Battle of Somosierra

To open the road to Madrid, Napoleon ordered an attack on Spanish redoubts defending the Somosierra pass. After several unsuccessful infantry assaults, he ordered a bold charge by the Polish Guard chasseurs. They broke enemy lines, captured the guns, and forced the Spanish to retreat. The road to the capital was cleared.

Napoleon intervened in Spain in person after the rising of May 1808 and the capitulation of Bailén. He marched on Madrid with 45,000 men. Benito de San Juan barred the Somosierra pass against him with about 8,000 Spaniards and 16 guns in four successive batteries, echeloned along a hairpin road only tens of metres wide. The position forbade any deployment and made a frontal assault all but impossible.

The first infantry assaults bogged down under the fire of the tiered batteries. Napoleon then launched the 3rd Squadron of the Polish light horse of the Guard, led by Captain Jan Leon Kozietulski. Contemporary accounts speak of 125 to 140 troopers, but the unit's records list about 216. The charge went in successive waves, several Polish officers taking command in turn as their predecessors fell, until the guns were carried at the point of the lance. The attribution of command to General Montbrun is disputed: the Polish participants and the French officer Pierre d'Autancourt denied it, the latter reporting that Montbrun himself laughed at the idea. The victory also owed much to General Ruffin's infantry, whose sustained pressure forced the Spanish to give way — a share long eclipsed by the legend of the charge.

Madrid fell on 4 December 1808 and Joseph Bonaparte was restored to the throne. Somosierra became a symbol of Polish bravery in Napoleon's service, fixed by Horace Vernet's painting, and the Emperor is said to have answered those who called the position impregnable: 'Impossible! I do not know this word for my Poles.' Historians still debate the real tactical value of the charge against the action of the infantry.