Now Marmont, as Napoleon repeatedly told him, had only to watch lord Wellington’s movements, and a temporary absence from Castile would have cost him nothing of any consequence, because the army of the north would have protected the great communication with France. The advantages of greater means, and better arrangements for supply, on which Wellington had calculated, would thus have been lost, and moreover, the discontented state of the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo, and the approach of a new battering train from France, rendered it dangerous to move far from that fortress. The invasion of Andalusia, judicious in April, would in the latter end of May have been a false movement; and the more so that Castaños having, like his predecessors, failed to bring forward the Gallician army, it was again made painfully evident, that in critical circumstances no aid could be obtained from that quarter. Such being the impediments to an invasion of Andalusia, it behoved the English general to adopt some other scheme of offence more suitable to the altered state of affairs. He considered that as the harvest in Leon and Castile, that is to say, in the districts north of the Gredos and Gata mountains, was much later than in Estremadura and Andalusia, he should be enabled to preserve his commissariat advantages over the French in the field for a longer period in the north than in the south. And if he could strike a decisive blow against Marmont, he would relieve Andalusia as securely as by a direct attack, because Madrid would then fall, and Soult, being thus cut off from his communications with France, would fear to be hemmed in on all sides. Wherefore to make the duke of Ragusa fight a great battle, to calculate the chances, and prepare the means of success, became the immediate objects of lord Wellington’s thoughts.