I'm afraid that the MILITARY MEMOIRS OF CAPTAIN GEORGE CARLETON is worthless as an historical source. Literature experts have long suspected that the book was written by Daniel Defoe (who specialised in such phoney 'memoirs'), and it has often been included in collections of his works, though the issue has been confused by the fact that there really was a George Carleton serving in Queen Anne's army and until recently the question has remained 'not proven'.

Parnell in his WAR OF THE SUCCESSION IN SPAIN (1905) devoted a whole appendix to arguing the memoirs were fake, though he came to the odd conclusion that they were written by Jonathan Swift, on behalf of the eccentric Allied commander, the Earl of Peterborough. Arthur Wellesley Secord in his STUDIES IN THE NARRATIVE METHOD OF DEFOE (1963) devotes a whole chapter to demonstrating that the book was by Defoe and how he did it; an edition with Defoe as the author was published in 1970, and Ion A. Bell in DEFOE'S FICTION (1985), one of the most recent books on the subject, states categorically that it was written by Defoe.

I have checked with the University of East Anglia's specialist on 18th century English literature, Dr. Robert Clark, and he has kindly sent me a copy of the relevant pages of the standard Defoe bibliography, J.R. Moore's A CHECKLIST OF THE WRITINGS OF DANIEL DEFOE (1960) which includes the MILITARY MEMOIRS. Dr. Clark thinks that this makes the attribution to Defoe definitive.

Defoe may have used original sources in developing the work (see especially Secord) and Moore refers to Carleton being around when the book was at the printers; but it is no less a work of fiction for that - and some of the presumed sourres are themselves extremely suspect