At Bordeaux the 51st remained in the enjoyment of a good deal of pleasure and gaiety until July, when it embarked for England, and proceeded first to Plymouth and then to Portsmouth, from which latter place it had started three years and a half before for the Peninsula. In that time the regiment had lost many officers and a great number of men, but these gallant dead had helped to gain seven fresh battle honours for the colours of the 51st. Personal rewards were restricted to the three senior officers, each of whom received the Gold Medal and brevet promotion, otherwise the officers and men found their reward only in the knowledge that they had fought for the glory of England, and had upheld the good name of their regiment. Napier, in the concluding paragraph of his 'Battles and Sieges,' writes of the Peninsular army as follows:-- "Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance of the veterans' services. Yet those veterans had won nineteen pitched battles and innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges, and taken four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of their own number forty thousand dead, whose bones whiten the plains and mountains of the Peninsula." But, if one turns to the lighter side of the war, one gathers from the journals and letters of officers that, in all this campaigning, with its attendant bloodshed and misery, there was usually some bright lining to the cloud. The vast majority of the officers, as has been shown, were of an age particularly susceptible to sparkling eyes and suchlike things, and the Spanish and French ladies appear to have been no less susceptible to the charming manners of the brave young Englishmen--even though the latter loved and rode away. There were not a few instances, however, of attachments which ended in marriage, and some of the non-commissioned officers and men also brought home Spanish or French wives. These men of war certainly carried large hearts buttoned within their tight-fitting coatees, and the cordiality of the _entente_ was beyond dispute, as is evident from the following words with which one of Napier's subalterns concludes his account of the war[80]--words which, when compared with the above-quoted paragraph, show with what different eyes a bachelor lieutenant and a married lieutenant-colonel looked on life:-- "But at the conclusion of the war there was such an abundance of kissing as probably the like of it was never seen before, which put one in mind of the adage, 'that none but the brave deserve the fair.' There was kissing in the valleys, and kissing upon the hills, and, in short, there was embracing, kissing, and counter-kissing from Toulouse to Bordeaux." CHAPTER XIII. THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN.