Note 659 — SECTION XVI: CHAPTER VII

There is a legend which occurs in all French narratives of Talavera—starting with the contemporary accounts, and including Desprez’s and Jourdan’s Mémoires. It is to the effect that Leval’s division, in its first advance, came upon an English battalion, which several writers call the 45th, lying in front of the rest of the allied line. It is alleged that the Nassau regiment surrounded and almost captured it—that they would have taken it prisoner indeed en masse, if the troops on their left (Holland and Baden) had held firm. But at least ‘on lui prit une centaine d’hommes, le major, le lieutenant-colonel, et le colonel—ce dernier mourut de ses blessures’ (Jourdan). No such incident can have occurred, for (1) no English regiment lost more than twenty-one ‘missing’ on this side of the field. (2) No English officer of higher rank than a captain was taken prisoner in the battle. (3) Only one officer was killed in the whole of Campbell’s division, and he was a lieutenant of the 7th Fusiliers. (4) The 45th was not engaged with Leval’s men, but lay to the left and supported the Guards in resisting Sebastiani: it lost one officer (a captain) and twelve men missing, but this was in the great mêlée in the centre, at the end of the day’s fighting: it had no officer killed. I am driven to conclude that the whole is some gross exaggeration of the surprise of Campbell’s pickets in the vineyards, and that instead of a ‘battalion’ we should read the light companies of the division. Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers, who was in the skirmishing line, says that the Germans got close among them by calling out ‘Españoles’ and pretending to be Spaniards. A few prisoners (twenty-six in all) were lost in this way.