"If the general has no funds, Terence, he had better be stopping where he is. There is no getting anything in Portugal without paying ten times the proper price for it, and from what I hear of the Spaniards they will charge twenty times, put the money in their pockets, and then not even give you what you paid for. As to their being any good to us as allies, it is not to be hoped for; they will take our arms and our money, expect us to feed their troops, and will then run away at the sight of a French soldier; you will see if they don't." "I hear that the Junta of Corunna says that all the north will rise as soon as we enter their country." "They may rise and flock round us until they have got arms and money, and then they will go off to their homes again. That is the sort of assistance that is to be had from them. We should do a deal better if there was not a Spaniard in the country, and it was left to us to fight it out with the French." "In that case, O'Flaherty, we should never cross the frontier at all. They say that Napoleon is gathering a great army, and against such a force, with the French troops already in Spain, our twenty or twenty-five thousand men would fare very badly, especially as they say that the emperor is coming himself." "That is worse news than the other, Terence. It is only because the French generals have always been quarrelling among themselves that the whole Peninsula has not been conquered; but with Napoleon at the head of affairs it would be a different matter altogether, and my humble opinion is that we had better stay where we are until he has wiped out the Spaniards altogether." Terence laughed. "You don't take a sanguine view of things."