force that could be collected in the Condado de Niebla, or the mountains above Ronda. [127] See pp. 57-8 above. Soult, as Napoleon pointed out to him two months later[128], had committed a considerable fault by not putting all the divisions left behind in Andalusia under a single commander, responsible for all parts of the kingdom alike. Victor was given no authority over Sebastiani, nor even over Daricau, who had been left as governor of Seville, or Godinot, whose depleted division occupied the province of Cordova. Napoleon, always suspicious of Soult, accused him of having neglected this precaution because he was jealous of Victor, and would not make him as great as himself[129]. Whether this was so or not, it is at any rate clear that the position was made much more dangerous by the fact that each of the three problems named above would be presented to a different commander, who would be prone to think of his own troubles alone, and to neglect those of his colleagues. If all three dangers became threatening at the same moment, each general would regard his own as the most important, and bestow comparatively little care on those which menaced the others. As a matter of fact, Victor was almost destroyed, because Sebastiani did not come to his help, when the sally from Cadiz took place early in March; and Seville was in serious danger a few days later, because there was no one who could order Godinot to march to its aid from Cordova without delay.