[96] Details are worth giving. The 2nd Dragoons K.G.L. had 52 casualties, the 1st 44. In Anson’s brigade the 11th Light Dragoons lost 49, the 12th only 20, the 16th 47. The officers taken prisoners were Colonel Pelly and Lieutenant Baker of the 16th, Major Fischer (mortally wounded) of the 1st Dragoons K.G.L., and Captain Lenthe and Lieutenant Schaeffer of the 2nd Dragoons K.G.L. The two infantry battalions had 18 casualties, of whom 13 were men missing, apparently skirmishers cut off in the fight earlier in the day on the Hormaza, or footsore men who had fallen behind.
[97] H. Sydenham to Henry Wellesley, printed in Wellington Supplementary Dispatches, vii. pp. 464-5. Sydenham understates, however, the available force when he says that Anson had only 460 sabres and Bock only two squadrons. Hodenberg diminishes less, but still too much, when he gives Bock 300 sabres and Anson 600. The real numbers are given above.
[98] Napier, iv. p. 361. Corroboration may be had on p. 120 of the Journal of Green of the 68th, who says that his colonel was much puzzled to know how so many men had succeeded in getting liquor, and that one soldier was drowned in a vat, overcome by the fumes of new wine.
[99] This was Bonnet’s old division: Chauvel had been commanding it since Bonnet was disabled at Salamanca. But he had been wounded by a chance shot at Venta del Pozo on the 23rd, and Gauthier, his senior brigadier, had taken it over.
[100] Some 27 men of the 3/1st, taken prisoners here, represent this party in the casualty list of October 25. The battalion was not otherwise seriously engaged.
[101] Who were drawn from the 4th, 30th, and 44th.
[102] For a romantic story of how one was discovered see Napier, iv. p. 363, a tale which I have not found corroborated in any other authority.
[103] I had not been able to make out how the 1/9th came to lose these prisoners till I came on the whole story in the Autobiography of Hale of the 1/9th, printed at Cirencester 1826, a rare little book, with a good account of this combat. He is my best source for it on the British side.
[104] Hale, p. 95, quoted above.
[105] I have been using for the French side mainly the elaborate and interesting narrative of Colonel Béchaud of the 66th, recently published in Études Napoléoniennes, ii. pp. 405-11.