en
made. He said he believed there had been some conversation on the
subject, and that Marmont had said he was wounded before this
movement took place; he said he did not know if this was true,
but it might be, as there had been continual fighting for some
time previous. I asked him why Bonaparte had not himself come to
Spain to attack him; and if he had with a great force, whether he
would have driven him out. He replied that he thought Napoleon
had satisfied himself that it would be a work of great
difficulty, and what was more, of great length, and he had no
mind to embark in it; and that the French certainly would not
have driven him out: he should have taken up some position, and
have been enabled to baffle the Emperor himself just as he had
done his marshals. He thinks that Napoleon's military system
compelled him to employ his armies in war, when they invariably
lived upon the resources of the countries they occupied, and that
France could not have maintained them, as she must have done if
he had made peace: peace, therefore, would have brought about
(through the army itself) his downfall. He traces the whole
military system of France from its first organisation during the
Reign of Terror, in a letter in the tenth volume of the
Despatches. I asked him how he reconciled what he had said of the
extraordinary discipline of the French army with their unsparing
and habitual plunder of the country, and he said that though they
plundered in the most remorseless way, there was order and
discipline in their plundering, and while they took from the
inhabitants everything they could lay their hands upon, it was
done in the way of requisition, and that they plundered for the
army and not for themselves individually, but they were reduced
to great shifts for food. At the battle of Fuentes d'Onor he saw
the French soldiers carry off horses that were killed to be
cooked and eaten in another part of the field. 'I saw
particularly with my own eyes one horse put upon a cart drawn by
two bullocks (they could not afford to kill the bullocks), and
drawn off; and I desired a man to watch where the cart went, and
it was taken to another French division for the horse to be
eaten. Now we never were reduced to eat horseflesh.' I remarked
that he alluded in one of his letters to his having been once
very nearly taken, and he said it was just before the battle of
Talavera in consequence of some troops giving way. He was on a
ruined tower