both for a while from public life. But the expedition itself was finely conceived; in scale and strength it left nothing to be desired. And its history deserves to be remembered as proving how useless is the wealth of a great State, and the courage of gallant soldiers, when administered by drivelling imbecility.

It is pleasant to turn from the swamps of Walcheren, and the spectacle of an army perishing for simple lack of leadership, to the great field of the Peninsula, on which Wellington was now to begin those immortal campaigns which are the glory of English military history.

CHAPTER X

THE NEW CAMPAIGN IN THE PENINSULA

HERE was a touch of mystery in Napoleon's

THE

sudden abandonment at Astorga of the pursuit of Moore's army. The usual reason assigned is that he had received news Austria was preparing for war, and that a conspiracy was fermenting in Paris. But, as a matter of fact, Napoleon lingered ten days at Valladolid, after turning his back on Moore, before he finally started for France; and war with Austria did not break out till April 6.

Wellington always declared that Napoleon's surrender of the pursuit of the British army puzzled him. He judged Napoleon with hard and unfriendly common-sense. Discussing the matter with Croker long afterwards he said: "Was he disinclined de se frotter against Moore? Did he wish that Soult should try what stuff our people were made of before he risked his own great reputation against us? Or did he despair of driving us out of Corunna? And was the bad news from Vienna (he generally kept bad news a profound secret) now invented or promulgated to excuse his evident reluctance to follow

us up? I cannot account for his not having subtracted from the three weeks he spent in Spain after his return from Astorga, and the three months that, I think, he spent in Paris, half-a-dozen days for so great an object as a victory over the English army, won by himself in person. My own notion is that he was not sure of the victory."

Lanfrey, it is to be noted, agrees in substance with Wellington, that the reason assigned by Napoleon for the abandonment of the pursuit at Astorga was not the real one. The scene of the sudden arrival and reading of urgent despatches was a mere trick. Nothing had happened either in Paris or Vienna to change Napoleon's plans. "His real motive in halting," says Lanfrey, "was that he no longer perceived any way of hindering the embarkation of the English. The decisive blow which he had announced with so much clamour had failed, and he did not care to go forty or fifty leagues farther, over terrible roads, merely to witness their escape, and to bring back, as the only trophy of so toilsome an expedition, 3000 or 4000 stragglers, vanquished by hardship rather than by the sword. He left this unenviable kind of success to Marshals Soult and Ney, and returned himself to Valladolid.”

There is no doubt that Napoleon was personally tired of the struggle in Spain. It did not suit his genius. The problem was not merely how to overthrow armies, but how to pacify a nation.

This

needed gentleness, tact, unfailing equity, unhurrying patience, and, above all, time. Napoleon loved to dazzle, to strike sudden blows, to crush his enemies as with a mere volition. He could "persuade" only from the cannon's mouth. He was wearied with the slow uncertainties of the Spanish war—a war in which victory seemed to yield no result, and in which he had to contend with a stubborn, smouldering insurrection which knew neither how to resist nor how to yield.

In such a war Napoleon could reap no shining laurels. He flew to a more dramatic field of action, and declared he would "conquer Spain on the Continent." But he carried from Spain a new resentment against the English. He had pledged himself in the eyes of Europe to "plant his eagles on the towers of Lisbon;" and this feat he had certainly not performed. He who had struck down Prussia in a campaign of eight days, after spending three months in Spain, contending with a nation in a sense without armies or generals, had to leave it still unsubdued. And the explanation of it all was found in "those miserable English!" Moore's march to Sahagun had spoiled Napoleon's march on Lisbon.

The temper in which Napoleon left Spain found expression in many ways. He charged Joseph to shoot, hang, or despatch to the galleys, a sufficient number of the population of Madrid to strike a whole

some terror into the city. "The rabble,” he explained to his milder-tempered brother, "like and respect only those whom they fear." Joseph, too, was directed to collect from Spanish monasteries and art galleries fifty masterpieces of the Spanish school and send them to Paris. Then, having executed this characteristic bit of theft, and having despatched his Guard and the bulk of his veterans through the Pyrenees, Napoleon turned his disgusted back on Spain. Joseph was left in nominal command of the French forces in the Peninsula, which still numbered 270,000 men.

In a sense Joseph's position was stronger than before. He was again in Madrid, and nearly 30,000 heads of families in that city had voluntarily taken the oath of allegiance to him. But Joseph's court, like the French armies, had to subsist on the country it had invaded. Little French coin was allowed to trickle through the Pyrenees to his help, and the unhappy Joseph could not, like a French general, live by open plunder. "I have not a penny to give any one," he wrote pathetically to his brother; "I see my guards still wearing the same coats I gave them four years ago." A king of Spain who was guilty, not only of the offence of not being a Spaniard, but of the crime of empty pockets, could hardly expect to be comfortable in Madrid.

The French marshals in Spain, too, were consumed by jealousy of each other. Napoleon's keen