Hi,
In the main, if not totally exclusively - according to the literature available - these provisional regiments were comprised of recently recruited conscripts, commanded by officer cadres from regiments already in theatre. Moreover, units deployed in Spain and Portugal suffered from continuous and high rate of attrition – given the nature of the warfare in which they were employed and the length of their lines of communication. It would appear to me that to prevent their being forwarded to their parent “regiments”, to make up these losses, and to “brigade” them together with similarly poorly experienced troops in ad hic formations would be highly deleterious – to use a phrase deployed very skilfully by Andrew Bamford in his recent book on the British regimental system – to the “internal economy” of the regimental system. To take the example of the 34e, a battalion almost 1,000 strong, surely rather than being shut up in Ciudad Rodrigo they should have been hurried forward to replenish losses in regiments at the front, and the garrison made up more than adequately by convalescents and, after some time in recuperation, wounded and sick soldiers. This system of creating totally new regiments would appear to me to be to not only very expensive and time consuming but also highly counterproductive and damaging to morale and esprit de corps. A
"34e Régiment, formé le 9 mars 1811des 2e, 4e, 5e et 7e bataillons auxiliaires de l'armée d'Espagne. "