Roy

Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
Dost thou remember, soldier old and hoary, The days we fought and conquered, side by side, On fields of bank, famous now in story, Where Britons triumphed, And where Britons died? Dost thou remember all those marches weary, From gathering foes, to reach Coruña's shore? Who can forget that midnight sad and dreary, When in his grave we laid the noble Moore? But ere he died, our General heard us cheering And saw us charge with Victory's flag unfurled,— And then he slept, without a moment's fearing For British soldiers conquering all the world. NORMAN MACLEOD.
IN the following pages I have tried to give a faithful picture of life in England and in France during the first decade of the Nineteenth Century. The invasion scare, the state of National feeling in our land, the conditions which prevailed among British prisoners in France, the descriptions of French conscripts and French dungeons, etc., are in accordance with reality. My authorities have been many, including volumes written and published at the time, long since out of print. One chief authority for dungeon-scenes is the Narrative of Major-General Lord Blayney, himself four years a captive at Verdun and elsewhere; but his account by no means stands alone. My aim has been in no case to overdraw, but to be true to those things which actually were.
Some old MS. letters, handed down in my own family, belonging to that date, have been no inconsiderable help.
In the central figure of the tale I have sought to draw a portrait, true again to life, of him who in an age of British heroes ranked par excellence as England's foremost soldier-hero; of him about whom, twenty years later, Sir George Napier wrote— That great and good soldier ... to whom I looked up as the first of men; of him about whom, half a lifetime after the Battle of Coruña, Sir Charles Napier, the famous conqueror of Scinde, could sadly say— Thirty-eight years ago the great Moore fell: I have never seen his equal since!