We have seen, when dealing with the last month of 1812 and the distribution of the French army into winter quarters, that all the arrangements made by King Joseph, Jourdan, and Soult were settled before any knowledge of the meaning of the Moscow Retreat had come to hand. The famous ‘29th Bulletin’ did not reach Madrid till January 6th, 1813; this was a long delay: but the Emperor’s return to Paris on December 16th, though he arrived at the Tuileries only thirty-six hours after the Bulletin had come to hand, was not known to Joseph or Jourdan till February 14th--which was a vastly longer delay. The road had been blocked between Vittoria and Burgos for over five weeks--and couriers and dispatches were accumulating at both these places--one set unable to get south, the other to get north. The Minister of War at Paris received Joseph’s dispatches of the 9th, 20th, and 24th of December all in one delivery on January 29th[358]. The King, still more unlucky, got the Paris dispatches of all the dates between December 18th and January 4th on February 14th to 16th by several couriers who came through almost simultaneously[359]. It was not till Palombini’s Italian division--in a series of fights lasting from January 25 to February 13--had cleared away Longa and Mendizabal from the high-road between Burgos and Vittoria, that quicker communication between those cities became possible. Long as it had taken in 1812 to get a letter from Paris to Madrid, there had never been such a monstrous gap in correspondence as that which took place in January 1813. Hence came the strange fact that when Napoleon had returned to France, and started on his old system of giving strategical orders for the Army of Spain once more, these orders[360]--one on top of another--accumulated at Vittoria, and came in one overwhelming mass, to upset all the plans which Joseph and Jourdan had been carrying out since the New Year.