Dated one day later than the Emperor’s first rough notes, we find the formal dispatch from the war-minister Clarke, which made things a little clearer. Setting forth his master’s ideas in a more verbose style, Clarke explained that the affairs of Spain must be subordinated to those of the North. The move to Valladolid would make communication with Paris shorter and safer, and provide a larger force to hold down Northern Spain. Caffarelli was not strong enough both to hunt down the guerrilleros and at the same time to provide garrisons on the great roads and the coast. The King would have to lend him a hand in the task. There were other dispatches for Joseph and Jourdan dated on the 4th of January, but only one more of importance: this was an order for wholesale drafts to be made from the Army of Spain, for the benefit of the new Army of Germany. But large as they were, the limited scale of them showed that the Emperor had not the least intention of surrendering his hold on the Peninsula, or of drawing back to the line of the Ebro or the Pyrenees, as Lord Liverpool had expected[367]. All the six Armies of Spain--those of the North, Portugal, the Centre, the South, Aragon, and Catalonia--were to continue in existence, and the total number of men to be drawn from any one of them did not amount to a fourth of its numbers. There were still to be 200,000 men left in the Peninsula. The first demand was for twenty-five picked men from each battalion of infantry or regiment of cavalry, and ten from each battery of artillery, to reconstitute the Imperial Guard, reduced practically to nothing in Russia. Putting aside foreign regiments (Italian, Neapolitan, German, Swiss) there were some 220 French battalions in Spain in January 1813, and some 35 regiments of cavalry. The call was therefore for 5,500 bayonets and 875 sabres--no great amount from an army which had 260,000 men on its rolls, and 212,000 actually under the colours.