What happened at the Battle of Somosierra?
On 30 November 1808 Napoleon forced the Somosierra pass north of Madrid. While French infantry climbed the slopes under fire, a squadron of the Polish Light Horse of his Imperial Guard charged up the mountain road at the Spanish guns. The Spanish defense collapsed, sixteen guns were taken, and the road to Madrid lay open. [1,1
The road climbs through a stony valley between high hills, and on the morning of 30 November 1808 Spanish guns stood across it with infantry on the slopes. When the fog lifted and the guns opened fire, the French infantry stalled. Napoleon, impatient to reach Madrid, turned to the Polish light horse of his Guard. A few minutes later the pass was his, and the charge had passed into Napoleonic legend, and into an argument about what really happened that has lasted ever since.2
Who won the Battle of Somosierra and why?
France won. Napoleon brought some 40,000 men against a Spanish division a fraction of that size, regulars mixed with insurgent levies, holding a pass whose flanks infantry could climb. Ruffin's infantry worked up the heights on both sides while the Polish light horse charged the guns on the road, and San Juan's army broke and scattered.3
The road to Madrid
The Spanish war was born of Napoleon's war on Britain. To close the continent to British trade he brought Portugal to heel and then used a dynastic quarrel in Madrid to put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. On 2 May 1808 Madrid rose against the French, the revolt spread across the country, and King Joseph soon had to abandon his capital. In the autumn Napoleon came south in person with the core of the Grande Armée to put him back.4
The shortest road to the capital crossed the mountains north of Madrid by the Somosierra pass, and there General Benito de San Juan dug in to stop him. Napoleon marched on the pass with the main body of his army, some 40,000 men.5
Armies and commanders
San Juan's division numbered about 12,000 men in Oman's count and 13,000 in Napoleon's bulletin, regular regiments alongside insurgent levies, with sixteen guns. Not all of it was on the pass: the Polish accounts put the infantry there at about 8,000, and Oman describes a detachment sent forward to Sepúlveda, at the foot of the mountains, that was cut off when the French arrived.6
How the guns stood is itself disputed. Polish accounts describe four batteries placed one above another along about 2.5 km of the climbing road, each covering the bends below it. The British historian Charles Oman, using French eyewitnesses, describes the guns ranged in a single line across the little plateau at the crest, behind a shallow earthwork. Either way the flanking heights, steep but not impassable, were not entrenched.7
Napoleon had the infantry of General François Ruffin's division of Victor's corps at the head of his army and the cavalry of his Guard behind it, including the Regiment of Polish Light Horse. Its men were not yet lancers: the regiment received the lance only in 1809, and in 1808 its men were chevau-légers, light horsemen armed with sabers. On 30 November the 3rd squadron, formed by the 3rd and 7th companies, was on duty as the Emperor's escort, and it was led that day by Jan Leon Kozietulski, a chef d'escadron with the rank of colonel.8
The infantry stalls
The French began to climb on the morning of 30 November. Fog hid the pass at first, and the infantry made some progress under its cover; when it lifted, the Spanish guns opened up. The 96th Line went up the road, the 9th Light spread out on the slopes to the right and the 24th Line on the left, with six guns on the road behind them.9
Napoleon was not prepared to wait. Over the protests of some of his own officers, and repeating the order when it was questioned, he sent in the Polish squadron, already weakened by a platoon sent off to scout. Polskie Radio's expert, Andrzej Ziółkowski of the Polish Army Museum, and the Museum of Polish History both point out that the order was to take the first battery only. What followed went far beyond it.10
The charge
The Polish veterans told the story of the next minutes this way. The squadron went up the stony road at a gallop in a column of fours, with a cheer for the Emperor. In his memoirs Józef Załuski recalled Kozietulski ordering sabers drawn and leading the charge himself. The first battery fell. Kozietulski's horse was killed under him early in the charge and he could not go on, but the squadron did not stop: Captain Jan Dziewanowski and the officers behind him led the survivors on through the fire of the next batteries, and as the leading riders fell, those behind took their place.11
Andrzej Niegolewski, the lieutenant whose scouting platoon joined the attack on the way, became its most famous survivor. He saw Lieutenant Stefan Krzyżanowski lying dead between the first and second batteries and Dziewanowski on the ground by the third with a shattered leg, reached the last battery himself, and was cut down there when his horse was shot under him. He was found among the guns with nine bayonet wounds and two gunshot wounds, and survived. The charge, by the Polish count, had lasted about eight minutes.12
Napoleon, seeing the Poles on the move, sent the chasseurs à cheval of his Guard and the rest of the Polish regiment after them, and the arrival of the French cavalry and infantry broke the last defenders. Niegolewski, pinned under his horse at the crest, remembered seeing first a squadron of the Guard chasseurs and then French light infantry come up behind him, and only after them the other Polish squadrons.13
Two stories of one charge
The French version is very different. Philippe de Ségur, an aide-de-camp of the Emperor who rode with the Poles and was wounded, wrote that the first charge stalled halfway, that the survivors took cover behind rocks until he brought them Napoleon's order to go on, and that a single blast of the Spanish guns then destroyed the squadron short of the battery. Oman, who followed Ségur, concluded that the guns fell only to a second charge by the whole regiment, made when Ruffin's infantry had reached the crest and the Spaniards were already giving way.14
Polish veterans spent decades fighting that version. Niegolewski's book of 1854, written against Ségur and the French historian Adolphe Thiers, insists that only the 3rd squadron charged, that it took all sixteen guns without stopping, and that every man killed or wounded in the charge belonged to it. Załuski, writing in 1865, made the same case. Napoleon's own bulletin had muddied the story from the start: it credited the charge to General Louis-Pierre Montbrun at the head of the Polish horse, while praising the regiment for covering itself with glory and showing itself worthy of the Imperial Guard.15
Counting the losses
Even the Polish losses are disputed, because each figure counts something different. The bulletin admitted only eight Poles killed on the guns and sixteen wounded. Ségur, as Oman reports him, counted 88 men in the squadron, of whom four officers and 40 men were killed and four officers and twelve men wounded. Niegolewski gave four officers and 60 men; Załuski wrote that 57 men of the squadron fell; the regimental chronicler Pierre Dautancourt counted 57 killed and wounded; and Polskie Radio gives 18 killed and 33 badly wounded.16
Of the squadron's seven officers, none came through unhurt. Krzyżanowski, Rudowski and Rowicki were killed; Dziewanowski, so badly wounded that the bulletin gave him up as almost without hope, died in Madrid a few days later; Captain Piotr Krasiński was badly bruised; Kozietulski lost his horse; and Niegolewski had his eleven wounds.17
On the Spanish side the gun crews were cut down and all sixteen guns were lost. The bulletin added ten flags, some thirty caissons and two hundred wagons. Polskie Radio and the Museum of Polish History's portal give about 3,000 prisoners; Ségur, as quoted by Oman, says that only 150 to 200 Spaniards were caught, because the rest broke so fast and scattered over the mountainside.18
Aftermath
The light horse pursued the fleeing Spaniards as far as Buitrago, at the foot of the pass, taking prisoners and equipment, though most of San Juan's men escaped by scattering over the mountains. The road to the capital was open. On 2 December the French cavalry stood on the heights above Madrid, and after a brief resistance the city capitulated on 4 December.19
Napoleon praised the Poles and gave Niegolewski the Legion of Honor. But the army bulletin on the battle, while praising the Polish horse, gave the lead in the charge to a French general and the decisive work to the French troops around it, and that was the start of two centuries of argument.20 › The Greatest Napoleonic Battles
Legend, quarrels and memory
Somosierra became a legend almost at once, and the legend has always run ahead of the sources. The famous cry "Naprzód psiekrwie, cesarz patrzy!" ("Forward, you dogs, the Emperor is watching!") cannot be traced to any eyewitness; the historian Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki traces it to Wacław Gąsiorowski's popular novel Huragan, while the memoirs record a cheer for the Emperor. The phrase "drunk as a Pole", supposedly coined because no sober man would have charged up that road, has no clear origin either. Polskie Radio quotes a Napoleonic general's verdict that one had to be drunk to give such an order and drunk to carry it out.21
In Szczęsny-Kostanecki's account the quarrels were serious, too. As early as 1815 the poet Kantorbery Tymowski asked why such fine laurels were stained with a brother's blood, since the Poles, unfortunate themselves, had crushed the unfortunate. Joachim Lelewel complained that the war had drawn Poland's sons beyond the mountains while their own country stood almost undefended in 1809. In communist Poland the charge was mocked as reckless adventurism, and then defended again.22
Behind those quarrels, Szczęsny-Kostanecki argues, lay a real dilemma. In 1808 the Duchy of Warsaw existed, a half-state that satisfied nobody, and the men of the Guard served Napoleon in the hope that he would restore Poland. Niegolewski himself saw the Spanish war as a blow against the old regimes of Europe that had readily accepted the partitions of his country; at his funeral Tytus Działyński answered over the coffin that the whole enterprise had served a tyrant, not Poland. The writer Marian Brandys called the losses enormous, almost half of the charging unit, and yet noted that Somosierra was the cheapest of all Napoleon's victories so far.23
Painters kept the legend alive. January Suchodolski painted the charge in 1860, and Polskie Radio's expert judged that Wojciech Kossak, who went to see the pass for himself, came closer than most to what really happened; the other artists, he said, painted it from imagination.24 › The Greatest Cavalry Charges in History
