Wellington’s policy at this moment depended on the exact distribution of the hostile armies in front of him. He lay with the bulk of his army wintering in cantonments along the frontier of Portugal and Leon, but with the Light Division pushed close up to Ciudad Rodrigo, and ready to invest it, the moment that the news should arrive that the French had so moved their forces as to make it possible for him to close in upon that fortress, without the danger of a very large army appearing to relieve it within a few days. On December 28th he summed up his scheme in a report to Lord Liverpool, in which he stated that, after the El Bodon-Aldea da Ponte fighting in September, he had ‘determined to persevere in the same system till the enemy should make some alteration in the disposition of his forces[163].’ In the meanwhile he judged that he was keeping Marmont and Dorsenne ‘contained,’ and preventing them from undertaking operations elsewhere, unless they were prepared to risk the chance of losing Rodrigo. ‘It would not answer to remove the army to the frontiers of Estremadura (where a chance of effecting some important object might have offered), as in that case General Abadia [and the Spanish Army of Galicia] would have been left to himself, and would have fallen an easy sacrifice to the Army of the North[164].’ Therefore Wellington refused to take the opportunity of descending upon Badajoz and driving Drouet out of Estremadura, though these operations were perfectly possible. He confined himself to ordering Hill to carry out the two raids in this direction, of which the first led to the destruction of Girard at Arroyo dos Molinos in October, and the second to the occupation of Merida and the expulsion of the French from central Estremadura at midwinter [December 27, 1811-January 13, 1812]. [163] _Dispatches_, viii. p. 516. [164] Wellington to Lord Liverpool, Dec. 28.