Of the 33,000 men with whom Suchet had conquered Valencia and captured Blake, no less than 13,000 under Reille had been lent him from the Army of the North, and were under orders to return to the Ebro as soon as possible. Indeed, till they should get back, Aragon, very insufficiently garrisoned by Caffarelli’s division, was out of hand, and almost as much in the power of the Empecinado, Duran, and Montijo, as of the French. Moreover, so long as Caffarelli was at Saragossa, and his troops dispersed in the surrounding region, both Navarre and Old Castile were undermanned, and the Army of the North was reduced to little more than Dorsenne’s two divisions of the Young Guard. To secure the troops for the great push against Valencia, so many divisions had shifted eastward, that Marmont and Dorsenne between them had, as the Emperor must have seen, barely troops enough in hand to maintain their position, if Wellington should make some unexpected move--though Napoleon had persuaded himself that such a move was improbable. In spite of this, he was anxious to draw back Reille’s and Caffarelli’s, no less than Montbrun’s, men to more central positions. But this was not all: in December the Emperor’s dispatches begin to show that he regarded war with Russia in the spring of 1812 as decidedly probable, and that for this reason he was about to withdraw all the Imperial Guard from Spain. On December 15th a note to Berthier ordered all the light and heavy cavalry of the Guard--chasseurs, grenadiers à cheval, dragoons, Polish lancers--to be brought home, as also its horse artillery and the _gendarmes d’élite_. All these were serving in the Army of the North, and formed the best part of its mounted troops. This was but a trifling preliminary warning of his intentions: on January 14, 1812--the results of the Valencian campaign being still unknown--he directed Berthier to withdraw from Spain the whole of the Infantry of the Guard and the whole of the Polish regiments in Spain. This was an order of wide-spreading importance, and created large gaps in the muster-rolls of Suchet, Soult, and Dorsenne. Suchet’s Poles (three regiments of the Legion of the Vistula, nearly 6,000 men, including the detachments left in Aragon) formed a most important part of the 3rd Corps. Soult had the 4th, 6th, and 9th Polish regiments and the Lancers, who had done such good service at Albuera, a total of another 6,000 men. But Dorsenne was to be the greatest sufferer--he had in the Army of the North not only the 4th of the Vistula, some 1,500 bayonets, but the whole of the infantry of the Young Guard, the two divisions of Roguet and Dumoustier, twenty-two battalions over 14,000 strong. The dispatch of January 14 directed that Suchet should send off his battalions of the Legion ‘immediately after the fall of Valencia.’ Soult was to draft away his Poles ‘within twenty-four hours after the receipt of the order.’ Dorsenne, of course, could not begin to send off the Guard Divisions