It is seldom that the last chapter of a volume is written seven years after the first has been finished; and when this does happen, the author is generally to blame. I must ask, however, for complete acquittal on the charge of dilatoriness or want of energy. I was writing the story of the Burgos Campaign in July 1914: in August the Great War broke out: and like every one else I applied for service in any capacity in which a man of fifty-four could be useful. By September 4th I was hard at work in Whitehall, and by a queer chance was the person who on September 12th drafted from very inadequate material the long _communiqué_ concerning the battle of the Marne. For four years and six months I was busy in one office and another, and ended up my service by writing the narrative of the Outbreak of the War, which was published by the Foreign Office in February 1919. My toils at the desk had just finished when it happened that I was sent to the House of Commons, as Burgess representing the University of Oxford, after a by-election caused by the elevation of my predecessor, Rowland Prothero, to the Upper Chamber. Two long official tours in the Rhineland and in France combined with parliamentary work to prevent me writing a word in 1919. But in the recess of 1920 I was able to find time to recommence Peninsular War studies, and this volume was finished in the autumn and winter of 1921 and sent to the press in January 1922. It was fortunate that in the years immediately preceding the Great War I had been taking repeated turns round the Iberian Peninsula, so that the topography of very nearly all the campaigns with which this volume deals was familiar to me. I had marvelled at the smallness of the citadel of Burgos, and the monotony of the plains across which Wellington’s retreat of 1812 was conducted. I had watched the rapid flow of the Zadorra beside Vittoria, marked the narrowness of the front of attack at St. Sebastian, and admired the bold scenery of the lower Bidassoa. Moreover, on the East Coast I had stood on the ramparts of Tarragona, and wondered at the preposterous operations against them which Sir John Murray directed. But there are two sections of this volume in which I cannot speak as one who has seen the land. My travels had never taken me to the Alicante country, or the scene of the isolated and obscure battle of Castalla. And--what is more important--I have never tramped over Soult’s route from Roncesvalles to the gates of Pampeluna, or from Sorauren to Echalar. Such an excursion I had planned in company with my good friend Foster Cunliffe, our All Souls Reader in Military History, who fell on the Somme in 1916, and I had no great desire to think of making it without him. Moreover, the leisure of the times before 1914 is now denied me. So for the greater part of the ten-days’ Campaign of the Pyrenees I have been dependent for topography on the observations of others--which I regret. But it would