It has been explained in an earlier chapter that ever since General Caffarelli concentrated all the available troops of the Army of the North, in order to join Souham in driving away Wellington from the siege of Burgos, the three Basque provinces, Navarre, and the coast-land of Santander had been out of hand[380]. The outward and visible sign of that fact was the intermittent stoppage of communication between Bayonne and Madrid, which had so much irritated Napoleon on his return from Russia. It was undoubtedly a just cause of anger that important dispatches should be hung up at Tolosa, or Vittoria, or Burgos, because the bands of Mina or Mendizabal or Longa were holding the defile of Salinas--the grave of so many convoy-escorts--or the pass of Pancorbo. It had been calculated in 1811 that it might often require a small column of 250 men to bring an imperial courier safely through either of those perilous narrows. But in the winter of 1812-13 things had grown far worse. ‘The insurgents of Guipuzcoa, Navarre, and Aragon,’ as Clarke wrote to Jourdan with perfect truth[381], ‘have had six months to organize and train themselves: their progress has been prodigious: they have formed many formidable corps, which no longer fear to face our troops when numbers are equal. They have called in the English, and receive every day arms, munitions, and even cannon on the coast. They have actually begun to conduct regular sieges.’ Yet it was three months and more since the King had sent back Caffarelli and the field-force of the Army of the North from Valladolid, to restore order in the regions which had slipped out of hand during the great concentration of the French armies in November.