2º. The Portuguese had suffered cruelly during the winter from hunger and nakedness, the result of the scarcity of money before-mentioned. To bring them into line, was to risk a total disorganization, destructive alike of present and future advantages. On the other hand, the French in Castile, consisting of the sixth corps and the troops of Kellerman’s government, lord Wellington knew to be at least thirty thousand strong, of which twenty thousand were in one mass; and, although the rest were dispersed from Burgos to Avila, and from Zamora to Valladolid, they could easily have concentrated in time to give battle, and would have proved too powerful. That this reasoning was sound shall now be shewn. [Sidenote: Rolls of the French army.] Mortier’s march from Seville would not have terminated at Badajos, if the British force at Abrantes, instead of advancing to Portalegre, had been employed in Castile. The invasion of Andalusia, was only part of a general movement throughout Spain; and when the king placed himself at the head of the army, to force the Morena, Kellerman marched from Salamanca to Miranda del Castanar and Bejar, with the sixth corps, and thus secured the defiles leading into the valley of the Tagus, and at the same time, the second corps coming down that valley, communicated with the sixth by the pass of Baños, and with the fifth by Seradillo and Caceres. Hence, without losing hold of Andalusia, three _corps d’armée_, namely, the sixth, second, and fifth, amounting to fifty thousand men, could, on an emergency, be brought together to oppose any offensive movement of lord Wellington’s. Nor was this the whole of the French combinations; for, in rear of all these forces, Napoleon was crowding the Peninsula with fresh armies, and not eight thousand, as the Central Junta asserted, but one hundred thousand men, rendered disposable by the peace with Austria and the evacuation of Walcheren, were crossing, or to cross, the western Pyrennees. Of these, the first detachments reinforced the divisions in the field, but the succeeding troops formed an eighth and ninth corps, and the former, under the command of the duke of Abrantes, advancing gradually through Old Castile, was actually in the plains of Valladolid, and would, in conjunction with Kellerman, have overwhelmed the British army; but for that sagacity, which the French, with derisive but natural anger, and the Spaniards, with ingratitude, have termed “_The selfish caution of the English system_.” Truly, it would be a strange thing, to use so noble and costly a machine, as a British army, with all its national reputation to support, as lightly as those Spanish multitudes, collected in a day, dispersed in an hour, reassembled again without difficulty, incapable of attaining, and consequently, incapable of losing, any military reputation. CHAPTER II.