the strongest terms about the absence of discipline to be found in detachments, which, of necessity, were always out in various parts of the country; and he drew particular attention to the number of malingerers who filled the hospitals principally for the purpose of plundering when on the march. "The disorders which these soldiers have," wrote Wellington to Lord Liverpool, "are of a very trifling description; they are considered to render them incapable of serving with their regiments; but they certainly do not incapacitate them from committing outrages of all descriptions on their passage through the country, and in the last movements of the hospitals, the soldiers have not only plundered the inhabitants of their property, but the hospital stores which moved with the hospitals, and have sold the plunder. And all these outrages are committed with impunity; no proof can be brought, on oath, before a court-martial that any individual has committed an outrage, and the soldiers of the army are becoming little better than a band of robbers." On the top of all this came the wild orgies which accompanied the sacking of Badajoz; and Wellington determined to adopt the strongest measures in order to restore the discipline of his army. We may say here, and without in any way belittling the military genius of England's greatest soldier, that Wellington knew nothing of the finer processes of producing and maintaining discipline among British soldiers. He was not of the school of Sir John Moore. He had no sympathy with the soldier, or indeed with the officer. He spoke of the men who won his victories for him as the scum of the earth and as the sweepings of the jails, and he treated them always with coldness, amounting almost to contempt. Probably he was the hardest master under whom men ever served, for at all times he governed by the lash, and he never hesitated to shoot or hang an unfortunate soldier, if he deemed it necessary to make an example. That these executions were not sometimes necessary we do not pretend to say, but the method of carrying them out, in the face of the whole army, served only to brutalise it. Officers and men became callous even of the capital punishment, and judging by the letter quoted above, Major Rice thought little of condemning to death half a dozen men for possibly trivial offences. Several of Wellington's generals, taking their cue from their chief, flogged and hanged freely, with the result that there was no love lost between them and their men; but, like the dog who licks the hand that beat him, these soldiers would follow their commanders without questioning, and perform for them prodigious acts of valour. Few of the Peninsular generals were really popular with their men, but Graham and Hill were exceptions. The latter, though a brilliant leader, was always sympathetic, and endeared himself to all ranks, who spoke of him among themselves as "Daddy Hill," though he was barely old enough to have been the father