It is clearly from the domestic annals of the 88th that Charles Lever drew the greater part of the good stories which made the fortune of _Charles O’Malley_. The reader will find many of the characters of that excellent romance appearing as actual historical personages in Grattan, notably the eccentric surgeon Maurice Quill, whose fame was so great throughout the British army that the novelist did not even take the trouble to change his name. His colleague Dr. O’Reily was almost as great an original. Many of the humours of Mickey Free seem to be drawn directly from the doings of Grattan’s servant Dan Carsons. Comparing the “real thing” with the work of fiction, one is driven to conclude that much of what was regarded as rollicking invention on Lever’s part, was only a photographic reproduction of anecdotes that he had heard from old soldiers of the Connaught Rangers. Military diaries are often disappointing from one of two causes. Either the author slips into second-hand and second-rate narratives of parts of the campaign which he did not himself witness—things which he had better have left to the professed historian—or he fails to give us those small traits of the daily life of the regiment which are needed to make us realise the actualities of war. Grattan sometimes falls into the first-named fault, but never into the latter. He seems to have had an instinctive knowledge of what future generations would want to know concerning the old Peninsular army—its trials in the matter of pay, food, and clothing, its shifts and devices, its views of life and death. If any one wishes to know why Sir Thomas Picton was unpopular, or what the private and the subaltern thought about Lord Wellington, they will find what they seek in these pages. Nowhere else have I seen the psychology of the stormers of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz dealt with in such a convincing fashion; let the reader note in particular pages 144–5 and 193–4. I have to confess that in various parts of this reprint I have used the Editor’s license to delete a certain amount of the author’s original manuscript. Grattan had two besetting sins considered as a literary man. The first was one to which I have already made allusion. Not unfrequently he quitted his autobiographical narrative, and inserted long paragraphs concerning parts of the war of which he had no personal knowledge, _e.g._ about the movements of Hill’s corps in Estremadura, or of the Spaniards in remote corners of the Peninsula. These, as is natural, are often full of inaccuracies: sometimes (and this is a worse fault) they turn out to be taken almost _verbatim_ from formal histories, such as those of Colonel Jones and Lord Londonderry. In one place I found thirty lines which were practically identical with a passage in Napier. In all cases these relate to parts of the war which did not come under Grattan’s own eyes: I have therefore ventured to omit them.