Stragglers continued to come in for several days. Julian Sanchez was sent out with his lancers to search the woods for them, and brought in 800 mounted on the horses of his men. But when the divisional returns were prepared on November 29th, it was found that besides killed and wounded in action and sick in hospital, there was a melancholy deficit of 4921 ‘missing’ since October 23rd. The killed and wounded in action, as opposed to the missing, were very few considering the dangers which the Army had gone through: some 160 at Villadrigo, 440 at Villamuriel and Palencia, 70 at the Puente Larga, 113 at Alba de Tormes, 187 at the combat of the Huebra--smaller fights such as the skirmishes at Tordesillas, Aldea Lengua, and Matilla can hardly account for 200 more between them--the total cannot have exceeded 1,200 casualties in action. But nearly 5,000 missing was a sad record. How many of them were dead, how many had deserted, and how many were prisoners in the hands of the French, it is hard to determine. The losses in missing before Salamanca had been insignificant--perhaps 500 in each of the two columns of Wellington and Hill--there had been many drunkards and malingerers taken both at Torquemada and at Valdemoro. But the main loss was suffered between the 16th and the 18th of November, in the woods and mires between Salamanca and the Yeltes river. Soult, in his daily letters to King Joseph, claims to have taken 600 prisoners on the 16th, 1,000 to 1,200 on the 17th, and 100 on the 18th. These figures do not appear incredible, and would allow in addition for well over a thousand men dead, and some hundreds of deserters. The latter were certainly numerous in the foreign corps--the Brunswick-Oels and Chasseurs Britanniques show losses in ‘missing’ out of proportion to all the other regiments[211]. It is noteworthy, when comparing the lists of the ‘missing’ in the various divisions, to see that the Portuguese units suffered far more severely in proportion to their numbers than the British. They showed the total of 2,469 as against 2,477, but this was out of 22,000 men only, while the similar British figure was out of a total of 32,000 or thereabouts--i. e. their loss was about 10·8 per cent. as against about 8 per cent. Several observers of the retreat note that the cold and perpetual rain told much more heavily upon the stamina of the Portuguese, whose native climate is far more mild than that of the plateaux of Leon. They simply sank by the wayside, and died, or suffered themselves to be taken prisoners without attempting to get away. The unit in the whole army which suffered most heavily in the way of ‘missing’ was Bradford’s Portuguese brigade, which lost 514 men out of 1,645. In the Light and 3rd Divisions the Portuguese battalions were little more than a third of the British in numbers, but had more missing than their comrades in the proportion of 163 to 92 in one case and 230 to 184 in the other. The worst