[253] In the Diary of Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons there is a curious note as to the capture of a ‘caravan’ or large coach belonging to the head-quarter staff, and more especially to Masséna’s Portuguese adviser, the Marquis d’Alorna, on April 7th. Sixty-five infantry were captured by the regiment on the same day.
[254] See letters to Beresford of April 6th and to Charles Stuart of April 8th, in Dispatches, vii. pp. 430-5.
[255] Napier (iii. 135) says that the French lost 300 men, which contrasts strangely with the official numbers given by the French. Probably Drouet gave only the actual loss in action, while the British accounts speak of all the stragglers taken that day as if they had been captured in the fight. The 16th certainly got 65 prisoners from a convoy guard.
[256] Wellington, Dispatches, vii. p. 448.
[257] But, as he wrote to Beresford on April 14, ‘I was not very sanguine of the results of the blockade of that place, and had indeed determined not to make it in any strength: and now it is useless to keep anybody on the other side of the Agueda save for food and observation.’ (Dispatches, vii. 457.)
[258] For the state of semi-blockade in which Sanchez had kept Ciudad Rodrigo, see the Memoirs of the Duchess of Abrantes (vii. pp. 275-7), who was beleaguered there while her husband was in Portugal. For the hunts organized against him by Thiébault, see the latter’s Memoirs, iv. 449-51, &c. Sanchez intercepted numbers of dispatches which were of great use to Wellington, as they kept him informed of the state of the French in northern Spain.
[259] See vol. iii, Appendix, p. 543.
[260] When Foy went back from Thomar on March 5 to Rodrigo his escort was taken from the 9th Corps, not from the Army of Portugal, so does not count. See Pièces Justificatives, No. 45, in Foy’s Vie Militaire, p. 357.
[261] See pp. 167-8 of vol. iii.
[262] Dispatch printed in Fririon, p. 157.