The French army embarked for its native soil still 25,747 strong. It had entered Portugal in the previous November with a strength of nearly 25,000, and had received during the spring of 1808 some 4,500 recruits: in the month of May, before hostilities began, its full force had been 26,594[270]. Of this total 20,090 were under arms at the moment that the Convention was signed, 3,522 were in hospital, sick or wounded: 916 were prisoners in the hands of the English or the Portuguese. There remain, therefore, some 4,500 men to be accounted for: these, however, were not all dead. More than 500 had deserted and taken service with the British before the embarkation: they came, almost without exception, from the ranks of the three foreign battalions which had been serving with Junot, the 1st Hanoverians and the 2nd and 4th Swiss[271]. As the total force of these corps had been only 2,548, it is clear that about one man in five deserted. This was natural in the case of the Germans, who were old subjects of George III, and most unwilling recruits to the French army, but the equally well-marked defection of the Swiss is very notable. Most of the latter were enlisted for the 5th Battalion of the 60th Rifles, while the Hanoverians joined their countrymen in the ranks of the King’s German Legion[272]. The real deficit, then, in Junot’s army was about 4,000 men: this represents the total loss of life by the fights of Roliça and Vimiero, by the numerous combats with the Portuguese, by the stragglers cut off during the forced marches of July and August, and by the ordinary mortality in hospital. It must be considered on the whole a very moderate casualty list: Junot’s corps, when it re-entered Spain to serve once more under the Emperor, was still 22,000 strong. It would have been even a trifle higher in numbers if a transport carrying two companies of the 86th Regiment had not foundered at sea, with the loss of every man on board. [270] _Well. Suppl. Disp._, vi. 207 (figures given for May 23), and Thiébault. [271] Napier, i. 246; Foy, iv. 363. We have already had occasion to note the proclivity of the 2nd Swiss to desert. The 4th Swiss, who had formed the garrison of Elvas, showed exactly the same tendency. [272] A table in the _Parliamentary Papers relative to Spain and Portugal_ shows that the Legion received 163 recruits from this source. The 5/60th obtained a much larger number, having still over 200 Swiss with them in 1809.