[132] Whom Wellington (in his dispatch to Graham of December 31) calls ‘the German deserters’—they having been mainly men who had absconded from the French armies.
[133] Correspondance, no. 17,131.
[134] See vol. i. pp. 442-3.
[135] Schepeler, the Prussian officer in Spanish service, whose notes on all the Cadiz affairs are so important, owing to his having served through them under Blake and La Peña, says that the latter was generally allowed to be incompetent—he was a regular old woman. He tells an illustrative anecdote, of a guerrillero chief who came to concert a bold plan with the general, and went away at once, saying, ‘Can I hope to get anything out of an officer who, as I find, is called “Donna Manuela” by every one about him?’ Schepeler, Geschichte der spanischen Monarchie, i. 134. La Peña had kept his place, despite of his Tudela fiasco, through family and salon intrigues—he is said to have been the ‘tame cat’ of certain great ladies of the patriotic party.
[136] He played in the first recorded cricket match in Scotland in 1785.
[137] See his diary, quoted in Delavoye’s Life of Lord Lynedoch, p. 32.
[138] Graham survived Barrosa for thirty years, lived to be ninety-six, and after Waterloo founded the United Service Club, as a place of rendezvous for his old Peninsular comrades, who looked upon him as a kind of father.
[139] The delays in the start caused an unexpected conjunction in the mountains of the south. Beguines and his roving brigade, warned to be ready to join in the campaign by the 23rd, came down from the Ronda mountains in search of the army, advanced as far as Medina Sidonia, and skirmished there with Victor’s flank guard, two battalions under General Cassagne, which were always kept watching the mountains (March 25). Beaten off, Beguines retired to his usual haunts, and waited for signs of the expedition. His premature attack—premature through no fault of his own—called Victor’s attention to his rear, and caused him to fortify Medina Sidonia, and to reinforce Cassagne with three battalions and a cavalry regiment.
[140] These battalions were, I believe, Ciudad Real and 4th Walloon Guards.
[141] As the names of the Spanish battalions engaged in this expedition have never before been collected, it may be worth while to mention here that they were—Lardizabal’s division: Campomayor, Carmona, Murcia (2 batts.), Canarias; Anglona’s division: Africa (2 batts.), Sigüenza, Cantabria (2 batts.), Voluntaries de Valencia.