In this dilemma lord Wellington adopted, from necessity, a very unmilitary and dangerous remedy. For having declared to the members of the Portuguese government, that on their heads he would throw the responsibility of losing Badajos and Elvas, if they did not immediately victual both, a threat which had its due effect, he employed the whole of the carriages and mules attached to the army to bring up stores to Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo; meanwhile he quartered his troops near the points of water-carriage, that is to say, on the Mondego, the Douro, and the Tagus. Thus the army was spread from the Morena to the Tagus, from the Tagus to the Douro, from the Douro to the Mondego, on a line little less than four hundred miles long, and in the face of three hostile armies, the farthest of which was but a few marches from the outposts. It was however scarcely possible for the French to assemble again in masses, before the ripening of the coming harvest; and on the other hand, even the above measure was insufficient to gain time; the expedition against Andalusia was therefore abandoned, and the fifth great epoch of the war terminated. CHAPTER VII. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. [Sidenote: 1812.] In this campaign the French forces were too much scattered, and they occupied the countries bordering on Portugal rather as a conquered territory than as a field of operations. The movements of the armies of the north, of the centre, and of Portugal, might have been so combined as to present a hundred thousand men on a field of battle; yet Wellington captured two great fortresses within gun-shot as it were of them all, and was never disturbed by the approach of even thirty thousand men. This arose partly from want of union, partly from the orders of the Emperor, whose plans the generals either did not or would not understand in their true spirit, and therefore executed without vigour; and yet the French writers have generally endeavoured to fasten the failures on Napoleon, as if he only was mistaken about the war in Spain! It is easy to spurn the dead lion!