Suchet found resources in Valencia to support the king’s court and army, without augmenting the pressure on the inhabitants, and a counter-stroke could have been made against the allies, if the French commanders had been of one mind and had looked well to the state of affairs; but Joseph exasperated by the previous opposition of the generals, and troubled by the distresses of the numerous families attached to his court, was only intent upon recovering Madrid as soon as he could collect troops enough to give Wellington battle. He had demanded from the French minister of war, money, stores, and a reinforcement of forty thousand men, and he had imperatively commanded Soult to abandon Andalusia; that clear-sighted commander, could not however understand why the king, who had given him no accurate details of Marmont’s misfortunes, or of his own operations, should yet order him to abandon at once, all the results, and all the interests, springing from three years’ possession of the south of Spain. He thought it a great question not to be treated lightly, and as his vast capacity enabled him to embrace the whole field of operations, he concluded that rumour had exaggerated the catastrophe at Salamanca and that the abandoning of Andalusia would be the ruin of the French cause. [Sidenote: French correspondence taken at Vittoria, MSS.] “To march on Madrid,” he said, “would probably produce another pitched battle, which should be carefully avoided, seeing that the whole frame-work of the French invasion was disjointed, and no resource would remain after a defeat. On the other hand, Andalusia, which had hitherto been such a burthen to the invasion, now offered means to remedy the present disasters, and to sacrifice that province with all its resources, for the sake of regaining the capital of Spain, appeared a folly. It was purchasing a town at the price of a kingdom. Madrid was nothing in the emperor’s policy, though it might be something for a king of Spain; yet Philip the Vth had thrice lost it and preserved his throne. Why then should Joseph set such a value upon that city? The battle of the Arapiles was merely a grand duel which might be fought again with a different result; but to abandon Andalusia with all its stores and establishments; to raise the blockade of Cadiz; to sacrifice the guns, the equipments, the hospitals and the magazines, and thus render null the labours of three years, would be to make the battle of the Arapiles a prodigious historical event, the effect of which would be felt all over Europe and even in the new world. And how was this flight from Andalusia to be safely effected? The army of the south had been able to hold in check sixty thousand enemies disposed on a circuit round it, but the moment it commenced its retreat towards Toledo those sixty thousand men would unite to follow, and Wellington himself would be found on the Tagus in its front. On that line then the army of the south could