Note 388 — SECTION XXVI: CHAPTER II

Complaints on this score fill up great parts of Wellington’s letters of the 30th April and 1st May (Dispatches, vii. 511-12, 516-17). They seem slightly to overstate the deficiency, compared with morning states of May 1; but this comes from his persistent habit of counting only rank and file, omitting officers and sergeants. When he says that the total infantry (including Pack) was only 11,000, while it works out to over 12,000 when that detached brigade is counted, we must remember that he is not reckoning anything but rank and file. Wellington attributes most of the loss to (1) slackness at the depositos (dépôts) in forwarding drafts, (2) maladministration of the hospitals, (3) insufficient food at the front for those brigades still fed by the Portuguese government, and not taken on to the British establishment.