[859] Doyle and 2nd of Jaen.
[860] Sometimes called the Puerto de Val Carlos.
[861] See the very interesting letter of Bainbrigge of the 20th, printed as an Appendix to the regimental history of that corps, p. 390.
[862] Bainbrigge says that it was 7 a.m. before the regiment reached the Linduz, but that it was an hour earlier is demonstrated by the fact that they heard firing at Roncesvalles after arriving. Now Byng’s fight on the Leiçaratheca began at 6 a.m. Therefore Ross was on the Linduz earlier.
[863] What became of this Spanish company? Captain Tovey of the 20th (see history of that corps, p. 408) says that the French ‘made the Spanish picquet, who were posted to give us intelligence, prisoners, without their firing a shot’. Another account is that having seen Ross arrive, they quietly went off to rejoin their brigade, without giving any notice.
[864] There is a curious and interesting account of all this in the Memoirs of Lemonnier-Delafosse, aide-de-camp to Clausel, who was twice sent to stir up Barbot, whose conduct he describes in scathing terms (pp. 212-14). Clausel says that the 50th stormed the Leiçaratheca. That it stormed an abandoned position is shown by the figure of its losses. What Clausel does not tell can be gathered from Byng’s workmanlike dispatch to Cole, in Supplementary Dispatches, viii. pp. 128-9.
[865] Of the 27th and 130th Line.
[866] I confess that I doubt these figures. Martinien’s lists show the 27th Line with seven officer-casualties, the 1st Line with two, the 25th Léger with three, the 130th with two. Fourteen officer-casualties ought to mean more like 280 than 100 casualties of all ranks. In the whole Pyrenean campaign the French army lost 120 officers to 12,300 men—nearly 30 men to each officer. Clausel asks us to believe that at Roncesvalles the proportion was one officer to twelve men! Yet, of course, such disproportion is quite possible.
[867] While we have quite a number of good personal narratives of the fight on the Linduz, I have found for the fight on the Leiçaratheca nothing but the official reports of Clausel, Byng, and Morillo, save the memoirs of George L’Estrange of the 31st and of Lemonnier-Delafosse, who is interesting but obviously inaccurate, since he says that the French regiment which carried the hill was the 71st. Not only was it the 50th, as Clausel specially mentions, but 71 was a blank number in the French Army List.
[868] Four, not five, because the light company of the 20th was absent with the other light companies far to the right: so the wing was only four companies strong, or three deducting Tovey’s men. Wachholz forgets this.