The expedition of Montbrun to Alicant has been fixed upon as the chief cause of the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo. Napoleon however did not desire that Montbrun’s march should be held in abeyance for a week, upon the strength of some vague rumours relative to the allies’ proceedings, and yet be finally sent at precisely the wrong period; neither did he contemplate that general’s idle display at Alicant after the city of Valencia had fallen. But ill-executed and hurtful as this expedition doubtless was, in various ways, the loss of Ciudad Rodrigo cannot be directly traced to it. Montbrun was at Almanza the 9th of January and the 19th Ciudad was stormed; now, if he had not been at Almanza he would have been at Toledo or Talavera, that is, eight marches from Salamanca; and as the commencement of the siege was not known until the 15th, even at Valladolid, he could not have been on the Tormes before the 25th, which would have been five days too late. The emperor wished to strengthen Suchet at the crisis of the Valencian operations, and his intent was that Montbrun should have reached that city in December, but the latter did not arrive before the middle of January; had he been only a week earlier, that is, had he marched at once from Toledo, Mahy could not have escaped, Alicant would then have fallen, and if Blake had made an obstinate defence at Valencia the value of such a reinforcement would have been acknowledged. At this period Valencia was the most important point in the Peninsula, and there was no apparent reason why Ciudad should be in any immediate danger; the emperor could not calculate upon the errors of his own generals. It is futile therefore to affirm that Montbrun’s detachment was made on a false principle; it was on the contrary conceived in perfect accord with the maxim of concentrating on the important point at the decisive moment; errors, extraneous to the original design, alone brought it within the principle of dissemination. The loss of Ciudad Rodrigo may be directly traced to the duke of Ragusa’s want of vigilance, to the scanty garrison which he kept in the place, to the Russian war which obliged the emperor to weaken the army of the north; finally, to the extravagance of the army of the centre. Marmont expressly asserts that at Madrid three thousand men devoured and wasted daily the rations of twenty-two thousand, and the stores thus consumed would have enabled the army of Portugal to keep concentrated, in which case Wellington could not have taken Ciudad; and if the army of the centre had been efficient, Hill would have incurred great danger and Soult’s power been vastly augmented.