There is no duty which a British soldier performs before an enemy that he does with so much reluctance—a retreat always excepted—as working in trenches. Although essentially necessary to the accomplishment of the most gallant achievement a soldier can aspire to—the storming a breach—it is an inglorious calling; one full of danger, attended with great labour, and, what is even worse, with a deal of annoyance; and for this reason, that the soldiers are not only taken quite out of their natural line of action, but they are, if not entirely, at least partially, commanded by officers, those of the Engineers, whose habits are totally different from what they have been accustomed to. No two animals ever differed more completely in their propensities than the British engineer and the British infantry soldier. The latter delights in an open field, and a fair “stand-up fight,” where he meets his man or men (for numbers, when it comes to a hand-to-hand business, are of little weight with the British soldier); if he falls there, he does so, in the opinion of his comrades, with credit to himself; but a life lost in the trenches is looked upon as one thrown away and lost ingloriously. The engineer, on the contrary, braves all the dangers of a siege with a cheerful countenance; he even courts them, and no mole ever took greater delight in burrowing through a sandhill than an engineer does in mining a covered way, or blowing up a counterscarp. Not so with the infantry soldier, who is obliged to stand to be shot at, with a pick-axe or shovel in his hand instead of his firelock and bayonet. If, then, this is a trying situation, as it unquestionably is for a soldier, where death by round-shot and shell in the works is comparatively less than it is at the moment of the assault of a breach, how much more care should there be taken in the selection of the ladder men than appears to have been the case at San Christoval? On the 22nd of June, the two French Marshals moved a large body of troops towards Elvas and Campo Mayor, in order to cover their _reconnoissance_ of our position. Our army at this time counted about sixty-six thousand men, of which number only six thousand were cavalry. The combined French army exceeded us by about ten thousand, and in the arm of horse they were upwards of three thousand our superiors. Notwithstanding this disproportion of force, Lord Wellington had made able dispositions to beat the French Marshals in detail, and there is little or no doubt but that he would have succeeded, had Marmont been acting in concert with a man as presumptuous as himself; but Soult was too good a judge not to see the sort of adversary he was opposed to, and it was not possible to entrap him. Albuera taught him a lesson.