In January, 1810, one year after Corunna, Charles Napier rejoined the Fiftieth Regiment, again in the south of England. Meanwhile another expedition had gone to Portugal, and great events had taken place in the Peninsula. Sir Arthur Wellesley, having driven Soult from Oporto, urged by the Ministry at home and by their representatives in the Peninsula to repeat the movement into Spain which had so nearly ended in the destruction of Sir John Moore's army, advanced along the Tagus, joined Cuesta, fought the French at Talavera de la Reyna, held his position during the battle but fell back from it two days later, leaving his wounded to be captured by the enemy, and narrowly escaping by a forced march Soult's advancing army, retreated back to Portugal with the loss in killed, wounded, prisoners, and by death from disease of fully one-third of his entire army. The British Government, now feeling certain that the last hour of Napoleon had arrived, all at once resorted to the old idea of foreign expeditions; and two of the largest expeditions that had ever left the British Islands had been despatched to the Continent, one to Italy, the other to Holland. In all the long history of abortive military enterprise there is nothing so sad as this Walcheren expedition. It numbered in its naval and military total eighty thousand fighting men. Its fate has been told with vehement truth by Charles Napier's brother. "Delivered over," writes William Napier, "to the leading of a man whose military incapacity has caused the glorious title of Chatham to be scorned, this ill-fated army, with spirit and strength and zeal to have spread the fame of England to the extremities of the earth, perished without a blow in the pestilent marshes of Walcheren." Thus this year 1809, which had opened upon Charles Napier in the gloom of the retreat to Corunna, ran its course of conflict to find him at its close an impatient spectator of these three mighty efforts in Spain, southern Italy, and on the Scheldt, which, though not unattended by brilliant feats of arms in at least one theatre of hostility, had all, so far as their ultimate object was concerned, left matters precisely where they had found them. For it was not at the extremities of his vast empire that the power of Napoleon was to be successfully encountered. When on the first day of the new year he turned back from the distant Galician frontier to take up the burthen of continental war which Austria, subsidised by England, had so suddenly cast upon him, he realised that in the heart of Europe lay the life or death of his power. The march in the summer of 1809 to Vienna is all old history. Despite the duplicity of Austria, which had succeeded in springing upon him a mine while he was yet unconscious of the impending danger, Napoleon's presence on the Danube was sufficient in a few hours to retrieve the errors of his lieutenants, and to neutralise all the advantages which