Just as Desai was about to leave Krakow, preparing to go to Dresden, the capital of the Saxony Kingdom. In the morning before participating in the Joint Conference of Monarchs of the European Allies convened by Napoleon, the intelligence officer who returned from the English Channel, Captain Davi Silva (promoted), and the Cathay military officer in Istanbul who came from the Turkish front, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Jacques, came to Warwick Castle at the same time to report to Desai to the military information and government affairs of the Iberis Peninsula and the Black Sea.

That night, Desai Grand Duke spent the first happy night with his wife Princess Maria. Of course, this was the "franchise" of Count Kava and others. Because after half a year of careful care, the Grand Duchess's physical condition seemed to have been completely recovered.

When a ray of warm winter sun entered the bedroom through the gaps in the curtains, Maria, who was a woman, noticed that her husband had left. She felt a little disappointed, but she unexpectedly saw a bouquet of blooming red roses beside her pillow, and a strong warmth and love surged in her heart. Before Maria came to Krakow, Desai ordered the construction of a greenhouse in the palace. He hired gardeners from Vienna to cultivate various flowers here, especially the red roses that his wife likes the most.

At this time, in Desai's study and bedroom, Captain Silva first reported the latest battle situation on the Iberis Peninsula for Desai.

On September 2, 1811, the British Expeditionary Force commanded by Wellington successfully landed under the cover of the local fleet and successfully raided Lisbon, defeating the Spanish and French defenders stationed here. Within a few weeks, the local Portuguese people, under the instigation of the resistance nobles and British spies, raised their flags and changed their banners, organized the National Self-Defense Forces that were loyal to the Portuguese royal family, drove away the Spanish and French, and instead welcomed the British allies, and the entire southern Portugal was revived...

At the same time, the Massena Army, which was encircling guerrillas in northern Portugal, received an order from Madrid and Paris. Massena, who was sick, rushed to lead his troops south to fight without being fully prepared.

When facing Wellington's reorganized Lisbon defense line, Massena and his Portuguese army were once again in a stalemate of no war and a dilemma. Massena obviously learned from the previous lesson, stopped acting rashly, and instead held his position. He began to expect the Sirtes or Victor to follow Desai's approach in 1810 and reinforce the Portuguese battlefield from the flanks.

For this reason, the British, who had been bullied by Desai, was prepared for it.

Almost as Wellington raided Lisbon, General Hill, who had recovered from injury, led a British-army, with the cooperation of Spanish guerrillas and the Mediterranean fleet, landed in the southern part of Andalusia, thus attracting most of the troops of Sirte and Victor, resulting in the two French marshals being unable to send one soldier and one soldier to the Portuguese battlefield.

At the same time, various guerrillas in Portugal and Spain all launched a crazy operation to ambush the French supply convoy, making the French army in southern Spain and central and northern Portugal have a difficult life. Due to the loss of traffic supply lines, the Sirte Army and the Massena Army were trapped in the city for a long time and could not get supplies from the rear. In the end, they had to retreat without fighting.

In late January 1812, after nearly five months of fatigue and unintentional bloody battle, the Massena Legion, which was tortured by hunger and disease, finally had to choose to withdraw its troops voluntarily. When it retreated from Portugal to Spain, the legion lost a total of 25,000 people, of which more than 8,000 were captured, 15,000 people died of illness and starvation, and only 2,000 people died in battle.

On the other side, on the Andalusian battlefield in southern Spain, under the joint attack of the British and Spanish resistance troops, the Sirte tribes and Victor tribes also had no choice but to give up their long-term siege on the city of Cadiz and retreated from the coastal zone to the inland plateau.

In early February, Napoleon was very dissatisfied with Massena's inability to defeat Wellington. Soon, the emperor removed Marshal Massena from his position as commander of the Portuguese Legion on the grounds that he was old and weak, and forced him to retire immediately. He was also preparing to send another French marshal who could fight to serve as the new commander of the Portuguese Legion.

During this period, Marséna had proposed that Marshal Desay replace his position, but was rejected by Napoleon. In March, Marshal Marmon rushed from Italy to the Spanish battlefield and became the commander of the third Portuguese Legion.

But at this time, Napoleon was preparing to turn most of his troops and attention to the upcoming expedition to the Russian battlefield, and coupled with the serious situation caused by the Spanish guerrillas, the French army on the Iberis Peninsula could no longer obtain the source of troops and material supplies imported from the country, which forced Marmon to completely turn into the defensive position on the central border between Portugal and Spain.

General Wellington, who was commanding the coalition in Portugal, decided to give Marmon a warning at the beginning of 1812. In mid-February, Wellington personally commanded the coalition to capture Rodrigo, an important border town on the Western-Portuguese border, and wiped out more than 2,000 defenders. The victorious British army massacred the city regardless of military discipline. Due to lack of military strength and siege equipment, Marmon could neither stop the coalition's actions nor regain the lost fortress. At the same time, he could not have crossed the areas where the food had been plundered and pursued the coalition.

Then, General Beresford, who vowed to wash away the shame with countless victories and the blood of the enemy, captured another important border town of Badajos in mid-to-late March and seized the French boat bridge. As part of his revenge, the British turned the city into a ruin. Later, Beresford destroyed the French pontoon bridge built by the French on the Tagus River in the Almadas area.

In this way, the connection between Marshal Marmon's Portuguese legion and Marshal Sirte's Spanish legion was cut off.

...

Captain Silva continued: "...When he noticed that the situation on the Iberian Peninsula began to become critical, His Majesty Joseph of Madrid sent a special envoy to Manresa twice, asking the cabinet to send troops to provide assistance... In accordance with your wishes, Prime Minister Say put forward the condition that the Spanish king must transfer the rule of the two regions of Navarra and La Rioja to the Kingdom of Catalonia. Unfortunately, the stubborn King Joseph flatly rejected this transaction condition, so we unanimously held our troops and waited for the opportunity."

When the battle between Spain and Portugal regained his past life memory, Desai was neither happy nor depressed.

The travelers knew that in 3 or 4 months, shortly after the European Union Army began the war against Russia, Wellington, who was dazzled by a series of victories, gave up his steady style and was about to launch a large-scale military operation to capture Madrid, trying to determine the war to completely end the Peninsula War, and then burn the war to southern France or Catalonia.

And this is definitely not what Desai and the Nine-man Regiment hope to see. Therefore, the Catalan army will inevitably go abroad again and fight the British and Portuguese coalition forces again; as for the timing, it is expected to be between July or August; for any excuse for sending troops, please find any one.

Before ending the report to the monarch, Captain Silva remembered one thing, saying: "According to the Lisbon Intelligence Station, they were informed that a German mercenary regiment was recently added to the British Expeditionary Force, with a force of about 5,000, and the two commanders were Prussian generals in exile in Britain, Blüchel and Gnezenau."

...

Later, when he met Lieutenant Colonel Jacques alone, Desai's inquiry did not focus on the war between Ottoman Turkey and Russia. That was because he knew that even with the support of France and Catalans, the Turks could no longer support it.

It was not just that after a series of long-term war failures, the Turkish army was disintegrated and morale was depressed. The more important reason was that Istanbul did not have hard currency such as gold and silver as military funds, and continued to maintain the war against Russia.

At the beginning of the new year in 1812, the Turkish Minister to Catalonia actually made a shocking request to the Manresa Cabinet to provide Istanbul with a military loan of 2 million pounds. However, because the Turkish envoy refused to use the imperial customs duties as a government loan guarantee and did not agree to open the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to provide free passage for the Catalan Navy, the diplomatic meeting between the two sides eventually ended up unhappily. Soon, the Sultan Empress Dowad Sultan, who truly held the power of Turkey, issued an order to send a special envoy to hold a two-country peace talks with Kutuzov.

“…It is expected that the armistice and date between Russia and Turkey will be officially signed in April or May. Before that, I have sent someone to make some arrangements, and then radical religious elements from Istanbul will give the Russians an unexpected surprise.”

Speaking of this, Lieutenant Colonel Jacques took two steps forward, and he took out a sealed wooden box wrapped in satin from his arms and presented it to the monarch. When Desay opened the brocade box, he saw a potato contained inside, to be precise, a bad potato with blight.

Lieutenant Colonel Jacques then said: "This is what I went to the lower Dnieper River and dug in a farm. It is obvious that the potato plague you mentioned has begun to spread on the land in southern Russia."

As Desaiso expected, in December 1810, this potato wilt began to spread in Odessa and spread rapidly along the Danube, Dnieper, and Don Rivers throughout Ukraine and southern Belarus.

Because potato germs require long-term adaptation, the consequences of this plague that broke out at the end of 1810 were not serious, because Russian farmers also had other crops such as corn, wheat, rye, etc. to rely on. The sudden potato plague only destroyed less than a quarter of the potato harvest from 1810 to 1811, and did not attract the attention of farmers and officials.

While the Russian aristocrats and serf owners considered themselves unlucky, they also ordered the serfs in the manor to step up the planting of a new season of potatoes to make up for the past losses. By February 1812, given that Russia was very likely to face the massive invasion of the coalition forces of various European countries led by Napoleon, Tsar Alexander suggested that large quantities of high-yield potatoes must be planted in the manors in the south to survive the famine caused by the war. As a result, the potato planting area in the entire Ukraine suddenly expanded to 8 to 10 times the original one.

However, from Tsar Alexander to Russian serfs, everyone despised the real cause of the reduction in potato production in 1811, and made an unforgivable fatal mistake: to keep the rotten potatoes in the field and serve as fertilizer for the coming year.
Chapter completed!