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FORMERLY A NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICER IN THE RIFLE BRIGADE, LATE CAPTAIN IN THE BRITISH LEGION, AND NOW ONE OF THE WARDENS OF THE TOWER OF LONDON;
NARRATIVES OF THE CAMPAIGNS IN THE PENINSULA UNDER THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, AND THE SUBSEQUENT CIVIL WARS IN SPAIN.
What, must I tell it thee? As o’er my ev’ning fire I musing sat Some few days since, my mind’s eye backward turn’d Upon the various changes I have pass’d— How in my youth with gay attire allur’d, And all the grand accoutrements of war, I left my peaceful home: Then my first battles, When clashing arms, and sights of blood were new: Then all the after-chances of the war; Ay, and that field, a well-fought field it was.
LONDON: COLBURN AND CO., PUBLISHERS, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1852.
LONDON: Printed by Schulze and Co., 13, Poland Street.
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?