The French (outnumbered, if Slade’s brigade be counted, but it was far to the rear and never put in line) lost 53 killed and wounded and 4 officers and 132 rank and file taken prisoners. Cotton’s casualties were 14 killed and 2 officers and 35 men wounded: he insisted that his success would have been much greater if Ponsonby had held back a little longer, till the whole of Le Marchant’s squadrons came on the field--Lallemand would then have been cut off from Llerena and his line of retreat, and the greater part of his brigade ought to have been captured, though the light cavalry in the second line might have got off[310]. However, the affair was very creditable to all concerned. [310] Soult only acknowledges a loss of three officers and about 110 men in his dispatch of April 21 to Berthier, adding the ridiculous statement that the British had 100 killed and many more wounded, and that the 5th Dragoon Guards had been practically destroyed. Martinien’s tables show four French officers wounded and one killed, but (of course) take no account of unwounded prisoners. The British lost two missing, men who had ridden ahead in the pursuit into the French infantry. Hill’s infantry did not follow the retreating French, and had halted about Almendralejo and Villafranca, only the cavalry having gone on in pursuit to Llerena. The rest of the Anglo-Portuguese army was already in movement for the North, as Wellington had given up the idea, which had somewhat tempted him at first, of pursuing Soult to Seville and trying to upset the whole fabric of French power in Andalusia. Of this more in its due place. Suffice it to say here that he fell back on his old partition of forces, leaving Hill in Estremadura as his ‘corps of observation’, with precisely the same force that he had been given in 1811, save that one British cavalry brigade (that of Slade) was added. The rest of the corps consisted of the 2nd Division, Hamilton’s two Portuguese brigades, Long’s British and John Campbell’s Portuguese horse[311]. The whole amounted to about 14,000 men, sufficient not only to hold Drouet in check, but also to keep an eye upon the French troops in the valley of the Tagus, against whom Wellington was now meditating a raid of the sort that he had already sketched out in his correspondence with Hill in February. [311] This was the brigade formerly under Barbaçena, 4th and 10th regiments. So much for the Army of Andalusia and its fortunes in April 1812. We must now turn to those of Marmont and the Army of Portugal during the same critical weeks.