The recapitulation of all this correspondence may seem tedious, but it is necessary. When it is followed with care I think that one definite fact emerges. Napoleon was directly and personally responsible for the fall of Badajoz. Down to March 27th Marmont was strictly forbidden to take any precautions for the safety of that fortress, and was censured as a meddler and an alarmist, for wishing to keep a strong force in the valley of the Tagus, ready to march thither. On March 27 he was suddenly given an option of marching to Estremadura with his whole army. It appears to be an option, not a definite order, for Berthier’s sentence introducing the new scheme is alternative--the Army of Portugal is ‘to take the offensive in the North _or_, under certain circumstances, to march for Almaraz.’ But this point need not be pressed, for if taken as a definite order it was impracticable: Marmont received it so late that, if he had marched for Badajoz with the greatest possible speed, he would have reached it some days after the place was stormed. The fact that he believed that he would never have got there at all, because lack of food would have stopped him on the way, is indifferent. The essential point of Napoleon’s responsibility is that he authorized the march too late, after having most stringently forbidden it, in successive letters extending over several weeks. That a march on Badajoz by the whole Army of Portugal (or so much of it as was not required to contain the Galicians and to occupy Asturias), if it had begun--as Marmont wished--in February or early March, would have prevented Wellington from taking the fortress, is not certain. A similar march in June 1811 had that effect, at the time of the operations on the Caya. But Wellington’s position was much better in February 1812 than it had been eight months earlier. This much, however, is clear, that such an operation had a possible chance of success, while Napoleon’s counter-scheme for a demonstration on the Agueda and an invasion of the northern Beira had no such prospect. The Emperor, for lack of comprehension of the local conditions, misconceived its efficacy, as Marmont very cogently demonstrated in his letters. Northern Portugal was a waste, where the Marshal’s army might wander for a few days, but was certain to be starved before it was many marches from the frontier. Napier, in an elaborate vindication of the Emperor, tries to argue that the Marshal might have taken Rodrigo by escalade without a battering-train, have assailed Almeida in similar fashion, have menaced Oporto and occupied Coimbra[241]. He deliberately ignores one essential condition of the war, viz. that because of the French system of ‘living on the country,’ Marmont had no magazines, and no transport sufficient to enable his army to conduct a long offensive campaign in a devastated and hostile land. His paragraphs are mere rhetoric of the most unfair kind. For example, he says, ‘Wellington