The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of Wellington’s genius is not to be seen so much in the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and Salamanca, or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. It is to be found rather in the fact that Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the three finest marshals of the Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after campaign, fighting battle after battle, and suffering defeat after defeat, in the hopeless effort to do what it was absolutely necessary to be done if the conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more than a passing dream of empire. Thus, for instance, when at the end of the campaign of 1810, Masséna finally retired upon Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he had engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer by no fewer than thirty thousand men. We have simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have been able to do if he had only had all these men free to work his will upon Continental troops and win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena, instead of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, and army after army, to dash themselves to pieces against that unbreakable phalanx of British valour and determination which the genius of Wellington had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier. Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and tremendous as were the sacrifices which France submitted to for his sake, all the genius even of Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood of the Napoleonic system was draining away through that open wound in the Peninsula. But for this there would have been no Leipsic, and probably no Moscow, no Waterloo, and no St. Helena. The most splendid military triumph in the history of the world is the uninterrupted march of victory made by Wellington and the soldiers whom his genius had made unconquerable for more than a thousand miles from the lines of Torres Vedras to the banks of the Seine. But behind the brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is something better still, something which Napoleon himself was first to see, and this was the supreme genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity which carried out, without one hitch or fault from start to finish, that marvellous series of operations which began with the first move of the pawns at Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate at Waterloo. Although, as I say, it would be quite out of the question to attempt to draw even the briefest outline of these magnificent campaigns, yet there are one or two incidents in them which may be looked at in passing for the sake of the glimpses they afford of the man in the midst of his work, and, few though they may be, there is yet more real knowledge to be got from them than from many pages of descriptions of battles and sieges.