as perfunctory as he could venture to make it, and leaving colonial ♦MÉMOIRES, 1. 306.♦ produce untouched because it happened not to be specified in his orders. ♦PREPARATIONS FOR BESIEGING TARRAGONA.♦ But the Spaniards were a people whom no length of time could reconcile to an usurpation by which they felt themselves insulted as much as they were wronged and outraged. Though his political sagacity was equal to his military skill, and though he was placed in a part of the peninsula where the Spaniards never received the slightest assistance from their British allies, even in Aragon he felt the insecurity of his position, and deemed it an advantage of no trifling moment when he could discover a manufactory of arms among the mountains. The Spanish frontier is that upon which France was least provided with military establishments; but the want of stores, which in other quarters could be drawn abundantly from the arsenals of Douay, Metz, and Strasbourg, was supplied here by the treacherous seizure of Pamplona before hostilities commenced, and by the subsequent capture of Lerida, Mequinenza, Tortosa, and Col de Balaguer. In this respect the war had abundantly furnished its own means; nor was he deficient in numbers for the siege which he was about to undertake, the army now under his command consisting of more than 40,000 men, notwithstanding its daily waste, and the great losses it had suffered. The Italian division from 13,000 to 14,000 had been reduced to five or six; but with the population of France, Italy, and the Netherlands, at his disposal, and of those states which, under the name of confederates, were actually subjected to the French government, Buonaparte thought that no war could thin his armies faster than the conscription could recruit them; and under his officers he well knew that men of any nation would soon be made efficient soldiers. Suchet found it better to make the regiments of different nations act together than to keep them in separate divisions; they were more likely thus to be influenced by a common feeling, and less liable to be affected by the proclamations in Italian, German, Dutch, and Polish, as well as Spanish and French, which General Doyle addressed to them, inviting them to abandon the unjust service in which they were engaged. Suchet provided also for their wants with a solicitude which made him deservedly popular among his men. He saw that the commissariat department was better administered by military than by civil agents; and having placed it therefore wholly in their hands, he adopted the farther improvement of giving to each regiment the charge of its own cattle, convoys of which from Pau and Oleron were constantly on the road, protected by a chain of fortified posts from Canfranc and Jaca to Zaragoza. It was found that by this means the cattle were better guarded and more easily fed; that the movements of the army were not impeded by them; and that when the soldiers reached their bivouac