Note 6 — HISTORICAL RECORD

The following incident in allusion to the Campo Mayor affair is taken from the journal of an officer published in Clarke's Life of the Duke of Wellington:—

"Yesterday a French captain of dragoons brought over a trumpet, demanding permission to search amongst the dead for his colonel. His regiment was a fine one, with bright brass helmets and black horse-hair, exactly like what the old Romans are depicted with. It was truly a bloody scene, being almost all sabre wounds. It was long before we could find the French colonel, for he was lying on his face, his naked body weltering in blood; and as soon as he was turned up, the officer knew him: he gave a sort of scream and sprang off his horse, dashed his helmet on the ground, knelt by the body, took the bloody hand and kissed it many times in an agony of grief; it was an affecting and awful scene. I suppose there were about six hundred naked dead bodies lying on the ground at one view. The French colonel was killed by a corporal of the Thirteenth. This corporal had killed one of his men, and he was so enraged, that he sallied out himself and attacked the corporal, who was well mounted and a good swordsman, as was the colonel himself. Both defended for some time; the corporal cut him twice across the face; his helmet came off at the second, when the corporal slew him by a cut which nearly cleft his skull asunder, cutting in as deep as the nose through the brain."