Amongst the many daring acts witnessed on the bloody day of Fuentes d'Onore, that of the Spanish guerilla chief, Julian Sanchez, deserves notice. At the head of his ragged and ill-disciplined band, he had the temerity to charge a crack French regiment, and, as might be expected, was sent back with a sore head. Whilst on the subject of guerillas, Mr Grattan combats an opinion which he believes many persons in this country entertain, "that the Spaniards and Portuguese did as much, if not more, during the Peninsular contest, than the British." Here he is certainly mistaken. Very few persons, out of the Peninsula, have any such notion. The French know well enough by whom they were beaten. Loth as they are to acknowledge a thrashing at the hands of their old antagonists, they do not dream of attributing their defeats to the "brigands," of whom they declare they would have had a very cheap bargain, but for the intervention of the troublesome English. And certainly, if the Spaniards and Portuguese had been left to themselves, although, favoured by the mountainous configuration of the country, they might long have kept up a desultory contest, they would never have succeeded in expelling the invaders; for the simple reason that they were wholly unable to meet them in the plain. Most true it is that, during the war of independence, the people of the Peninsula gave numerous examples of bravery and devotion, and still more of long suffering and patient endurance for their country's sake. The irregular mode of warfare adopted by the peasantry, the great activity and constant skirmishings, stratagems, and ambuscades of Mina, the Empecinado, Sanchez, and many other patriotic and valiant men, greatly harassed and annoyed the French; and, by compelling them to employ large bodies of troops in garrison and escort duty, prevented their opposing an overwhelming force to the comparatively small army under Wellington. But all that sort of thing, however useful and efficacious as a general system, and as weakening the enemy, was very petty work when examined in detail. The great victories, the mighty feats of war that figure in history's page, were due to British discipline, pluck, and generalship. And whatever merit remains with the Spaniards, is to be attributed to their guerillas and irregular partisans. As to their regular troops, after they had overthrown Dupont at Baylen, they seemed to think they might doze upon their laurels, which were very soon wrenched from them. Baylen was their grand triumph, and subsequently to it they did little in the field. Behind stone walls they still fought well: Spaniards are brave and tenacious in a fortress, and Saragossa is a proud name in their annals. Nothing could be better than old General Herrasti's valiant defence of Cuidad Rodrigo against Ney and his thirty thousand Frenchmen. The garrison, six thousand strong, lost seven hundred men by the first day's fire. Only when their guns were silenced, when the town was on fire in various places, and when several yards of wall were thrown down by a mine, did the brave governor hoist the white flag. Other instances of the kind might be cited, when Spanish soldiers fought as well as mortal men could do. But with respect to pitched battles, another tale must be told. At Ocaña, Almonacid, and on a dozen other disastrous fields, Baylen was amply revenged. The loss at Ocaña alone is rated by Spanish accounts at thirty thousand men, chiefly prisoners. Mr Grattan estimates it at twenty-five thousand men, and thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven guitars. Of these latter, he tells us twelve thousand seven hundred and fifty-two were in cases, and the remainder without; Indeed he is so exceedingly circumstantial that we presume he counted them himself. Otherwise, although well aware of the Spaniard's predilection for the fascinating tinkle of his national instrument, we could hardly credit the accuracy of the figures. Even a Spanish general, we should think, would hardly allow his men thus to encumber themselves with harmony. The march of such an army of Orpheuses, in which every third soldier shouldered a fiddle-case as a pendant to his musket, must have been curious to behold; suggesting the idea that the melodious warriors designed subduing their foes by the soothing strains of jotas and cachuchas, rather than by the more cogent arguments of sharp steel and ball-cartridge. Great must have been the tinkling at eventide, exceeding that of the most extensive flock of merinos that ever cropped Castilian herbage. Was it because they were certain of a dance that these barrack-yard minstrels came provided with music, sure, in any case, to have the piper to pay? If the instruments were provided to celebrate a triumph, they might as well have been left at home. In Spain, however, time has effaced, or greatly weakened, the remembrance of many reverses, whilst slight and dubious successes, carefully treasured up, have swollen by the keeping into mighty victories; and at the present day, foreigners who should be so uncourteous and impolitic as to express, in the hearing of Spaniards, a doubt that Spanish valour was the main agent in driving the French from the Peninsula, might reckon, not on a stab—knifeing being less in vogue beyond the Bay of Biscay than is often imagined—but certainly on a scowl, and probably on an angry contradiction. And in every province, almost in every town, in Spain the traveller may, if he so pleaseth, be regaled with marvellous narratives of signal victories, gained over the gavachos, in that immediate neighbourhood, by valiant generals whose names, so partial is fame, have never transpired beyond the scenes of their problematical exploits. Under the constitutional system, and owing to the long civil war, Spanish troops have improved in discipline and in various other respects; and with good generals, there is no manifest reason why they should not successfully cope with Frenchmen, although we doubt whether they could. But in Napoleon's day matters were very different, and in the open field their chance was desperate. The Portuguese were doubtless of a better quality; and in the pages of Napier and other historians, we find them spoken of in terms of praise. They had British officers to head them, and there is much in good leading; they had British troops to emulate, and national pride spurred them on. At the same period, Italians—certainly very poor soldiers when left to themselves—fought gallantly under French generals, and with French example before them. Of the general bearing of the Portuguese, however, we have heard few Peninsular men speak very highly. They appear to have been extremely inconsistent; brave one day, dastards the next.
At, Ciudad Rodrigo, Mr Grattan greatly lauds their gallantry, which struck him the more as being unexpected. At Salamanca, on the other hand, he records their weakness, and the easy repulse of Pack's brigade, two thousand strong, by four hundred Frenchmen. "Notwithstanding all that has been said and written of the Portuguese troops, I still hold the opinion that they are utterly incompetent to stand unsupported and countenanced by British troops, with any chance of success, against even half their own numbers of Frenchmen." Again, after Salamanca, when Wellington and his victorious army advanced on Madrid, the Portuguese dragoons fled, without striking a blow, before the French lancers, exposing the reserve of German cavalry to severe loss, abandoning the artillery to its fate, and tarnishing the triumphal entry of the British into the capital—within a march of which this disgraceful affair occurred. Still, to encourage these wavering heroes, it was necessary to speak civilly of them in despatches; to pat them on the back, and tell them they were fine fellows. And this has sometimes been misunderstood by simple persons, who believe all they see in print, and look upon despatches and bulletins as essentially veracious documents. "I remember once," says Mr Grattan, "upon my return home in 1813, getting myself closely cross-examined by an old lawyer, because I said I thought the Portuguese troops inferior to the French, still more to the British. 'Inferior to the British, sir! I have read Lord Wellington's last despatch, and he says the Portuguese fought as well as the British; and I suppose you won't contradict him?' I saw it was vain to convince this pugnacious old man of the necessity of saying these civil things, and we parted mutually dissatisfied with each other; he taking me, no doubt, for a forward young puppy, and I looking upon him as a monstrous old bore."
The Eighty-eighth, we gather from Mr Grattan's narrative, whilst respected by all as a first-rate battle regiment, was, when the stirring and serious events of that busy time left a moment for trifling, a fertile source of amusement to the whole third division. This is not wonderful. Many of the officers, and all the men, with the exception of three or four, were Irish, not Anglicised Irishmen, tamed by long residence amongst the Saxon, but raw, roaring Patlanders, who had grown and thriven on praties and potheen, and had carried with them to Spain their rich brogue, their bulls, and an exhaustless stock of gaiety. The amount of fun and blunders furnished by such a corps was naturally immense. But if in quarters they were made the subject of much good-humoured quizzing, in the field their steady valour was justly appreciated. No regiment in the service contained a larger proportion of "lads that weren't aisy," which metaphorical phrase, current among the Rangers, is translated by Mr Grattan as signifying fellows who would walk into a cannon's month, and think the operation rather a pleasant one. Whenever a desperate service was to be done, "the boys," as they, more Hibernico, familiarly termed themselves, were foremost in the ranks of volunteers. The contempt of danger, or non-comprehension of it, manifested by some of these gentlemen, was perfect. "My fine fellow," said an engineer officer, during the unsuccessful siege of Badajoz in May 1811, to a man under Lieutenant Grattan's orders, who sat outside a battery, hammering at a fascine; "my fine fellow, you are too much exposed; get inside the embrasure, and you will do your work nearly as well." "I'm almost finished, colonel," was the reply, "and it isn't worth while to move now. Those fellows can't hit me, for they've been trying it these fifteen minutes." Just then, a round-shot gave the lie to his prediction by cutting him in two; and, according to their custom, the French gunners set up a shout of triumph at their successful practice. Some of the Connaughters, who had never lost sight of their native bogs till exported to the Peninsula, understood little or no English beyond the words of command. On an inspection parade, one of this class was asked by General Mackinnon, to whose squad he belonged. Bewildered and puzzled, Darby Rooney applied to his sergeant for a translation of the general's question—thus conveying to the latter an idea that this was the first time he had heard such a thing as a squad spoken of. The story got abroad—was, of course, much embellished—and an hour afterwards the third division was enjoying a prodigious chuckle at the notion that not one of the Connaughters knew what a squad meant. The young men laughed, the old officers shook their heads and deplored the benighted state of the Irishmen; whilst all the time, Mr Grattan assures us, "the Eighty-eighth was a more really efficient regiment than almost any two corps in the third division." As efficient as any they undoubtedly were, when fighting was to be done; but in some other respects their conduct was less irreproachable. According to their historian and advocate's own showing, their knapsacks were often too light and their havresacks too heavy. "A watchcoat, a piece of pipe-clay, and a button-brush," compose rather a scanty kit: yet those three articles formed—with the exception of the clothes he stood in—the entire wardrobe and means of personal adornment of the Rooney above-named; and many of his comrades were scarce better provided. But if the back was neglected and left bare, the belly, on the contrary, was cared for with vigilant affection. On occasion, the Eighty-eighth could do their work on meagre diet as well, or better than any other corps. They would march two days on a pipe of tobacco; or for a week, with the addition of a biscuit and a dram. But when they did such things, it was no sign of any abstract love of temperance, or wish to mortify the flesh; it was simply a token of the extreme poverty of the district in which they found themselves. For the article provend they always kept a bright look-out. A greasy havresack, especially on the line of march, is the soldier's first desideratum; and it was rare that a very respectable workhouse soup could not have been produced by infusing that of a Connaughter in a proper quantity of water. When rations were scanty, or commissaries lagged in the rear, none understood better than the Eighty-eighth how to forage for themselves. "Every man his own quartermaster" was then their motto. Nothing came amiss to them; sweet or savoury, from a pig to a bee-hive, they sacked every thing; and their "taking ways" were often cast in their teeth. The natives were compelled to mount guard over their sheepfolds; but the utmost force they could muster was of small avail against the resolute onslaught of the half-famished Irishmen. Even the exertions of the Provost-marshal, and the liberal application of the cat, proved ineffectual to check these depredations; whilst the whimsical arguments used by the fellows in their defence sometimes disarmed the severity of Picton himself.
It would have been quite out of character for an Irish regiment to march without ladies in their train, and accordingly the female following of the Rangers was organised on the most liberal scale. Motley as it was numerous, it included, besides English and Irish women, a fair sprinkling of tender-hearted Spaniards and Portuguese, who had been unable to resist the fascinations of the insinuating Connaughters. The sufferings of these poor creatures, on long marches, over bad roads and in wet and cold seasons, were of course terrible, and only to be equalled by their fidelity to those to whom they had attached themselves. Their endurance of fatigue was wonderful; their services were often great; and many a soldier, stretched disabled on the field of some bloody battle, and suffering from the terrible thirst attendant on wounds, owed his life to their gentle ministry. In circumstances of danger, they showed remarkable courage. At the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo, the baggage-guard, eager to share in the fight, deserted their post and rushed to the trenches. Immediately a host of miscreants—fellows who hung on the skirts of the army, watching opportunities to plunder—made a dash at the camp, but the women defended it valiantly, and fairly beat them off. Of course feminine sensibility got a little blunted by a life of this kind, and it was rarely with very violent emotion that the ladies saw their husbands go into action. Persuaded of their invincibility, they looked upon success as certain, and if, unfortunately, the victory left them widows, they deemed a very short mourning necessary before contracting a new alliance. Now and then a damsel of birth and breeding would desert the paternal mansion to follow the drum; and Mr Grattan tells a romantic history of a certain Jacinta Cherito, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy judge, who blacked her face and tramped off as a cymbal boy under the protection of the drum-major of the Eighty-eighth—a magnificent fellow, whose gorgeous uniform and imposing cocked hat caused him to be taken by the Portuguese for nothing less than a general of division. The young lady had not forgotten to take her jewels with her, and the old judge made a great fuss, and appealed to the colonel, who requested him to inspect the regiment as it left the town. But the sooty visage and uniform jacket baffled his penetration, and at the first halt, the drummer and the lady were made one flesh. Thorp, the lucky bridegroom, was a fine dashing fellow, bent upon distinguishing himself. He was often wounded, but never missed an engagement, even when his hurts were unhealed. He fell gloriously at Toulouse, and the next day came the gazette with his promotion to an ensigncy, which, if it was then of little value to him, was at any rate "a great consolation to his poor afflicted widow, and the means of reconciling her father to the choice she had made; and her return once more to her home was a scene of great rejoicing." When the British troops embarked at Bordeaux, for America and England, a crowd of poor Spanish and Portuguese women, who had long followed their fortunes and were now forbidden to accompany their husbands and lovers, watched their departure with tearful eyes. "They were fond and attached creatures, and had been useful in many ways, and under many circumstances, not only to their husbands, but to the corps they belonged to generally. Many of them, the Portuguese in particular, had lived with our men for years, and had borne them children." But the stern rules of the service prevailed. The battalions bound for America were allowed but a limited number of soldiers' wives, and the surplus were of necessity left to their fate. Some had money; more were penniless, and nearly naked. Men and officers were then greatly in arrear, but nevertheless a subscription was got up, and its amount divided amongst the unfortunates, thus abandoned upon a foreign shore, and at many hundreds of miles from their homes.
General Picton was a man of action, not of words. There was no palaver about him, nothing superfluous in the way of orations, but he spoke strongly and to the point. Long harangues, as Mr Grattan justly observes, are not necessary to British soldiers. Metaphor and flowers of rhetoric are thrown away upon them. Something plain, pithy, and appropriate is what they like; the shorter the better. "Rangers of Connaught!" said Picton, as he passed the Eighty-eighth, drawn up for the assault of Ciudad Rodrigo, "it is not my intention to expend any powder this evening. We'll do this business with the cold iron." This was a very unpretending speech; nothing of the clap-trap or melodramatic about it; a mere declaration in the fewest possible words, of the speaker's intentions, implying what he expected from those he addressed. That it was just what was wanted, was proved by the hearty respondent cheer of the brave Irishmen. The result of the attack is well known; the Rangers took a gallant share in it. The next morning the troops were ordered out of the captured town, which they had ransacked to some purpose, and the Eighty-eighth, drawn up on their bivouac ground, were about to march away to the village of Atalaya, when Picton again rode past. "Some of the soldiers, who were more than usually elevated in spirits," (they had passed the night in bursting open doors and drinking brandy,) "called out, 'Well, General, we gave you a cheer last night: it's your turn now!' The general smiled, took off his hat, and said, 'Here, then, you drunken set of brave rascals—hurrah! we'll soon be at Badajoz.'" A prophecy which was not long unaccomplished. With all deference to Mr Grattan, we cannot but think that the Eighty-eighth were very appropriately placed under Picton's orders. Excellent fighting men though they were, they certainly, according to their champion's own showing, needed a strict hand over them. We should like to know how they would have got on under such an officer as Mr Grattan tells us of, who, when in command of a regiment, came to mess one day in very low spirits, because, having sent his adjutant to inquire of an ensign why he did not attend parade, the ensign returned no answer, and, on subsequently meeting his commanding officer, cut him dead. The colonel told the story at the mess-table, and concluded by saying, "I thought nothing of his not answering my message, but I cannot express how much I am hurt at the idea of his cutting me as he did when I wished to speak to him!" Field-officers of such susceptible feelings, and such very loose ideas on the subject of discipline, were not plentiful in the Peninsula, and this one, we are given to understand, did not long retain his regiment. He would hardly have done at the head of the high-spirited Connaughters. But if Picton's severity to the men of the Eighty-eighth may be justified, his neglect of the officers is far more difficult to excuse. "Not one of them was ever promoted through his recommendation." The conduct of Lieutenant Mackie at Ciudad Rodrigo was chivalrous in the extreme. General Mackinnon—who commanded the brigade and was blown to pieces at its head by the explosion of a mine—wished to confer a mark of distinction on the gallant Eighty-eighth, and ordered that one of its subalterns should lead the forlorn-hope. The moment this was announced to the assembled officers, "Mackie stepped forward, and lowering his sword, said, 'Major Thompson, I am ready for that service.'" Mackinnon had promised a company to the forlorn-hope leader, if he survived. But it must be observed that Mackie was senior lieutenant, and consequently sure of early promotion. The Eighty-eighth was to be in the van at the assault, and the probabilities were that at least one captain would be knocked off. Or, if not that day, it would happen the next. So that Mackie, in volunteering on the most desperate of all services, could have little to actuate him beyond an honourable desire for glory. How was he repaid? Gurwood, who led the forlorn-hope at the lesser breach, got his company; Mackie remained a lieutenant—no captain of the Eighty-eighth having been killed, and General Mackinnon not being alive to fulfil his promise. And whilst all the other officers who had been forward in the attack, had their names recorded in Picton's division-order, poor Mackie was denied even the word of barren praise so gratifying to a soldier's heart.
The loss of Ciudad Rodrigo was a stunning blow to the French. They could not understand it at all. Herrasti and his Spaniards had held out the place a month against Ney and Massena, with thirty or forty thousand veterans, and that in fine weather, a great advantage to the besiegers—in eleven days, and in the depth of winter, Wellington reduced it, with twenty thousand men and opposed by a French garrison. The contrast was great, and quite inexplicable to the French. "On the 16th," wrote Marmont to Berthier, "the English batteries opened their fire at a great distance. On the 19th the place was taken by storm, and fell into the power of the enemy. There is something so incomprehensible in this event, that I allow myself no observation. I am not provided with the requisite information." No testimony could be more complimentary to the brave captors of Rodrigo. That great success, however, was only a forerunner of greater ones. Badajoz was the next place to be taken, preparatory to marching into the interior of Spain. To conceal his intentions from the enemy, Wellington had recourse to an elaborate stratagem. A powerful battering train, supplied by the men of war in the Tagus, was shipped at Lisbon, on board vessels of large size, which put out to sea, and, when out of sight of land, transhipped their cargo into smaller craft. These carried them up the Tagus into the heart of the country. At the same time the necessary magazines were formed; and at Elvas, only three leagues from Badajoz, a large quantity of fascines and gabions were prepared. All this, however, was done so quietly, Wellington appeared so supine, and Badajoz was so well provided, that Soult was lulled into security; and when at last he took the alarm, and marched from Seville at the head of twenty-five thousand men, it was too late. Philippon, and his brave garrison, did all that skill and courage could; but in vain. When Soult reached Villafranca, two days' march from Badajoz, the fortress had already been two days in the power of the English. This, to the French, was another unaccountable business; they, even yet, had not learned fully to appreciate the sovereign virtues of British bayonets. "I think the capture of Badajoz a very extraordinary event," Lery, Soult's chief engineer, wrote to General Kellerman, "and I am much at a loss to account for it in a clear and distinct manner." This comes at the end of a mysterious sort of epistle, in which the engineer general talks of fatality, and seems to think that the British had no right to take Badajoz, defended as it was. But Wellington and his army were great despisers of that sort of right, and, in spite of the really glorious defence, in spite of the strategy of the governor and the valour of the garrison, of chevaux de frise of sword-blades, and of the deadly accuracy of the French artillery and musketeers, Badajoz was taken. The triumph was fearfully costly. Nearly four thousand five hundred men fell on the side of the besiegers;—Picton's division was reduced to a skeleton, and the Connaught Rangers lost more than half their numbers.
Shot through the body at Badajoz, Mr Grattan was left there when his division marched away. He gives a terrible account of the sacking of the town; but on such details, even had they not been many times recapitulated, it is not pleasant to dwell. The frightful crimes perpetrated during those two days of unbridled excess and violence, rest at the door of the man whose boundless ambition occasioned that most desolating war. From an ignorant and sensual soldiery, excited to madness by a prolonged resistance, and by one of the most sanguinary conflicts recorded in the history of sieges, forbearance could hardly be expected. The horrible saturnalia, in which murder and rape, pillage and intoxication, are pushed to their utmost limits, are the necessary condition of a successful assault on a desperately defended fortress; and supposing them prohibited, and that such prohibition could be enforced, we agree with Mr Grattan in believing that many a town that has been victoriously carried, might have been found impregnable. But one must ever deplore the disgraceful scenes enacted in the streets and houses of Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, and St Sebastian. Unsurpassed in atrocity, they remain everlasting blots upon the bright laurels gathered by the British in the Peninsula. And it is small palliation, that under similar circumstances, the armies of all nations have acted in like manner. Here the sufferers were not enemies. To the garrison, when their resistance ceased, quarter was given; they were marched away scatheless, and treated with that humanity which England, notwithstanding the lying assertions of foreign historians, has ever used towards her prisoners. No, the victims were friends and allies. The very nation in whose behalf our soldiers had fought, saw their houses ransacked, their property wasted, their wives and daughters brutally outraged, by those whose mission was to protect and defend. Let us hope they have forgotten, or at least forgiven, such gloomy episodes in the struggle for their liberation.
The advocates of universal peace might adduce many potent and practical arguments in favour of their doctrine from the pages of Mr Grattan's book. He is unsparing in his details of the inevitable horrors of war; and some of his descriptions, persons of tender hearts and sensitive nerves will do well to pass over. They may be read with profit by those who, accustomed to behold but the sunny side of military life, think too lightly of the miseries war entails. Let such accompany Mr Grattan though the streets of Badajoz, on the morning of the 7th April, 1812, and into the temporary hospital of Villa Formosa, after the fierce conflict of Fuentes d'Onore, where two hundred soldiers still awaited, twenty-four hours after the action, the surgeons' leisure, for the amputation of their limbs. Let them view with him the piles of unsuccoured wounded on the breach of Badajoz, and hear the shrieks and groans of men dying in helpless agony, without a friendly hand to prop their head, or a drop of water to cool their fevered lips. From such harrowing scenes it is pleasant to turn to the more humane and redeeming features of civilised warfare, and to note the courteous and amicable relations that existed between the contending armies when, as sometimes happened, they lay near together without coming to blows. This occurred previously to the battle of Salamanca. From the 3d to the 12th of July, the French and British were in presence of each other, encamped on either side the Douro, at that season little more than a rivulet. Of course all were on the alert; there was no laxity or negligence that could tempt to surprise; but neither was there any useless skirmishing or picket firing; every thing was conducted in the most gentlemanly and correct manner. The soldiers bathed together and exchanged their rations, and the officers were on equally good terms. "The part of the river of which I speak was occupied, on our side, by the Third division; on the French side by the Seventh division. The French officers said to us at parting, 'We have met, and have been for some time friends. We are about to separate, and may meet as enemies. As friends we received each other warmly; as enemies we shall do the same.' Ten days afterwards the British Third and the French Seventh division were opposed to each other at Salamanca, and the Seventh French was destroyed by the British Third." Mr Grattan's wound was healed in ample time for him to assist at the battle of Salamanca; a glorious victory, which would have been even more complete had the British been properly seconded by their Portuguese allies. The behaviour of these was any thing but creditable to their nation. One detachment of caçadores actually threw themselves on their faces to avoid the enemy's fire, and not all the blows showered on them by their commander, Major Haddock, could induce them to exchange their recumbent attitude for one more dignified. Notwithstanding this, and the more fatal feebleness of Pack's brigade, the French were totally beaten, and their loss was nearly four times that of the British. Lord Wellington's opinion of the battle—a particularly honourable one to our troops, inasmuch as they not only fought better, but (which was not always the case) moved and manœuvred better, than the picked veterans of the French army—is sufficiently shown by the fact that "he selected it in preference to all his other victories, as the most fitting to be fought over in sham-fight on the plains of St Denis, in the presence of the three crowned heads who occupied Paris after the second abdication of the Emperor Napoleon, in 1815."
At Salamanca, the right brigade of the Third division, including the Connaught Rangers, charged the entire division of the French General Thomière. So awful was the volley that welcomed them, that more than half the officers, and nearly the whole front rank, were swept away. Doubtless the French thought this would prove a sickener, for great was their consternation when, before the smoke had well cleared away, they saw the shattered but dauntless brigade advancing fiercely and steadily upon them. Panic-stricken, they wavered; "the three regiments ran onward, and the mighty phalanx, which a moment before was so formidable, loosened and fell in pieces before fifteen hundred invincible British soldiers fighting in a line of only two deep." In this memorable charge, the standard-pole of the Eighty-eighth was struck by a bullet, the same that killed Major Murphy, who commanded the battalion. New colours have since been presented to the regiment, but the wounded pole is still preserved, and on it is engraved, on a plate of silver, the day and the manner of its mutilation.
An advance on Madrid was consequent on the triumph at Salamanca, and on the 12th of August, Wellington and his army reached the Spanish capital. Their entrance has often been described, but in default of novelty, Mr Grattan's account of it possesses spirit and interest. It was one of those scenes that repay soldiers for months of fatigue and danger. The troops were almost carried into the city in the arms of the delighted populace. The steady, soldier-like bearing of the men, the appearance of the officers, nearly all mounted, inspired respect and increased the general enthusiasm. For miles from Madrid, the road was thronged; when the army got into the streets, it was no longer possible to preserve the order of march. The ranks were broken by the pressure of the crowd, and the officers (lucky dogs!) were half-smothered in the embraces of the charming Madrileñas. Young and old, ugly and handsome, all came in for their share of hugs and kisses. Still, although patriotism impelled the Spanish fair to look with favour upon the scarlet-coated Britons, the painful confession must be made that as individuals they gave the preference to the lively, light-hearted Frenchmen. Napoleon was the fiend himself, incarnate in the form of an under-sized Corsican, and the gavachos were his imps, whom it was praise-worthy to shoot at from behind every hedge, and to poniard whenever the opportunity offered. Such was the creed inculcated by the priests, and devoutly entertained by their petticoated penitents—that is to say, by every Christian woman in the Peninsula. But somehow or other, when French regiments were quartered in Spanish towns, the female part of the population forgot the anathemas of their spiritual consolers, and looked complacently upon those they were enjoined to abhor. It was a case of "nos amis les ennemis," and the French, beaten every where in the field, obtained facile and frequent triumphs in the boudoir. "It is a singular fact, and I look upon it as a degrading one," says Mr Grattan with diverting seriousness, "that the French officers, whilst at Madrid, made in the ratio of five to one more conquests than we did." The dignity of the admission might be questioned; the degree of degradation is matter of opinion; the singularity is explained away by Mr Grattan himself. He blames his comrades for their stiff, unbending manners, and for their non-conformance to the customs of the country. They were nearly three months at Madrid, and yet he declares that, at the end of that time, they knew little more of the inhabitants than of the citizens of Pekin. And he opines that the impression left in Spain by the Peninsular army was rather one of respect for their courage, than of admiration of their social graces and general affability. If Mr Grattan, whilst reposing at ease upon his well-earned bays, would devise and promulgate an antidote to the mixture of shyness, reserve, and hauteur, which renders Englishmen, wherever they travel, the least popular of the European family, he would have a claim on his country's gratitude stronger even than the one he established whilst defending her with his sword in the well-contested fields of the Peninsula. Notwithstanding, however, the unamiability with which he reproaches his companions in arms, there was much fun and feasting, and sauntering in the Prado, and bull-fighting and theatre-going, whilst the British were at Madrid. But it was too pleasant to last long. The best a soldier can expect in war-time, is an alternation of good quarters and severe hardship. The "quart-d'heure de Rabelais" was at hand, when all the dancing, drinking, masking, and other pleasant things should be paid for, and the brief enjoyment forgotten, amidst the sufferings of the most painful retreat—excepting, of course, that of Corunna—effected by a British army during the whole war. We refer to the retrograde movement that followed the unsuccessful siege of Burgos.