[130] But the last-named officer was absent.
[131] One Portuguese infantry and one Portuguese cavalry brigade.
[132] Napier (iv. 49) wrongly puts the combat of Navas de Membrillo on the 28th of December, not the 29th. The diaries of Stoltzenberg of the 2nd K.G.L. Hussars and Cadell of the 28th prove that the second date is correct. No force could have marched from Albuquerque to Navas in one day.
[133] Hill’s dispatch has a handsome but ungrammatical testimony to the enemy: ‘the intrepid and admirable way in which the French retreated, the infantry formed in square, and favoured as he was by the nature of the country, of which he knew how to take the fullest advantage, prevented the cavalry alone from effecting anything against him.’
[134] Apparently two killed and nine wounded.
[136] Napier (iv. p. 50) overrates the damage that Morillo suffered. He was not ‘completely defeated’ by Treillard, because he absconded without fighting. In his elaborate dispatch he gives his whole loss as two killed and nine wounded. See his life by Rodriguez Villa, appendices to vol. ii, for an almost daily series of letters describing his march.
[137] See below, section xxxiii, [page 337].
[138] For all this scheme see the Memoirs of Miot de Melito, iii. pp. 215-16, beside the Emperor’s own dispatches. Note especially the instructions which the French ambassador, Laforest, was to set before Joseph.
[139] See vol. iv. p. 215.