The Peninsular War was perhaps the least selfish conflict ever waged. It was not a war of aggrandizement or of conquest. It was fought to deliver Europe from the despotism of Napoleon. At its close the fleets of Great Britain rode triumphant, and in the Peninsula between 1808-14 her land forces fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten fierce and bloody sieges, took four great fortresses, twice expelled the French from Portugal and once from Spain. Great Britain expended in these campaigns more than one hundred million pounds sterling on her own troops, besides subsidizing the forces of Spain and Portugal. This “nation of shopkeepers” proved that when kindled to action it could wage war on a scale and in a fashion that might have moved the wonder of Alexander or of Cæsar, and from motives too lofty for either Cæsar or Alexander so much as to comprehend. It is worth while to tell afresh the story of some of the more picturesque incidents in that great strife. On April 6, 1812, Badajos was stormed by Wellington; and the story forms one of the most tragical and splendid incidents in the military history of the world. Of “the night of horrors at Badajos,” Napier says, “posterity can scarcely be expected to credit the tale.” No tale, however, is better authenticated, or, as an example of what disciplined human valor is capable of achieving, better deserves to be told. Wellington was preparing for his great forward movement into Spain, the campaign which led to Salamanca, the battle in which “forty thousand Frenchmen were beaten in forty minutes.” As a preliminary he had to capture, under the vigilant eyes of Soult and Marmont, the two great border fortresses, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos. He had, to use Napier’s phrase, “jumped with both feet” on the first-named fortress, and captured it in twelve days with a loss of twelve hundred men and ninety officers.