army: his adversaries have an army, and a people wholly or almost wholly
in arms, and making means of resistance out of every thing, each
individual of whom conspires against the common enemy; even the
non-combatants have an interest in his ruin and accelerate it by every
means in their power. He holds scarcely any ground but that upon which
he encamps; outside the limits of his camp every thing is hostile and
multiplies a thousandfold the difficulties he meets at every step.

These obstacles become almost insurmountable when the country is
difficult. Each armed inhabitant knows the smallest paths and their
connections; he finds everywhere a relative or friend who aids him; the
commanders also know the country, and, learning immediately the
slightest movement on the part of the invader, can adopt the best
measures to defeat his projects; while the latter, without information
of their movements, and not in a condition to send out detachments to
gain it, having no resource but in his bayonets, and certain safety only
in the concentration of his columns, is like a blind man: his
combinations are failures; and when, after the most carefully-concerted
movements and the most rapid and fatiguing marches, he thinks he is
about to accomplish his aim and deal a terrible blow, he finds no signs
of the enemy but his camp-fires: so that while, like Don Quixote, he is
attacking windmills, his adversary is on his line of communications,
destroys the detachments left to guard it, surprises his convoys, his
depots, and carries on a war so disastrous for the invader that he must
inevitably yield after a time.

In Spain I was a witness of two terrible examples of this kind. When
Ney's corps replaced Soult's at Corunna, I had camped the companies of
the artillery-train between Betanzos and Corunna, in the midst of four
brigades distant from the camp from two to three leagues, and no Spanish