It may seem profane to the worshippers of the Emperor to say that this dispatch was purely wrong-headed, and argued a complete misconception of the situation. But it is impossible to pass any other verdict on it. Marmont, since Bonnet’s division had been stolen from him, had seven divisions left, or about 44,000 men effective, including cavalry and artillery. The Emperor tells him to keep one division on the Tagus, to send a second to occupy the Asturias. This leaves him about 34,000 net to concentrate at Salamanca. With this force he is to attempt to besiege Rodrigo, or at least to execute a raid as far as Almeida and the Douro. ‘The English are divided and so must be much numerically inferior to you.’ But, as a matter of fact, the only British detachment that was not under Wellington’s hand at the moment was Hill’s 2nd Division, and he had just brought that up to Castello Branco, and would have had it with him in five days, if Marmont had advanced from Salamanca. The Marshal would have seen 55,000 men falling upon his 34,000 if he had moved on any day before the 20th of February, and Wellington was ‘spoiling for a fight,’ or, in his own quiet phraseology, ‘if the French move this way, I hope to give a good account of them[234].’ Supposing Marmont had, by some evil inspiration, done what the Emperor had wished him to do before the orders came, he would have been crushed by almost double numbers somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rodrigo or Almeida. The battle of Salamanca would have been fought six months too soon. [234] Wellington to Douglas, _Dispatches_, viii. p. 568. This is the crucial objection to Napoleon’s main thesis: he underrated Wellington’s numbers and his readiness to give battle. As to details we may observe (1) that there was no siege-train to batter Rodrigo, because the whole of the heavy guns of the Army of Portugal had been captured in that fortress. (2) That Wellington was ‘mad’ enough to march upon Badajoz with his whole army, precisely because he knew that, even if Marmont should invade Portugal, he could never get to Lisbon. He realized, as the Emperor did not, that an army of five or six divisions could not march on Lisbon in the casual fashion recommended in this dispatch, because it would starve by the way. Central Portugal, still suffering from the blight of Masséna’s invasion, could not have sustained 30,000 men marching in a mass and trying to live upon the country in the usual French style. And Marmont, as his adversary well knew, had neither great magazines at his base, nor the immense transport train which would have permitted them to be utilized. The best proof of the impracticability of Napoleon’s scheme was that Marmont endeavoured to carry it out in April, when nothing lay in front of him but Portuguese militia, and failed to penetrate more than a few marches into the land, because he could not feed his army, and therefore could not keep it concentrated.