I cannot here forbear making a few remarks with reference to the men who composed our battalion in the Peninsula. The reader will be apt to imagine, that those men who were in the habit of foraging after a day’s march, were but indifferent soldiers. Allow me, with some pretensions to the name of a veteran, to correct this error, and inform the reader, that these were the very men whose bravery and daring in the field far exceeded the merits of their more quiet comrades in quarters. Our men, during the war, might be said to have been composed of three classes. One was zealous and brave to absolute devotion, but who, apart from their “fighting duties,” considered some little indulgence as a right; the other class barely did their duty when under the eye of their superior; while the third, and I am happy to say, by far the smallest in number, were skulkers and poltroons—their excuse was weakness from want of rations; they would crawl to the rear, and were seldom seen until after a battle had been fought, when they might be observed in the ranks until the Commissary again placed them on short allowance, when off they started; in this manner they swelled the muster-rolls. But the first of these were the men who placed the Duke on his present pinnacle as one of the great captains of the age. During the whole of our advance from the frontiers of Portugal, until we entered the Pyrenees, not more (on the average) than one biscuit per day was served out to each man—and it consequently could not be expected that a soldier, weighed down by a heavy knapsack, and from sixty to eighty rounds of ammunition (such as we Riflemen carried at the time), could march from twenty to thirty miles a day on so short an allowance. It was not unfrequent, therefore, after a day’s march to observe groups of our regiment, and, indeed, of the division, rooting up the fields with their swords and bayonets, in search of potatoes, &c., and these were the men who were able to undergo the fatigue of the next day. The French, also, in their hurried retreat stocked themselves with several days’ provisions in advance; these were hung very temptingly from their knapsacks,[15] and as it were, in defiance of our hungry jaws; as a consequence, this gave rise to the well-known remark, or alternatives of the Light Division: “Damme, boys, if the Commissary don’t show his front we must either find a potato field, or have a killing day!” Indeed, but for these resources, so dependent on our individual energies, his Grace, from our being always in front, might have occasionally found half his Light Division “stiff,” and the other half tucked under the blankets as “Belem Rangers.”