7 
Joseph stood between him and the 20,000 Spaniards, who were coming up from 
Ciudad Real. 
On both sides communications between the separated bodies were established, 
and within two days orders and informations could be sent from Joseph to Soult, 
and from Wellesley to Venegas, and vice versd. 
King Joseph, who was in supreme command, might now call the army of Soult 
from Salamanca to Madrid, postpone any decisive engagement until it arrived, 
and then deliver a great battle with 100,000 men against 80,000. This plan was 
the simplest, and was the one which Napoleon afterwards said would have been 
the most judicious. According to another scheme Soult might march through 
Plasencia or Almaraz, and might take the Englishmen in rear. In that case the 
advantage of interior lines would be left to the English, and in view of this King 
Joseph’s force must play a waiting game, until Soult had gained the rear of the 
enemy, and his presence there had made a tactical impression. Meanwhile 
Venegas would have to be let pass on and invest Madrid. 
Joseph himself favoured this second plan, probably because Soult also re- 
commended it, and it was the one adopted. He sent General Foy to Salamanca 
on the 22nd of July, with orders for Soult to move on Plasencia. Foy reached 
Soult’s head-quarters on the 24th, and on the 26th again returned to the King 
with a communication from the Marshal in which the following passage occurs : 
‘“* My greatest desire is that your Majesty will not commit yourself to a decisive 
battle until you are quite certain that I have united all my force round Plasencia. 
We shall obtain the most important results if your Majesty refrains from fighting 
until the moment when the news of my march will compel the enemy to retreat. 
He must do this, or he will be lost.” 
King Joseph however paid no attention to these arguments, and, carried away 
by an inopportune lust for battle, moved forward, and on the 28th attacked 
Wellesley, who had been waiting motionless at Talavera for the last six days. 
He was repulsed with heavy loss. 
Now the moment had come when the Anglo-Spanish might reap the fruits of 
its strategical mancuvre and tactical victory. The army of the King must be 
pursued from two directions by Wellesley and Venegas, seized between them, and 
annihilated. Soult’s march would then have lost its object. 
But in place of anything of this sort we find Wellesley again remaining inactive 
for five days at Talavera, and we see the astonishing spectacle of two armies, 
which had been locked together in a decisive struggle on the 28th of July, com- 
pletely separated on the 3rd of August. On that day Wellesley marched to 
Oropeso in order to show a front towards Soult, and left the Spaniards after him 
behind the Alberche. The King left a corps on the Alberche, and moved with 
his main body on Toledo to deal with Venegas. The decisive point which had 
lain in the middle, where their stroke had not been turned to full account, had 
now, by the inefficiency of the Anglo-Spanish generalship, been shifted to the 
flanks, and that too under circumstances very disadvantageous to them, for Soult’s 
advance began at this time to make its full strategical value felt. 
The Marshal had moved with his 50,000 men through Plasencia to the Tagus, 
and his advanced-guard was at Naval-Moral on the 4th of August, within only a 
day’s march of the English. 
Wellesley now recognized the fact that the campaign was lost to him, for it 
was too bold a measure to fight a great battle North of the Tagus with an inverted 
front. On the 4th of August therefore he moved across the southern bank, and 
then began to fall back slowly by Truxillo and Badajoz to Portugal. His Spanish 
allies were left to their fate, which speedily overtook them in the battles of 
Almonacid and Ocafia. 
The other advance of Wellington’s, which I wish to place in comparison with 
