The month of March, eighteen hundred and eleven, showed the successful workings of Lord Wellington's admirable arrangements. The hitherto victorious French army, which, under their "spoilt child of fortune," had advanced to certain conquest, were now obliged to bundle up their traps and march back again, leaving nearly half their numbers to fatten the land which they had beggared. They had fallen, too, on nameless ground, in sickness and in want, and without a shot, by which their friends and relatives might otherwise have proudly pointed to the graves they filled.

Portugal, at that period, presented a picture of sadness and desolation which it is sickening to think of—its churches spoliated, its villages fired, and its towns depopulated.

It was no uncommon sight, on entering a cottage, to see in one apartment some individuals of the same family dying of want, some perishing under the brutal treatment of their oppressors, and some (preferring death to dishonour) lying butchered upon their own hearths.

These were scenes which no Briton could behold without raising his voice in thanksgiving to the Author of all good, that the home of his childhood had been preserved from such fearful visitations; and yet how melancholy it is to reflect that even in that cherished home there should be many self-styled patriots, who not only grumble at, but would deny their country's pittance to those who devoted the best part of their lives, sacrificed their health, and cheerfully scattered their limbs in rolling the tide of battle from its door.

I lament it feelingly but not selfishly, for as far as I am individually concerned, my country and I are quits. I passed through the fiery ordeal of these bloody times and came out scatheless. While I parted from its service on the score of expediency, it is to me a source of pride to reflect (may I be pardoned the expression) that we parted with mutual regret. That she may never again require a re-union with such an humble individual as myself may heaven in its infinite mercy forfend; but if she does, I am happy in the feeling that I have still health and strength, and a heart and soul devoted to her cause.

Massena's retreat having again called the sword from its scabbard, where it had slumbered for months, it was long ere it had another opportunity of running to rust through idleness, seeing that it was not only in daily communication with the heads of the enemy's corps in the course of their return through Portugal, but wherever else these same heads were visible, and for a year and a half from that date they were rarely out of sight.

On the 9th, we came up with their rear-guard on a table land near Pombal. We had no force with which to make any serious attack upon it, so that it was a day's dragooning, "all cry and little wool." We had one company mixed among them from day-light until dark, but they came back to us without a scratch.

On the morning of the 11th, finding that the enemy had withdrawn from the scene of the former day's skirmish, we moved in pursuit towards the town, which they still occupied as an advanced post. Two of our companies, with some CaÇadores and a squadron of the royal dragoons, made a dash into it, driving the enemy out, and along with a number of prisoners captured the baggage of young Soult.

I know not whether young Soult was the son of old Soult or only the son of his father; all I know is, that by the letters found in his portmanteau, he was the colonel of that name.

His baggage, I remember, was mounted on a stately white horse with a Roman nose and a rat tail, which last I believe is rather an unusual appendage to a horse of that colour, but he was a waggish looking fellow, and probably had shaken all the hairs out of his tail in laughing at the contents of the portmanteau of which he was the bearer.

He and his load were brought to the hammer the same day by his captors, and excited much merriment among us. I wish that I felt myself at liberty to publish an inventory of the contents of a French officer's portmanteau, but as they excited such excess of laughter in a horse I fear it would prove fatal to my readers—not to mention (as I see written on some of the snug corners of our thoroughfares) that "decency forbids." Suffice it that it abounded in luxuries which we dreamt not of.

Next day, the 12th, in following the retiring foe we came to the field of Redinha. I have never in the course of my subsequent military career seen a more splendid picture of war than was there shewn. Ney commanded the opposing force, which was formed on the table land in front of the town in the most imposing shape. We light folks were employed in the early part of the action in clearing the opposing lights from the woods which flanked his position, and in the course of an hour about thirty thousand British, as if by magic, were seen advancing on the plain in three lines, with the order and precision of a field day: the French disappeared before them like snow under the influence of a summer's sun. The forces on both sides were handled by masters in the art.

A late lady writer (Miss Pardoe) I see has now peopled Redinha with banditti, and as far as my remembrance goes, they could not have selected a more favourable position, with this single but important professional drawback, that there can be but few folks thereabout worth robbing.

I know not what class of beings were its former tenants, but at the time I speak of, the curse of the Mac Gregors was upon them, for the retiring enemy had given

and there seemed to be no one left to record its history.

After the peace, in 1814, I met, at a ball in Castel Sarrazin, the colonel who commanded the regiment opposed to us in the wood on that occasion. He confessed that he had never been so roughly handled, and had lost four hundred of his men. He was rather a rough sort of a diamond himself, and seemed anxious to keep his professional hand in practice, for he quarreled that same night with one of his countrymen and was bled next morning with a small sword.

From Redinha we proceeded near to Condeixa, and passed that day and night on the road side in comparative peace. Not so the next, for at Casal Nova, on the 14th, we breakfasted, dined, and supped on powder and ball.

Our general of division was on leave of absence in England during this important period, and it was our curse in the interim to fall into the hands successively of two or three of the worthiest and best of men, but whose only claims to distinction as officers was their sheet of parchment. The consequence was, that whenever there was any thing of importance going on, we were invariably found leaving undone those things which we ought to have done, and doing that which we ought not to have done. On the occasion referred to we were the whole day battering our brains out against stone walls at a great sacrifice of life, whereas, had we waited with common prudence until the proper period, when the flank movements going on under the direction of our illustrious chief had begun to take effect, the whole of the loss would have been on the other side, but as it was, I am afraid that although we carried our point we were the greatest sufferers. Our battalion had to lament the loss of two very valuable officers on that occasion, Major Stewart and Lieutenant Strode.

At the commencement of the action, just as the mist of the morning began to clear away, a section of our company was thrown forward among the skirmishers, while the other three remained in reserve behind a gentle eminence, and the officer commanding it, seeing a piece of rising ground close to the left, which gave him some uneasiness, he desired me to take a man with me to the top of it, and to give him notice if the enemy attempted any movement on that side. We got to the top; but if we had not found a couple of good sized stones on the spot, which afforded shelter at the moment, we should never have got any where else, for I don't think they expended less than a thousand shots upon us in the course of a few minutes. My companion, John Rouse, a steady sturdy old rifleman, no sooner found himself snugly covered, than he lugged out his rifle to give them one in return, but the slightest exposure brought a dozen balls to the spot in an instant, and I was amused to see old Rouse, at every attempt, jerking back his head with a sort of knowing grin, as if it were only a parcel of schoolboys, on the other side, threatening him with snow-balls; but seeing, at last, that his time for action was not yet come, he withdrew his rifle, and, knowing my inexperience in those matters, he very good-naturedly called to me not to expose myself looking out just then, for, said he, "there will be no moving among them while this shower continues."

When the shower ceased we found that they had also ceased to hold their formidable post, and, as quickly as may be, we were to be seen standing in their old shoes, mixed up with some of the forty-third, and among them the gallant Napier, the present historian of the Peninsular War, who there got a ball through his body which seemed to me to have reduced the remainder of his personal history to the compass of a simple paragraph: it nevertheless kept him but a very short while in the back-ground.

I may here remark that the members of that distinguished family were singularly unfortunate in that way, as they were rarely ever in any serious action in which one or all of them did not get hit.

The two brothers in our division were badly wounded on this occasion, and, if I remember right, they were also at Busaco; the naval captain, (the present admiral of that name,) was there as an amateur, and unfortunately caught it on a spot where he had the last wish to be distinguished, for, accustomed to face broadsides on his native element, he had no idea of taking in a ball in any other direction than from the front, but on shore we were obliged to take them just as they came!

This severe harassing action closed only with the day-light, and left the French army wedged in the formidable pass of Miranda de Corvo.

They seemed so well in hand that some doubt was entertained whether they did not intend to burst forth upon us; but, as the night closed in, the masses were seen to melt, and at day-light next morning they were invisible.

I had been on picquet that night in a burning village, and the first intimation we had of their departure was by three Portuguese boys, who had been in the service of French officers, and who took the opportunity of the enemy's night march to make their escape—they seemed well fed, well dressed, and got immediate employment in our camp, and they proved themselves very faithful to their new masters. One of them continued as a servant to an officer for many years after the peace.

In the course of the morning we passed the brigade of General Nightingale, composed of Highlanders, if I remember right, who had made a flank movement to get a slice at the enemy's rear guard; but he had arrived at the critical pass a little too late.

In the afternoon we closed up to the enemy at Foz d'Aronce, and, after passing an hour in feeling for their different posts, we began to squat ourselves down for the night on the top of a bleak hill, but soon found that we had other fish to fry. Lord Wellington, having a prime nose for smelling out an enemy's blunder, no sooner came up than he discovered that Ney had left himself on the wrong side of the river, and immediately poured down upon him with our division, Picton's, and Pack's Portuguese, and, after a sharp action, which did not cease until after dark, we drove him across the river with great loss.

I have often lamented in the course of the war that battalion officers, on occasions of that kind, were never entrusted with a peep behind the curtain. Had we been told before we advanced that there was but a single division in our front, with a river close behind them, we would have hunted them to death, and scarcely a man could have escaped; but, as it was, their greatest loss was occasioned by their own fears and precipitancy in taking to the river at unfordable places—for we were alike ignorant of the river, the localities, or the object of the attack; so that when we carried the position, and exerted ourselves like prudent officers to hold our men in hand, we were, from want of information, defeating the very object which had been intended, that of hunting them on to the finale.

When there is no object in view beyond the simple breaking of the heads of those opposed to us, there requires no speechification; but, on all occasions, like the one related, it ought never to be lost sight of—it is easily done—it never, by any possibility, can prove disadvantageous, and I have seen many instances in which the advantages would have been incalculable. I shall mention as one—that three days after the battle of Vittoria, in following up the retreating foe, we found ourselves in a wood, engaged in a warm skirmish, which we concluded was occasioned by our pushing the enemy's rear guard faster than they found it convenient to travel; but, by and bye, when they had disappeared, we found that we were near the junction of two roads, and that we had all the while been close in, and engaged with the flank of another French division, which was retiring by a road running parallel with our own. The road (and that there was a retiring force upon it) must, or ought to have been known to some of our staff officers, and had they only communicated their information, there was nothing to have prevented our dashing through their line of march, and there is little doubt, too, but the thousands which passed us, while we stood there exchanging shots with them, would have fallen into our hands.

The day after the action at Foz d'Aronce was devoted to repose, of which we stood much in want, for we had been marching and fighting incessantly from day-light until dark for several consecutive days, without being superabundantly provisioned; and our jackets, which had been tolerably tight fits at starting, were now beginning to sit as gracefully as sacks upon us. When wounds were abundant, however, we did not consider it a disadvantage to be low in flesh, for the poorer the subject the better the patient!

A smooth ball or a well polished sword will slip through one of your transparent gentlemen so gently that be scarcely feels it, and the holes close again of their own accord. But see the smash it makes in one of your turtle or turkey fed ones! the hospital is ruined in finding materials to reduce his inflammations, and it is ten to one if ever he comes to the scratch again.

On descending to the river side next morning to trace the effects of the preceding night's combat, we were horrified and disgusted by the sight of a group of at least five hundred donkeys standing there ham-strung. The poor creatures looked us piteously in the face, as much as to say, "Are you not ashamed to call yourselves human beings?" And truly we were ashamed to think that even our enemy could be capable of such refinement in cruelty. I fancy the truth was, they were unable to get them over the river, they had not time to put them to death, and, at the same time, they were resolved that we should not have the benefit of their services. Be that as it may, so disgusted and savage were our soldiers at the sight, that the poor donkeys would have been amply revenged, had fate, at that moment, placed five hundred Frenchmen in our hands, for I am confident that every one of them would have undergone the same operation.

The French having withdrawn from our front on the 16th, we crossed the Ciera, at dawn of day, on the 17th; the fords were still so deep, that, as an officer with an empty haversack on my back, it was as much as I could do to flounder across it without swimming. The soldiers ballasted with their knapsacks, and the sixty rounds of ball cartridge were of course in better fording trim. We halted that night in a grove of cork trees, about half a league short of the Alva.

Next morning we were again in motion, and found the enemy's rear-guard strongly posted on the opposite bank of that river.

The Alva was wide, deep, and rapid, and the French had destroyed the bridge of Murcella, and also the one near Pombeira. Nevertheless, we opened a thundering cannonade on those in our front, while Lord Wellington, having, with extraordinary perseverance, succeeded in throwing three of his divisions over it higher up, threatening their line of retreat—it obliged those opposed to us to retire precipitately, when our staff corps, with wonderful celerity, having contrived to throw a temporary bridge over the river, we passed in pursuit and followed until dark; we did not get another look at them that day, and bivouacked for the night in a grove of pines, on some swampy high lands, by the road side, without baggage, cloaks, or eatables of any kind.

Who has not passed down Blackfriars-road of an evening? and who has not seen, in the vicinity of Rowland Hill's chapel, at least half a dozen gentlemen presiding each over his highly polished tin case, surmounted by variegated lamps, and singing out that most enchanting of all earthly melodies to an empty stomach, that has got a sixpence in its clothly casement, "hot, all hot!" The whole concern is not above the size of a drum, and, in place of dealing in its empty sounds, rejoices in mutton-pies, beef-steaks, and kidney-puddings, "hot, all hot!" If the gentlemen had but followed us to the wars, how they would have been worshipped in such a night, even without their lamps.

In these days of invention, when every suggestion for ameliorating the condition of the soldier is thankfully received, I, as one, who have suffered severely by outward thawings and inward gnawings, beg to found my claim to the gratitude of posterity, by proposing that, when a regiment is ordered on active service, the drummers shall deposit their sheep-skins and their cat-o'-nine tails in the regimental store-room, leaving one cat only in the keeping of the drum major. And in lieu thereof that each drummer be armed with a tin drum full of "hot, all hot!" and that whenever the quarter-master fails to find the cold, the odd cat in the keeping of the drum-major shall be called upon to remind him of his duty.

If the simple utterance of the three magical monosyllables already mentioned did not rally a regiment more rapidly round the given point than a tempest of drums and trumpets, I should be astonished, and as we fought tolerably well on empty stomachs, I should like to see what we would not do on kidney puddings, "hot, all hot!"

On the 19th we were again in motion at day-light, and both on that day and the next, although we did not come into actual contact with the enemy, we picked up a good many stragglers. We were obliged, however, to come to a halt for several days from downright want, for the country was a desert, and we had out-marched our supplies. Until they came up, therefore, we remained two days in one village, and kept creeping slowly along the foot of the Sierra, until our commissariat was sufficiently re-inforced to enable us to make another dash.

I was amused at that time, in marching through those towns and villages which had been the head-quarters of the French army, to observe the falling off in their respect to the Marquess d'Alorna, a Portuguese nobleman, who had espoused their cause, and who, during Massena's advance, had been treated like a prince among them. On their retreat, however, it was easily seen that he was considered an incumbrance. Their names were always chalked on the doors of the houses they occupied, and we remarked that the one allotted to the unfortunate marquis grew gradually worse as we approached the frontier, and I remember that in the last village before we came to Celerico, containing about fifty houses, only a cow's share of the buildings had fallen to his lot.

We halted one day at Mello, and seeing a handsome-looking new church on the other side of the Mondego, I strolled over in the afternoon to look at it. It had all the appearance of having been magnificently adorned in the interior, but the French had left the usual traces of their barbarous and bloody visit. The doors were standing wide open, the valuable paintings destroyed, the statues thrown down, and mixed with them on the floor, lay the bodies of six or seven murdered Portuguese peasants. It was a cruel and a horrible sight, and yet in the midst thereof was I tempted to commit a most sacrilegious act, for round the neck of a prostrate marble female image, I saw a bone necklace of rare and curious workmanship, the only thing that seemed to have been saved from the general wreck, which I very coolly transferred to my pocket and in due time to my portmanteau. But a day of retribution was at hand, for both the portmanteau and the necklace went from me like a tale that is told, and I saw them no more.

It was the 28th before we again came in contact with the enemy at the village of Frexadas. Two companies of ours and some dragoons were detached to dislodge them, which they effected in gallant style, sending them off in confusion and taking a number of prisoners; but the advantage was dearly purchased by the death of our adjutant, Lieutenant Stewart. He imprudently rode into the main street of the village, followed by a few riflemen, before the French had had time to withdraw from it, and was shot from a window.

One would imagine that there is not much sense wrapped up in an ounce of lead, and yet it invariably selects our best and our bravest, (no great compliment to myself by the way, considering the quantity of those particles that must have passed within a yard of my body at different times, leaving all standing.) Its present victim was a public loss, for he was a shrewd, active, and intelligent officer; a gallant soldier, and a safe, jovial, and honourable companion.

I was not one of the party engaged on that occasion, but with many of my brother officers, watched their proceedings with my spy-glass from the church-yard of Alverca. Our rejoicings on the flight of the enemy were quickly turned into mourning by observing in the procession of our returning victorious party, the gallant adjutant's well-known bay horse with a dead body laid across the saddle. We at first indulged in the hope that he had given it to the use of some more humble comrade; but long ere they reached the village we became satisfied that the horse was the bearer of the inanimate remains of his unfortunate master, who but an hour before had left us in all the vigour of health, hope, and manhood. At dawn of day on the following morning the officers composing the advanced guard, dragoons, artillery, and riflemen, were seen voluntarily assembled in front of Sir Sidney Beckwith's quarters, and the body, placed in a wooden chest, was brought out and buried there amid the deep but silent grief of the spectators.

Brief, however, is the space which can be allotted to military lamentations in such times, for within a quarter of an hour we were again on the move in battle array, to seek laurels or death in another field.

Our movement that morning was upon Guarda, the highest standing town in Portugal, which is no joke, as they are rather exalted in their architectural notions—particularly in convent-building—and were even a thunder-charged cloud imprudent enough to hover for a week within a league of their highest land, I verily believe that it would get so saddled with monks, nuns, and their accompanying iron bars, that it would be ultimately unable to make its escape.

Our movement, as already said, was upon Guarda, and how it happened, the Lord and Wellington only knows, but even in that wild mountainous region the whole British army arriving from all points of the compass were seen to assemble there at the same instant, and the whole French army were to be seen at the same time in rapid retreat within gun-shot through the valley below us.

There must have been some screws loose among our minor departments, otherwise such a brilliant movement on the part of our chief would not have gone for nothing. But notwithstanding that the enemy's masses were struggling through a narrow defile for a considerable time, and our cavalry and horse artillery were launched against them, three hundred prisoners were the sole fruits of the day's work.