A circumstance occurred on this day that so strongly marks the difference between the British soldiers and the soldiers of any other nation on such a retreat as we were engaged in, that I cannot avoid noticing it. I have already said that we had no means of cooking our meat, and that the soldiers and officers, for all shared the same privations alike, carried their meat raw, or nearly raw; consequently it was not an additional supply of “raw material” that we so much needed as the means of dressing what we had. Nevertheless, towards noon, while a portion of the army was engaged in a warm skirmish with the enemy’s advance, which lay through a vast forest of oak, some hundreds of swine, nearly in a wild state, were discovered feeding upon the acorns which had fallen from the trees the autumn before. No flag of truce ever sent from the advance post of one army to the advance of another had a more decisive effect. Our soldiers immediately opened a murderous fire upon the pigs, who suffered severely on the occasion, being closely pursued on the route, which they followed with that stupid—and for them, on this occasion, fatal—pertinacity which the pig tribe are so proverbial for, namely, going to the rear when they ought to go straight forward. Had this herd of swine deviated from the old beaten track of pigs in general—had they, in short, gone forward instead of rearward—many valuable lives, in the eyes of the owners at least, would have been saved, because they would have soon reached the French advance, and our fellows, once more placed _vis à vis_ with the riflemen of the _grande nation_, would have left off the pursuit—if for nothing else _but to save their bacon_! This _rencontre_, one of the most curious that came within my knowledge during my Peninsular campaigns, or indeed during my sojourn in this world, led to consequences the most comic as well as tragic. Colonel O‘Shea, who commanded the cavalry of the French advance ordered to support the _tirailleurs_, was astounded when he saw the direction which the British fire took. He could not be mistaken; the fire of the advance of his own soldiers had slackened—ceased. It immediately occurred to him that some corps must have got in rear of our advance, and he galloped up to the _tirailleurs_ to ascertain the real state of affairs. He was soon undeceived; but when he learned the cause of the retrograde movement on the part of our men, he could not avoid—and who could?—laughing heartily.