deal decisively with the Spanish. Instead he opted to take out the British.
Hearing that Sir John Moore had tried to fall on his isolated right flank
under Soult at Sahagun, he marched north in person, aiming to get
behind Moore and cut off his retreat to Lisbon; while Soult 'pinned'
Moore the Emperor would execute a classic sur les derrieres to annihilate
him. But first he had to traverse the Sierra de Guadarrama in winter.
This turned out to be an even more terrible exploit than the passage of
the Alps during the r8oo Marengo campaign.
On 22 December the Grande Armee began the ascent of the Sierra amid
motionless torrents of snow and silent cataracts of ice. A circumspect man
would have drawn back, but Napoleon urged his veterans on, defying
them to achieve the impossible. What on the Emperor's battle plans was a
mere 'traverse' was in reality a white hell, a nightmare of slithering and
crashing over precipices. On this march the Army came closer to mutiny
than ever before or afterwards. The poilus called out for someone to have
the guts to shoot the Emperor so they could all go home. Napoleon
overheard the remark but, so fragile was morale in the ranks, he dared not
punish the culprits and pretended he had heard nothing.
Finally the nightmare ended and the Army was through the pass. But
the two extra days braving crevasses and avalanches had made all the
difference: Moore had made good his escape and won the race to Astorga,
which was where the Emperor had planned to encircle him. Since a
completely satisfactory outcome was no longer feasible, Napoleon handed
over the pursuit to Soult and Ney but not before he had reduced the size
of the pursuing force and sent the balance back to help the hard-pressed
Joseph in Madrid. Moore decided to evacuate his army at Corunna, using
the Royal Navy, but the two marshals caught up with him before the
evacuation was complete. Moore was fo rced to turn and deal with his
pursuers. In a hard-fought engagement on r6 January r8o9 he repulsed
Soult and Ney, inflicting r,soo casualties for the loss of 8oo; he himself
was killed by a cannonball but the rest of the British army got off safely
on to the waiting transports.
On 6 January r8o9 Napoleon left Astorga for Valladolid, where he
remained for eleven days, completing the military and administrative
arrangements for the handover of power in Spain to Joseph and his
marshals. It was in Valladolid that he made the fateful error of allowing
the bickering marshals to become, in effect, warlords with semi
autonomous commands, only nominally under Joseph's suzerainty. This
he did to palliate the growing unpopularity of the Peninsular War and to
give his marshals bones to gnaw on, but the long-term effect was to
marcin
(Marcin)
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