[498] The ‘Vanguard’ and 2nd Division of his army.
[499] Dispatches, vi. p. 544.
[500] Correspondance, xxi. pp. 273, 295.
[501] Dispatches, vi. 502, to Craufurd.
[502] Wellington to Spencer, afternoon of Oct. 11, Dispatches, vi. 505.
[503] Wellington to Craufurd, same day, Dispatches, vi. 504.
[504] Wellington to Chas. Stuart, Dispatches, vi. 506. D’Urban’s invaluable diary has the note. ‘Oct. 11: ’Tis difficult to account for all this, which must be vexatious to the Commander-in-Chief, who, aware of the importance of the heights in front of Sobral, must have wished to keep them for the present.... Oct. 12: In the morning the enemy was no more to be seen, and what we should never have given up, we were fortunately permitted to re-occupy. But at nightfall the French, with about six battalions, retook the height and town of Sobral.’
[505] Of the nineteen casualties, nine belonged to the newly-landed 71st, four to the German Legion, six to the company of the 5/60th attached to Erskine. See Return in Record Office.
[506] Sainte-Croix had been the Marshal’s chief-of-the-staff during the Wagram campaign, and was generally reputed to have been responsible for some of the boldest moves made by Masséna’s army during that period.
[507] That Fririon is correct in dating Sainte-Croix’s death on the 12th, and Delagrave and others wrong in placing it on the 16th, is proved by an entry in D’Urban’s diary of Oct. 15, stating that it had just been discovered that the general killed in front of Alhandra was called Sainte-Croix. Clearly then he was dead before the 16th.