Note 307 — SECTION XIX: CHAPTER VI

It is a curious fact that in the draft of Masséna’s dispatch in the Archives du Ministère de la Guerre, we actually catch him in the act of falsifying returns. There is first written ‘Nous leur avons pris 100 hommes et deux pièces de canon. Notre perte a été de près de 500 hommes tant tués que blessés.’ Then the figures 100 are scratched out and above is inserted ‘un drapeau et 400 hommes,’ while for the French loss 500 is scratched out and 300 inserted. Ney, whose dispatch was lying before Masséna, had honestly written that Craufurd ‘a été chassé de sa position avec une perte considérable de tués et de blessés, nous lui avons fait en outre une centaine de prisonniers.’ Ney reported also a loss of about 500 men, which Masséna deliberately cut down to 300. Belmas (iii. 379) has replaced the genuine figures in his reprint of Masséna’s dispatch, though both the draft in the Archives and the original publication in the Moniteur give the falsifications. Masséna says nought of the check at the bridge, though Ney honestly wrote ‘au delà du Coa, une réserve qu’il avait lui permis de se reconnaître, et il continue sa retraite sur Pinhel la nuit du 24.’ As to the guns captured, it was perfectly true that some cannon were taken that day, but not in fighting, nor from Craufurd. The governor of Almeida was mounting two small guns (4-pounders) on a windmill some way outside the glacis. They had not been got up to their position, but were lying below—removed from their carriages, in order to be slung up more easily on to the roof. The mill was abandoned when Ney came up, and the dismounted cannon fell into his hands. He said not a word of them, any more than he did of the imaginary flag alleged by Masséna to have been captured. But the Prince of Essling brought in both, to please the imperial palate, which yearned for British flags and guns. His dispatch, published some weeks later in the Moniteur, came into Craufurd’s hands in November, and provoked him to write a vindication of his conduct, and a contradiction of ‘the false assertions contained in Marshal Masséna’s report of an action which was not only highly honourable to the Light Division, but positively terminated in its favour, notwithstanding the extraordinary disparity of numbers. For a corps of 4,000 men performed, in the face of an army of 24,000, one of the most difficult operations of war,—a retreat from a broken and extensive position over one narrow defile, and defended during the whole day the first defensible position that was to be found in the neighbourhood of the place where the action commenced.’ For the whole letter see Alex. Craufurd’s Life of Craufurd, pp. 140-1.