Script for War Room 24: The Retreat to Corunna (Patreon)

Boy, that felt like a slog. I've had to condense this down a fair bit to boot. And having just recorded it I'm sure I need to get myself a new microphone...

Anyway:

*Edit: Oh hey, looks like Patreon is supporting imported formatting now and I don't have to go through and do all the headings myself! Awesome!

War Room XXIV: The Retreat to Corunna

Welcome back to the slightly delayed War Room, where we’re going to round out our look at the first British intervention in the Peninsular War by tackling Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Moore’s Retreat to Corunna.

Napoleon Invades

The situation as we left it saw Moore taking command of the British army in Lisbon, the Spanish ranging their armies against the troops of the French initial coup d’main now arrayed in North West Spain across the River Ebro and the Emperor himself coming up behind them with overwhelming force to take charge and complete the conquest of Iberia.

Overwhelming force is not an overstatement. Napoleon cannot afford to take any chances, according to Oman:

“Any expedition in which he himself took part must, for the sake of his prestige, be conducted from beginning to end in a series of spectacular triumphs. It was better to use a larger army than absolutely necessary, in order to make his blows sufficiently heavy, and to get the Spanish business over as rapidly as possible.”

So while Napoleon had nothing but contempt for the Spanish in his path- demonstrated aptly enough already by the sheer audacity of his first attempt to seize the country- he had to be sure of success.

Arrayed against himself were three Spanish armies. General Blake’s Army of the Left was stationed in Biscay with perhaps 44,000 men in total. The Army of the Centre, roughly 50,000 strong, occupied a line from Miranda to Tudela under General Castanos. The Army of the Right, commanded by Palafox, was made up of another 33,000 men, but was stretched from Saragossa all the way across to Catalonia in the east where it was supporting 20,000 troops under General Vives.

All in all the Spanish forces covering the North-East amounted to 127,000 men, but they were not only spread thin across a long front, those numbers include troops far to the rear, coming up to reinforce from deeper in Spain. In addition, while some of the constituent units were elements of the Spanish army, many more were hastily assembled, poorly trained and badly equipped formations thrown together in the popular uprising that had ousted the French a few months earlier.

Across the River Ebro from them were roughly 65,000 French at least nominally under command of Marshal Jourdan and Joseph Bonaparte, the erstwhile King of Spain. These were more concentrated than the Spanish, generally occupying a line from Bilbao to Sanguesa.

This was the general situation in mid-October 1808. The Spanish Central Junta failed to appoint an overall commander, leaving the various generals facing the French in a position where none of them could agree to or coordinate any significant offensive action. The French remained in position, under orders from Napoleon to avoid provoking their opponents into changing their positions.

The Emperor, meanwhile, was approaching Bayonne with a stream of reinforcements. By the start of the campaign in November, the French Army of Spain in total could field 245,000 men, many of whom where veterans of the Grand Armee who had marched across from the Rhine.

Napoleon had identified a weak point in the Spanish line on the Ebro- the junction between the Armies of the Right and Centre. Behind this was Burgos and the road to Madrid.

Ordering Lefebrve’s 4th Corps to fix Blake on the right and Moncey’s 5th Corps to fix Castanos on the left, Napoleon threw his 2nd Corps across the Ebro at Miranda to punch directly for Burgos.

In command of 2nd Corps’s 24,000 men, Marshal Soult found 10,000 Spanish troops temporarily under the woefully inadequate command of the young Conde de Belvedere lined up to fight outside the village of Gamonal on November the 10th. Soult routed them in a single attack and occupied Burgos, before the Emperor ordered him and Ney’s 6th Corps to wheel right and left respectively to encircle the Armies of the Right and Centre.

On the same day though, Victor’s Corps defeated Blake at the Battle of Espinosa, forcing the Spanish to retreat. Blake’s army had started the battle with 25,000 men but this had been reduced to 12,000 by the time the retreating army arrived at Reynosa. With Victor and Lefebvre’s Corps bearing down on him from the north, Blake paused to let more of his men straggle in only to find Soult appear from the South on the 13th.

Judging his position impossible, Blake ordered his army to escape the jaws of the French trap by scattering into the mountains. This allowed them to get away, but they had abandoned all of their remaining supplies and guns and suffered greatly as they traversed the snow covered valleys and peaks to safety.

On the French left, meanwhile, Marshal Lannes replaced Moncey as commander of 3rd Corps and caught the Army of Centre and elements of the Army of the Right at a disadvantage at Tudela on the 23rd. Castanos tried to hold a line 16km long, but with 48,500 men dispersed on a front of that distance against 34,000 French able to concentrate at any point, the result was a disaster. The Army of the Centre suffered a defeat in detail, collapsing and fleeing to the south, while Palafox’s Army of the Right units fell back towards Saragossa.

Ney should have been in position to block their retreat and deal a final blow, but as Napoleon had only unleashed him from Burgos on the 18th he was too far out of position to complete the encirclement.

The Emperor had intended to catch and destroy both the Army of the Right and the Army of the Centre, but although they had suffered crushing defeats, they were by no means annihilated. In time, the survivors would reassemble and reconstituted into new formations.

Having paused at Aranda though, Napoleon received word of Lanne’s victory at Tudela and, confident that his flanks were now secure even if he was disappointed the Spanish had not been completely destroyed, he pressed on towards Madrid with 130,000 men on the 28th.

The Spanish Central Junta soon found itself scrambling to defend the capital. The obvious means of doing so was to hold the passes of the Sierra de Guadarrama north of the city and the Spanish managed to scrape together 21,000 men for the purpose.

There were more forces the Spanish could call upon- it was possible to bring in the remnants of Castanos’ army and as we’ll see in a bit, Sir John Moore’s British army had advanced from Lisbon- but the Central Junta really didn’t comprehend the scale of the French invasion and believed that a reconnaissance in force was descending on them… not the Emperor himself.

As it was then, the 21,000 men available were dispersed among the line of the Sierra de Guadarrama and when the Emperor struck at the pass of Somosierra on the 30th of November, he only found 8500 Spaniards under General San Juan waiting for him.

Even so, the terrain helped balance out the French advantage in numbers. With some proper field fortifications the pass could have proven a tough nut to crack, but these were lacking. The Spanish were deployed with infantry skirmishing on the hillsides to either side of the main road, where 16 guns had been set up to dominate the approach.

Napoleon committed 10,000 men: primarily Ruffin’s division, which advanced on the hillsides and slowly forced the Spanish infantry back. These were on the point of unhinging the entire position by outflanking the guns and rendering the battery untenable when the Emperor impatiently ordered his personal escort of Polish Light Horse to charge up the road.

The predictable duly took place: the Poles were shredded by canister fire and half of them killed without getting any closer than 30 yards. By the time Napoleon threw in the rest of the Polish regiment and the chasseuers a cheval of the Guard, the Spanish were more closely engaged with the French infantry and a second cavalry charge broke them, scattering San Juan’s force and opening the road to Madrid.

The advance guard of Napoleon’s army reached the city on December the 1st. Madrid would have been indefensible even had there been regular troops available, the hastily formed Junta of Defence was intimidated into surrender by the 4th.

From here, Napoleon was poised to strike south west into Estramadura and thence towards Lisbon in order to chase out the British and avenge the blow to Imperial prestige struck by Junot’s defeat there. In preparation for this, most of the French army was concentrated around Madrid. Victor’s 1st Corps was to screen the capital against whatever remained of the Army of the Centre, now pulling itself together at Cuenca, Lefebvre’s 4th Corps had already pushed its advanced cavalry out towards Plascenia, only 150km from the border fortress of Badajoz, while Napoleon kept Ney’s 6th Corps in hand, along with the Imperial Guard and the cavalry reserve. 3rd and 5th Corps, under Lannes and Mortier respectively had invested Saragossa and begun the second siege of that city- which would not go as well as for Spanish as the first- while Marshal Soult was to the north with the 2nd Corps with orders to keep moving west and descend into Leon, keeping up the pressure on the shattered Army of the Left.

There was not much to stop the French. Fighting continued in Catalonia, which was very much its own separate theatre, but the remnants of the Spanish armies arrayed against the French before Napoleon’s arrival were scattered, out of position and in no state to resist, while hurriedly scraped together forces deeper inside Spain were hardly likely to present much more than speed-bumps, at least in conventional battle.

The British Army Leaves Portugal

That essentially left the British under Moore, with no more than 25000 men, as the only meaningful field force able to oppose the Emperor. Napoleon was aware that the British had advanced into Spain with an eye to assisting their allies, but according to Oman he:

“… could draw no other deduction from the facts at his disposal than that the whole of them would promptly retreat to Portugal, when the passage of the Somosierra and fall of Madrid became known to their commander-in-chief. Lisbon, he thought, must be their base of operations, and on it they must retire…”

Moore had certainly not been having a good time. Assuming command of the British army in Portugal back on October the 6th, he rapidly discovered that his predecessor Dalrymple had laid none of the groundwork for moving on into Spain. On the 9th he wrote back to London:

“When I shall cross the frontier of Portugal it is impossible for me at this instant to say: it depends on a knowledge of the country which I am still without, and on commissariat arrangements as yet unmade.”

Almost inconceivably, Moore could find no one who could provide detailed information about the roads crossing the frontier. Some degree of excuse could be made for the British, who had had time and effort soaked up by the need to convey Junot’s defeated army out of the country as per the Convention of Cintra, but it appears none of the Portuguese or Spanish consulted could even lay out which routes were suitable for artillery.

In a similar vein, the British ability to supply its own troops on the move was greatly curtailed. The army had only the barest organic transport courtesy of the fledgling Royal Wagon Train, hired Portuguese transport was incredibly reluctant to leave the country and although Moore was able to send commissariat officers ahead of his columns to stockpile supplies along their routes, these men were not only inexperienced but unable to speak Portuguese.

At the same time, coordination with the Spanish was hampered by the lack of a Supreme Commander. Eventually, given that more reinforcements were expected by sea, Moore was to march on Burgos, from which point the British army would be slotted into the defensive line on the Ebro.

First though, he had to get his army across the mountainous Hispano-Portuguese frontier. This was the same terrain that had near crippled Junot’s army in the initial French invasion- with little information at his disposal and concern over his ability to supply his men, Moore elected to advance by three routes, recombine at Salamanca and then march east to join the Spanish armies.

Splitting his force like this reduced the logistical demand for each column and allowed him to move faster across the board, but Moore’s understanding of the state of the roads forced him to send all of his cavalry and artillery by the longest, most southerly route.

As it transpired, all of the routes chosen were suitable for artillery: something that Oman points out should have been obvious given that the French had had no trouble using some of them while they had occupied the country and that heavy artillery mounted on the border fortress of Almeida had to have gotten there somehow. He concludes:

“… it was not easily pardonable in any competent general that he should accept as possible the statement that there was no road for artillery connecting the capital of Portugal and the main stronghold of its norther-eastern frontier. Moore did so, and in a fortnight regretted his credulity.”

Nevertheless, the British Army was at least on the move. The lead elements of the two northern columns reached Salamanca on November the 13th, by the 23rd Moore was only waiting for the cavalry and artillery in the southern column, having agonisingly discovered for himself that the northern roads were entirely suitable for them.

By this time Napoleon had begun his campaign and already smashed the Army of the Left… it wouldn’t be until December the 4th that the southern column finally arrived, by which time Madrid had fallen.

Worse, this wasn’t the only British force to face significant delays. Another division had been despatched from England under General Baird, with the intention of rendezvousing with the main body on the way to Burgos. The only real suitable port was that of Corunna, but when the transports arrived on October 13th, the Spanish refused to let him land. This was apparently because the Galician Junta wanted the British to come ashore further east, closer to the line on the Ebro, and it wasn’t until a ruling from the Central Junta in Madrid came through almost two weeks later that Baird was allowed to disembark.

The infantry was only ashore in its entirety by the 4th of November, at which point they encountered the same difficulties of supply that Moore had, compounded by the reluctance of the poverty-stricken Galician peasants to accept British money.

It wasn’t until the 22nd of November that Baird had gotten through the mountains and reached Astorga, by which point the entire strategic situation had changed.

Moore’s Decision

All of this friction effectively kept the British army out of the fight until after Napoleon had seized Madrid.

But neither side had good information about the other. Napoleon didn’t know exactly where the British were, but he had already written them off as a threat. And perhaps unsurprisingly, on hearing the news of Castanos’ defeat at Tudela and the shattering of the Spanish armies on the 28th of November Moore issued orders to retreat.

At that point, dismayed and irritated by the difficulty in getting his own force forward and having to deal with the awkwardness and incompetence of the Spanish, such a decision is entirely understandable. Moore was under orders to assist the Spanish, but he was also under orders to take no unnecessary risks. He was not in command of a British army… he was in command of the British army. And it was reasonable to assume that the French, having collapsed the Spanish line on the Ebro, were going to continue southwest from Burgos onto the plains towards Salamanca.

But two events conspired to change Moore’s mind.

First, he received word from the Army of the Left. General Blake had been replaced by General La Romana, who was collecting the battered remnants of the army at the city of Leon. The Army of the Left actually relatively few casualties. Rather than being destroyed in Napoleon’s envelopment, the Spanish force had dispersed into the mountains and were no steadily returning to the colours.

La Romana already had over 15,000 men at his disposal with more stragglers coming in all the time, and suggested the Army of the Left and the British army concentrate to act in concert.

The combined manpower of the British Army and the Army of the Left would constitute a much greater threat to the French than they would acting alone, plus a movement to the north would allow Moore to pick up Baird’s division at Astorga.

Second, and perhaps more decisively, Moore received several captured French dispatches. Napoleon and his Marshals had yet to adapt away from the conventional wisdom that lightly escorted messengers and aides could traverse Spain freely: the countryside was infested with armed peasantry and guerrillas ready to prey on any small groups of Frenchmen that came by.

These dispatches allowed Moore to illuminate the fog of war to the east: not only were Soult’s orders revealed, but one of the captured documents was a sketch map outlining French dispositions in their entirety.

The British Army was not, in fact, in the path of the French steamroller, but off to its flank as it concentrated at Madrid to push south-west. Soult’s 2nd Corps was heading into Leon, isolated and unsupported, and the French line of communications from Madrid to Burgos to Bayonne were exposed.

Moore cancelled his orders to retreat and seized his opportunity.

Meanwhile, in Madrid

Napoleon, meanwhile, had no solid confirmation of where the British army was and it took him a long time to overcome his assumption that Moore was in full flight. The indicators that Moore was instead moving north were there: on the 12th a lone French cavalryman returned to Franceschi’s cavalry division at Valladolid after the rest of his patrol was captured by British cavalry at Rueda.

More cavalry contacts followed: Franceschi’s division was steadily driven in until he was forced to evacuate the city on December the 18th. Two days before, Soult had learnt that Moore was moving. But whether there were breakdowns in the Imperial intelligence structure, the French struggled to get their reports in thanks to guerrilla activity and/or Napoleon simply refused to connect the dots, it wasn’t until the 21st that he really realised what was going on. But to quote Oman again:

“… when he did at last realise the situation, he acted with a sudden and spasmodic energy which was never surpassed in any of his earlier campaigns. He hurled onto Moore’s track not only the central reserve at Madrid, but troops gathered in from all directions, till he had set at least 80,000 men on the march, to encompass the British corps which has so hardily thrown itself upon his communications.”

At a stroke, and by manoeuvre rather than combat, Moore had totally dislocated Napoleon’s plans to complete the conquest of the Peninsular. He was, as of yet, unaware of that though.

On the morning of the 21st of December, one of Soult’s screening cavalry brigades at Sahagun found itself attacked out of nowhere by British cavalry. The 10th and 15th Hussars under General Paget savaged the French 8th Dragoons and 1st Provisional Chassuers, taking half of them prisoner and driving the rest of them back onto 2nd Corps.

The survivors fell back to Soult, who rapidly began to concentrate his dispersed corps and call up reinforcements from Burgos.

Moore paused in Sahagun for two days to allow his entire column to come up, with the intention of marching out on the night of the 23rd and catching Soult at Carrion on the morning of the 24th before he could assemble his entire corps.

But before he could set out, word arrived that large columns of French troops were crossing the Sierra de Guadarrama and heading north-west. Moore cancelled his orders to attack and began to fall back to the north towards Astorga. Here he would be able to rendezvous with La Romana and defend the mountain passes that separated Leon from Galicia.

The Retreat

Napoleon had begun working on the principle that the British were at Valladolid, and although he was delayed by heavy snow in defiles of the Sierra de Guadarrama, he was confident that he could catch them. It soon became apparent from communication with Soult that Moore was in fact much further away.

For his part, Moore managed to contain the 2nd Corps with his cavalry screen for a couple of days, allowing his infantry and guns to get a head start. The British cavalry, supported by the Light Division, fought a very successful rearguard action, blowing the bridge over the Esla at Castro Gonzalo in the face of the French cavalry.

On the 30th of December, Moore met La Romana at Astorga. The march had been hard: in addition to heavy rain and muddy roads there was little supply to be had in the region and the British troops could not understand why they were running away from the French, who they had beaten so easily in Portugal back in August.

Moore still had 25,000 men at his disposal, having taken negligible casualties thus far… La Romana’s army was in a much worse state. Despite having re-assembled 22,000 men of the Army of the Left, the Spanish general only arrived at Astorga with 10,000. They had suffered much more harshly from the weather en route, were stricken with typhus and La Romana’s rearguard holding the bridge at Mansilla had been scattered by Soult.

There were, however, substantial depots at Astorga: supplies of shoes, clothing and blankets, ammunition and food that had come up from Corunna after Baird. The town itself was not particularly defensible but the mountains beyond certainly were and 35,000 British and Spanish troops entrenched in the passes could have presented a serious challenge even for the Emperor.

Moore, however, resolved to continue on. He was concerned about the attrition rate of his transportation- both from the elements and desertion of hired civilians- that his own army would likewise wither away encamped in the mountains during January and that the French possessed such numbers that they could easily fix him to his front and outflank his position elsewhere along the range. How much of this is realistic is hard to judge- Moore had lapsed back into the dismay he felt prior to setting out from Salamanca. Although he had evidently successfully lured Napoleon into north-eastern Spain, there was no sign that the Spanish were taking advantage of the opportunity he had created.

They did in fact made an effort to move on Madrid, but this ultimately panned out in defeat at Ucles on January 13th the next year.

So the British army moved on. By the time French infantry arrived at Astorga on the first of January, Moore already had a 3 day headstart.

The cost of leaving Astorga was high though. There simply wasn’t enough transport to evacuate all the supplies accumulated in the town, so that which couldn’t be carried or issued to re-equip La Romana’s men had to be denied to the French. This was not handled well- for instance, in the chaos some British regiments were issued new shoes, while others that were almost barefoot had to watch as thousands of pairs were destroyed instead of distributed. Difficulties were exacerbated by a breakdown in discipline.

Oman relates how:

“The news that they were to retreat once more without fighting had exasperated the men to the last degree. Thousands of them got loose in the streets, breaking into houses, maltreating the inhabitants, and pillaging the stores, which were to be abandoned, for their private profit. The rum was naturally a great attraction, and many stragglers were left behind dead drunk, to be beaten out of the place by the cavalry when they left it on the night of the 31st.

La Romana had to make a formal complaint to Moore of the misbehaviour of his troops, who even tried to steal his artillery mules and insulted his officers. There can be no doubt that if the rank and file had been kept in hand many valuable stores could have been distributed instead of destroyed, and the straggling which was to prove so fatal might have been nipped in the bud.

But the officers were as discontented as the men, and in many regiments seem to have made little or no effort to keep things together. Already several battalions were beginning to march with an advanced guard of marauders and a rearguard of limping stragglers, the sure signs of impending trouble.”

But, the British and Spanish were away and Napoleon was unable to catch them at Astorga as he had hoped. Judging that it was now impossible to catch Moore and inflict a decisive defeat, the Emperor disassociated himself and his personal prestige from the pursuit.

Leaving 47,000 men to continue the chase- primarily Soult’s 2nd and Ney’s 6th Corps- Napoleon diverted his attention to the Imperial paperwork, redistributing forces around French occupied Spain and issuing detailed orders for the future completion of his Iberian conquests. At the same time, news arrived of stirrings in the east from the Austrians and rumours of political manoeuvrings back in Paris. The Emperor left Spain on the 17th of January to deal with them, abandoning the theatre that would eventually become the great ulcer of Imperial France.

This hardly meant that Moore was away scot free. La Romana separated from the British, taking a harder path over the mountains to escape the French, but the retreat from Astorga to Corunna was atrocious. With the January weather closing in and conditions worsening, the discipline of some battalions frayed to breaking point. The scenes of Astorga were repeated at Villafranca where another depot had been accumulated. Beyond that point the retreat descended further into all the suffering of forced marching through desolate, mountainous country in the winter.

Oman quotes one eyewitness who relates that:

“All that had hitherto been suffered by our troops was but a prelude to this time of horrors… It had still been attempted to carry forward our sick and wounded: here (on Monte Cebrero) the beasts which dragged them failed, and they were left in their wagons to perish in the snow. As we looked round on gaining the highest point of these slippery precipices, and observed the rear of the army winding along the narrow road, we could see the whole track marked out by our own wretched people, who lay expiring from fatigue and the severity of the cold…

That no degree of horror might be wanting, this unfortunate army was accompanied by many women and children, of whom some were frozen to death on the abandoned baggage-wagons…”

On the 6th, the British army reached the city of Lugo. This was a strong position with another depot and Moore took the opportunity to resupply, re-impose a degree of discipline and rest for a few days. Soult arrived on the 7th, having been kept at bay multiple times in actions by the British rearguard.

Moore offered battle, but the Marshal declined until more of his own force had come up and Ney had arrived to reinforce him. This had still not come to pass by the 9th, at which point the British torched what supplies were left and continued their way onwards to Corunna.

Corunna

The first elements of Moore’s army arrived at the port on the night of the 11th. But the British transports needed to evacuate them were not there.

The ships had run into bad weather sailing round from Portugal and were not expected until the 14th, at which point it could still take considerable time to embark. As such, the rearguard was called upon yet again to delay the French. They blew the bridge at El Burgo, forcing Soult to first find an alternate route and then to rebuild it.

It wasn’t until the 15th that Soult had gotten across in force. By then he faced Moore’s army arrayed on the hills south of Corunna, resupplied as much as possible with the stores stockpiled in the city, their sick and wounded already being loaded onto ships in the harbour.

The British had 15,000 men in the field, spoiling for a fight with the enemy they had spent the last weeks running away from, against which Soult- with Ney still not having caught up- being able to mass 20,000.

By midday on the 16th it was clear that British would likely be able to escape. There was little daylight left, the evacuation of the whole army was scheduled to be completed overnight and the wind was such that the transports would be able to leave harbour.

Moore was, however, dismayed by the lack of a battle. To quote Lipscombe in the Peninsular War Atlas:

“… he had hoped for an opportunity to fight. Psychologically it was important, as the men both craved and needed the opportunity for action, and Moore considered it important to redress some of the unfortunate decisions and subsequent depravations of recent weeks- and, perhaps most significantly, to silence his critics.”

He got his opportunity: Soult launched his attack at about 1345, seeking to fix the British in their positions on the Monte Mero in front of Corunna while he turned their flank on his left.

The result was hard fighting on the slopes and in the villages across the British line- French columns advancing under supporting fire from artillery on the heights across the valley. One lucky cannon ball fatally struck Sir John Moore in the shoulder, but he would survive long enough to see his army prevail.

Ultimately, Soult’s divisions were unable to force their way forward and his attempt to outflank the line was countered by the British reserve. The fighting faded away as darkness fell, the British disengaged overnight and began the embarkation. This was almost complete at dawn, at which point Soult advanced and was able to take some of the evacuating transport under artillery fire, but the British army was able to make good its escape.

Overall, both sides suffered about a thousand casualties in the fighting- considerably less than they had suffered from the elements in the chase from Astorga.

Conclusion

In a sense, this forms one of the most interesting components of the entire campaign. Although there were skirmishes and minor battles between the British, Spanish and French along Moore’s route from Salamanca to Corunna, the decisive elements were undoubtedly not combat related.

Moore managed to totally upset Napoleon’s plans to complete the conquest of Spain and Portugal by simply marching on his flank and evading pursuit, drawing the Emperor and significant French forces out of position into a bleak and inhospitable corner of the country. As a result, Napoleon would not be able to enact his plans in person: after he returned to France he failed to appoint an overall French commander and attempted to micromanage operations from afar, restricting his marshals to almost independent operations dictated by orders that were both out of date and out of touch.

At the same time though, we need to temper this strategically effective stroke against the less glamorous realities of campaigning. The staff-work of the British army, both that which Moore inherited on his arrival and that completed under his command was at times severely lacking.

The initial movement across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier into Spain was riddled with ignorance and difficulties that seem hard to comprehend. Not knowing or being unable to confirm which roads were suitable for the movement of the army is perhaps less inexcusable than it might appear given the time and resources of the age, but is still somewhat ridiculous.

In the end, the delay imposed by the unnecessarily circuitous route of the British cavalry and artillery, hand-in-hand with the delay faced by Baird’s reinforcements arriving at Corunna, conspired to put Moore in the right place at the right time… but that is undoubtedly a saving grace rather than some kind of conscious genius.

In a similar vein, poor staff-work, mismanagement and the inability of many units to maintain discipline all contributed to the horror of the retreat from Astorga. Improvements in these areas- such as those demonstrated by some of the higher quality British units like the Guards and the Light Division- could have gone a long way to offsetting the natural difficulties and friction imposed by the time of year, weather and terrain.

The reality is that, as usual, the British Army was learning to fight all over again and it would suffer until it increased in experience. And, also as usual, it was learning the hard way.

But, that’s it for the Peninsular War for now. We’ve covered the first Hispano-French invasion of Portugal, the first French invasion of Spain, the first British Intervention in Portugal, the arrival of Napoleon with the second French invasion and finally the Retreat to Corunna. That’s a lot of ground in one theatre: I think for the next one we’ll take a break from the Napoleonic Wars and tackle something more modern, no matter how much I want to keep going to tackle what happens when Wellington comes back.

Hope you all found this little mini-series interesting and enjoyable, if you’d like to listen to these episodes a week early you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.