But Soult’s late arrival and miscalculation of the time that the siege would take, were neither of them the causes of the fall of Badajoz. It would have fallen none the less if he had arrived on the Albuera upon April 2nd. The fate of the place was really settled by Napoleon’s dispatches to Marmont, with which we dealt at great length in an earlier chapter[299]. The orders of February 11 and February 21 (received by the Duke of Ragusa on February 26 and March 2 respectively) forbade him to worry about Badajoz, ‘a very strong fortress supported by an army of 80,000 men,’ and told him to withdraw to Salamanca two of the three divisions which he was keeping in the valley of the Tagus, and to reply to any movement of Wellington into Estremadura by invading Northern Portugal. The plan which Soult and Marmont had concerted for a joint relief of Badajoz was expressly forbidden by their master, on his erroneous hypothesis that a thrust at Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida must bring Wellington home again. Marmont’s promise of co-operation, sent off on February 22nd to Seville, was rendered impossible--through no fault of his--by the imperial dispatch received four days later, which expressly forbade him to stand by it. ‘The English will only go southward if you, by your ill-devised scheme, keep two or three divisions detached on the Tagus: that reassures them, and tells them that you have no offensive projects against them.’ So Marmont, protesting and prophesying future disaster, was compelled to withdraw two divisions from the central position on the Tagus, and to leave there only Foy’s 5,000 men--a negligible quantity in the problem. Nor was this all--he was not even allowed to send them back, since the whole Army of Portugal was ordered to march into the Beira. [299] See chapter ii above, pp. 54, 55.