[517] 1st, 5th, 7th, 8th of the Line, only 9 squadrons altogether, and slightly over 1,000 sabres.
[518] Apparently a squadron each of Borbon and Reyna, the rest of the Spanish cavalry being on the Monasterio Road. Penne Villemur was sick at Villafranca. Strength about 300 sabres.
[519] Lumley in his very modest dispatch (Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches, xiii. pp. 654-6) under-estimates the damage he had done to the enemy. He states his 78 prisoners, and notes that 29 French dead had been counted, but only speaks of 50 wounded. There were really over 200. In combats with the arme blanche, the number of killed is always very small compared with that of the wounded, which here was about 8 to 1—not at all an unusual proportion in cavalry fights. A good account from the French side may he found in Picard’s Histoire de la Cavalerie, 1792-1815, vol. ii. pp. 315-16.
[520] Only two squadrons strong, because the remainder of the regiment was at Cadiz: it had (as will be remembered) done good service under Graham at Barrosa.
[521] It arrived by June 1st, according to Mr. Atkinson’s useful list of Wellington’s divisional organization.
[522] Mulcaster’s company, the first to arrive, reached Spain some weeks later. By the time of the third siege of Badajoz in 1812 there were so many as 115(!) military artificers available.
[523] Refer back to [pp. 283-4] for details.
[524] D’Urban’s diary under June 10th, when the siege was just developing into an acknowledged failure.
[525] 30 brass 24-pounders, 4 16-pounders, 4 ten-inch howitzers, 8 eight-inch ditto, according to Dickson’s letter of May 29. See his papers, ed. Leslie, p. 394. I follow him rather than Jones’s Sieges of the Peninsula, where they differ, as he is absolutely contemporary authority, and was the officer in charge of everything.
[526] Dickson Papers, ed. Leslie, p. 405.