To sum up the results of all the operations in Catalonia, Aragon, and Navarre, which followed on the release of Reille’s troops from the Valencian expedition, it may be said that Napoleon’s scheme for the complete reduction of north-eastern Spain had completely failed by April. Large forces had been put in motion; toilsome marches had been executed over many mountain roads in the worst season of the year; all the bands of the insurgents had been more than once defeated and dispersed. But the country-side was not conquered: the isolated garrisons were still cut off from each other by the enemy, wherever the heavy marching columns had passed on. The communications were no more safe and free than they had been in December. The loss of men by sickness and in the innumerable petty combats and disasters had been immense. The game had yet to be finished, and the spare time in which it could be conducted was drawing to an end. For Wellington was on the march, and ere long not a man from the Armies of the North or the Centre was to be available to aid Reille, Suchet, and Decaen in their unending and ungrateful task. Gone, too, were the days in which reserves without end could be poured in from France: the Russian war was about to open, and when once it began reinforcements were to be drawn from Spain rather than sent into it. The invasion had reached its high-water mark in January 1812 before the walls of Valencia and Alicante. SECTION XXXI: CHAPTER II OPERATIONS OF SOULT IN ANDALUSIA: THE SIEGE OF TARIFA, DEC. 1811-JAN. 1812 In the south-west no less than in the south-east of Spain the month of January 1812 was to witness the last offensive movement of the French armies of invasion. But while Suchet’s advance ended, as we have seen, in a splendid success, that of Soult was to meet with a disastrous check. Neither marshal was to have another chance of taking the initiative--thanks, directly or indirectly, to the working out of Wellington’s great plan of campaign for the New Year.