[488] The writer of the Strictures on Napier’s History, vol. iii, gives as an eye-witness the following anecdote: ‘As a Spanish soldier in the ranks close to the Marshal was looking to the rear, a Spanish-Irish officer in that service cried to him, “To-day is not the day to fly, when you are fighting as the comrades of the British.” The poor fellow replied, “No, señor, mas los Ingleses nos tiraron por atrás.”’ The Spanish never at any moment fired into the British, as Napier asserts. The mistake was remedied by Beresford’s aide-de-camp Arbuthnot, who rode, at great risk, along the front of the 29th, and stopped their fire.
[489] It was here that the 57th earned the well-known nickname of the Die-hards, from their splendid answer to Colonel Inglis’s adjuration.
[490] This was an Anglo-Swiss officer, Major Roverea, whose memoirs have lately been published.
[491] It appears that the three stray companies from Kemmis’s absent brigade which had reached the field, were put into the square at the right flank also.
[492] What exactly passed between Cole and Hardinge is thoroughly worked out by the correspondence between them printed in the United Service Journal for 1841.
[493] Quoted in the Cole-Hardinge correspondence in the United Service Journal for 1841.
[494] Of which no less than 171 were in the battalion of the Lusitanian Legion which formed Cole’s flank-guard on the left: it suffered terribly from artillery fire.
[495] See [Appendix XVI].
[496] For details see [Appendix XVI].
[497] D’Urban in his diary under the 17th first speaks of an attack by Soult being possible, and then concludes it impossible; Kemmis’s arrival he thinks will have cured the Marshal of any idea of returning to the fight.