But the position which Wellington had achieved had its drawbacks as well as its advantages. Since it had become habitual for the Cabinet to ask his opinion on high military matters not connected with the Peninsula, an endless vista of troubles was opened up before him, for (as always happens in times of exceptional crisis) the Ministry at home was being plagued with all manner of solicitations from every quarter of Europe, to which answers were required. While Wellington had been trailing back reluctantly from Burgos to Ciudad Rodrigo, Napoleon had been conducting a retreat of a very different kind from Moscow to the Berezina, a retreat whose character and consequences were not known in London or in Spain for some weeks later. He had left Moscow on October 19th, had dictated the famous 29th Bulletin, acknowledging the wreck of his project and the ruin of his army, at Molodetchno on December 3rd, and had started on his headlong flight to Paris on December 5th, leaving the small remnant of his host to perish in the snow. He reached the Tuileries on the night of December 18th, on the heels of the disastrous bulletin, which his ministers had only received thirty-six hours before, on the preceding day[301]. In London the fact that the Russian expedition had failed was well known by the end of November, but the extent of the failure was only realized when the 29th Bulletin got to Lord Liverpool’s hands, by the usual smugglers’ route, on December 21st, rather less than five days after its arrival in Paris[302].