Suchet’s errors respecting the allies were easily detected by Soult, those touching the French in Catalonia he could not suspect and acquiesced in the objections to his first plan; but fertile of resource he immediately proposed another, akin to that which he had urged Joseph to adopt in 1812 after the battle of Salamanca, namely, to change the theatre of war. The fortresses in Spain would he said, inevitably fall before the allies in succession if the French armies remained on the defensive, and the only mode of rendering offensive operations successful was a general concentration of means and unity of action. The levy of conscripts under an imperial decree, issued in August, would furnish, in conjunction with the depôts of the interior, a reinforcement of forty thousand men. Ten thousand would form a sufficient corps of observation about Gerona. The armies of Aragon and Catalonia could, he hoped, by sacrificing some posts produce twenty thousand infantry in the field. The imperial muster-rolls prove that they could have produced forty thousand, but Soult misled by Suchet’s erroneous statements assumed only twenty thousand, and he calculated that he could himself bring thirty-five or forty thousand good infantry and all his cavalry to a given point of junction for the two bodies between Tarbes and Pau. Fifteen thousand of the remaining conscripts were also to be directed on that place, and thus seventy or seventy-five thousand infantry all the cavalry of both armies and one hundred guns, would be suddenly assembled, to thread the narrow pass of Jaca and descend upon Aragon. Once in that kingdom they could attack the allied troops in Navarre if the latter were dispersed, and if they were united retire upon Zaragoza, there to fix a solid base and deliver a general battle upon the new line of operations. Meanwhile the fifteen thousand unappropriated conscripts might reinforce the twenty or twenty-five thousand old soldiers left to cover Bayonne.