One thing is clear--he was conscious of the mistakes of 1812, and was not going to see them repeated in 1813. When the Burgos campaign was just over he wrote two short comments[442] on it, for the benefit of persons whom he judged capable of appreciating his difficulties. He owned up to his errors--he acknowledged four. The first was that he had tried to take Burgos by irregular means, without a proper battering train: the second that he had under-estimated the strength of the united French armies of Portugal and the North: the third that he had kept his army in two equal halves over-long--Hill should have been called in from Madrid to join the main body much sooner than he actually was: the fourth and most notable was that he had entrusted a crucial part of his plan of campaign to a Spanish general, over whom he had no formal authority--Ballasteros, who should have advanced from Andalusia to distract and hinder Soult. ‘If the game had been well played it would have answered my purpose. Had I any reason to suppose that it would be well played? Certainly not. I have never yet known the Spaniards do _anything_, much less do anything _well_.... But I played a game which _might_ succeed (the only one that _could_ succeed) and pushed it to the last. The parts having failed--as I admit was to be expected--I at least made a handsome retreat to the Agueda, with some labour and inconvenience but without material loss.’ The interest of these confessions is that we find Wellington in his next campaign making a clear effort to avoid precisely these four mistakes. He made elaborate preparations long beforehand for getting up a battering train: he rather over- than under-estimated his adversary’s numbers by way of caution: he never divided his army at all during his great advance of May-June 1813; after the first six days it marched in close parallel columns all in one mass, till Vittoria had been reached: and, last but not least, he entrusted no important part of the scheme to any Spanish general, and indeed used a much smaller proportion of Spanish troops than he need have done, although he had now become Generalissimo of all the allied armies, and could command where he could formerly only give advice. Immediately after the termination of the Burgos retreat Wellington’s views for the future do not seem to have been very optimistic. He wrote to the Prime Minister that at present he could do nothing against an enemy whose numbers had proved too great for him to contend with[443]. Next spring he hoped to take the field with a larger force than he had ever had before, but unless the Spaniards could display a discipline and efficiency which it seemed impossible to teach them, he saw no prospect of ever obliging the French to quit the Peninsula by force of arms. To Lord Bathurst he wrote in much the same terms--the French, he thought, would canton their army in Old Castile and wait for the arrival of fresh reinforcements from France.