On 16 January 1809 a French corps under Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult attacked the British army of Lieutenant General Sir John Moore outside Corunna (A Coruña) in Galicia, north-west Spain. The British had just ended a punishing winter retreat and were waiting to board ships for home. They held their ground until dark and sailed away over the next two days, but Moore was mortally wounded in the fighting. In Spain the battle is known as the Battle of Elviña, after the village at its center.
A retreat to the sea
In the autumn of 1808 Moore took command of the British army sent to help Spain against Napoleon. He advanced into Spain, but the Spanish armies were defeated by Napoleon's own offensive, and Moore's force was left exposed. At the end of December he turned back and marched for the coast, with Soult's corps in pursuit.1
The retreat led through the mountains of León and Galicia in the depth of winter. Discipline broke down: some soldiers looted villages, others got drunk and were left behind for the French to capture. The army reached Corunna on 11 January 1809 and found the harbor empty, because the transport ships had not yet arrived. The fleet came in on the afternoon of 14 January. While the sick and wounded, most of the cavalry and all but nine of the army's sixty guns were embarked, Moore put his infantry on high ground south of the town, by the village of Elviña.2
The fight for Elviña
Soult attacked in the afternoon of 16 January. His main blow fell on the British right at Elviña. The village changed hands several times as British regiments, among them the 42nd Highlanders and the 50th Foot, counterattacked into it. Sir David Baird, one of Moore's divisional commanders, was badly wounded early in the fighting, and Moore took charge on that part of the field himself.3
While he was directing the fight he was hit by a French cannonball. HistoryOfWar.org describes the shot striking his left shoulder, while Historic UK writes that it hit him in the chest. Both agree that he was carried to the rear and lived for some hours, long enough to learn that the French had been held. Command passed to Sir John Hope. The fighting died down at dusk, and neither Soult nor Hope wanted to renew it.4
Evacuation and losses
Hope chose to continue the embarkation rather than renew the fight. From about 9 pm on 16 January the British slipped away from their lines, leaving pickets behind, and boarded the ships during the night and the next day. The rearguard embarked on 18 January. General Alcedo, the commander of the Spanish garrison, waited until the British were out at sea and then surrendered the town to the French.5
No figure for the losses is certain. Historic UK puts British losses in the battle at about 900; HistoryOfWar.org notes that Hope's first estimate was 700 to 800 and that many regimental returns mixed the battle with the retreat. French estimates range more widely. HistoryOfWar.org notes that Le Noble's biography of Soult gives 150 dead and 500 wounded, which it calls a clear underestimate, and that Marshal Jourdan reported 1,000 casualties; its own judgment is at least 1,500. Historic UK gives about 2,000. The strength of Soult's infantry is also disputed: some French accounts gave him only 13,000, while HistoryOfWar.org reckons that he still had about 20,000.6
Defeat or deliverance
Corunna has been judged in very different ways. Historic UK calls it a tactical British victory, while noting that the French had forced a hasty British withdrawal from Spain. HistoryOfWar.org stresses that the evacuation saved the only field army Britain then had. Moore was buried at Corunna, and Charles Wolfe's poem The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna made his death famous in the English-speaking world. Britain kept fighting in the Peninsula, where Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, made his name against Napoleon's marshals.7
