Christmas Eve with Napoleon
Christmas Eve 1808, northern Spain, the 16th year of war with revolutionary France. “Ever since the beginning of the month the weather had been colder than it usually is in England at this season,” wrote Captain Alexander Gordon of the 15th King’s Royal Hussars a week earlier. “For the last five or six days the frost had become most intense and the roads very slippery... It continued snowing all night, and in the morning the ground was covered to the depth of eight or 10 inches.”
Armies in those days usually withdrew to winter quarters when the first frosts came but not this year. In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte had turned on his former ally, Spain, putting his brother on the throne, and in May 1808 the Spanish had risen against him. A British army landed in Portugal to assist them, and Bonaparte arrived to take personal command and throw them out.
The force, soon to grow to 42,000 men, was the largest that Britain had sent abroad since the Duke of Marlborough’s day. Although small by continental standards, it was all that London could spare. Indeed, the foreign secretary, George Canning, warned its commander, Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore, that it was “not merely a considerable part of the dispensable force
