[829] The British officer in command in the trenches, Major O’Halloran, was court martialled, but acquitted. It was proved that he had given the correct orders to the Portuguese captains of the companies on guard, who had not obeyed them. All the prisoners except 30 were Portuguese.
[830] The history of this proclamation is curious. Clarke, or Napoleon himself, considered it too full of insults of a person who was, after all, the Emperor’s brother. So it had to be disavowed: Soult wrote to Paris that he had not authorized it, and Clarke had the ingenuity to print in the French newspapers that it was an invention of the English government, intended to disgust the Spanish partisans of King Joseph, and to advertise the ill feeling that prevailed between the French army and the Imperial family. See Vidal de la Blache, i. p. 138; as he remarks, the style is all Soult’s, and there is not a trace of foreign diction in it. No Englishman or Spaniard could have written it.
[831] Joseph to Napoleon, 1st February 1813.
[832] See notably the case of General Excelmans.
[833] See especially the proclamation of March 6, 1815.
[834] Mémoires of St. Chamans, p. 35.
[835] Maximilien Lamarque, ii. p. 182.
[836] Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington, p. 20.
[837] The gendarmerie were those who had come from the ‘legions’, employed in 1811-12-13 as garrisons in Northern Spain. They were embodied in units, horse and foot, and used as combatants (as at the combat of Venta del Pozo, for which see [p. 71]).
[838] As Table XVI in the Appendix shows, Foy’s division received two of Sarrut’s regiments: Cassagne’s (now Darmagnac’s) took all the French infantry of the old Army of the Centre: Villatte’s (now Abbé’s) was given two of Abbé’s regiments of the Army of the North: Conroux’s division absorbed Maransin’s independent brigade: Barbot’s (now Vandermaesen’s) received two regiments of the Army of the North: Daricau’s (now Maransin’s) got half Leval’s ‘scrapped’ division, Taupin the other half of it: Maucune absorbed one of Vandermaesen’s old regiments, Lamartinière one of Sarrut’s.