[680] The best account of all this comes from the Mémoire of General Desprez, who was riding with the head-quarters staff at this moment.
[681] All this is again derived from Desprez, who both carried the King’s orders to Victor, and bore back Victor’s remonstrances to the King.
[682] Lord Munster, p. 235; Leith-Hay, p. 162.
[683] See Jourdan’s Mémoires, p. 262.
[684] These ‘missing’ do not include the French wounded taken on the field, and recovered when Victor came back to Talavera on Aug. 6 and captured the British hospitals. The French return was drawn up only after Aug. 18, when these men had been released.
[685] Wellesley to Castlereagh, Aug. 1, Wellington Dispatches, iv. p. 553.
[686] For excellent accounts of this forced march see Col. Leach (95th), Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier (pp. 81-2), and Sir George Napier’s Autobiography, pp. 108-10. The distance was forty-three miles, not as W. Napier states sixty-two. That all the stragglers met on the way were not Spaniards is unfortunately evident from both narratives. Nor were all the British stragglers non-combatants.
[687] Wellington to Beresford, Talavera, July 29, 1809.
[688] On July 14 Wellesley writes to Beresford that he does not believe that Ney has quitted Galicia [Wellington Dispatches, iv. 510], because of the tenour of the captured dispatches of Soult to King Joseph. These, of course, had been written under the idea that the 6th Corps was still holding on to Corunna and Lugo: it was not till some days later that Soult learned of his colleagues’ unexpected move. But Wellesley knew of Ney’s move before the battle of Talavera, as is shown by Wellington Dispatches, iv. 545.
[689] ‘The enemy have on the Douro and in the neighbourhood not less than 20,000 men, being the remains of the Corps of Soult, Ney, and Kellermann.’ To Frere, July 30.