So many Lives of Soldiers have already been written, and by abler pens than mine, and so many tales have arisen out of the chequered scenes of the late Peninsular War, and the short existence of the British Legion, that I dare not be very sanguine of creating for my work any great degree of interest.

But every man’s life is a volume of change, felt and expressed according to his peculiar dispositions and feelings, which are as varied under a military as they can be under a civil life. Could the never to be forgotten Tom Crawley but give his own detail!—could Long Tom of Lincoln, once one of the smartest of our regiment, now the forlorn bone-picker of Knightsbridge, but pen his own eventful track—could Wilkie, Hetherington, Plunket, and many others of those humbler heroes, conquerors in such well-contested fields as Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, and Waterloo, &c., whose exploits form the principal attractions in this volume, and whose stubborn spirits and perforated bodies formed key-stones for the fame of our immortal Wellington, whose standard might have found a sandy support but for the individual bravery of the soldiers of his invincible divisions: could they but recount their varied casts of fortune—who would fail to read their histories and help to rear a cypress to their memories?

With these considerations, I send this volume forth, trusting that the reader will bear in mind that he who wrote it was both actor and spectator in the scenes he has narrated, and feels assured that by their perusal, he will be enabled to guess at what is generally felt and experienced by the individual soldier.

In the British Legion I held a medium rank. I saw not only what its soldiers were, but caught a glance at their officers: with them my military career flickered out its last moments of existence. Its brighter fortunes, short as they were, however, gave me sufficient opportunity to value those unfortunate men—my humbler comrades, and to be convinced by their deeds, that the British soldier, with sickness, oppression, the lash, and other distresses, still possessed his old spirit, and was as fitted to reap laurels as he had been in more glorious times.