'Now, my men--la générale!' cried the Viscount de Sa, as he leaped on his horse, and the buglers, at the head of whom stood little José de Castro, poured clearly and melodiously on the morning wind, 'the générale,' that old warning for the march--a warning long since disused in the British service, where it was well known once. Then the Cazadores took the road for Badajoz, and that night were there in the trenches. It is recorded of José that before the Cazadores marched that morning he and a comrade bugler, Diaz of Belem, gave up the little pay they possessed to repair the loss of a poor woman whose hen-roost had been pillaged of its inmates in the night. The early weeks of 1812 were cold and rainy at Badajoz, and the howling tempests of wind often concealed at night the noise of the shovels and pickaxes, as the troops broke ground, within a hundred and sixty yards of Fort Picurina, and pushed forward the trenches, till they achieved an opening four thousand feet long--a work of five days' duration, under a dreadful shower of shot and shell. Our artillery had succeeded in making a practicable breach, by which the columns of assault might enter whenever the order to advance was given; but the position of the enemy was strong by nature, and made more so by art. Enormous beams of timber, loaded shell, huge stones, hand grenades, cold shot, all to be launched from the hand, with relays of ready-loaded muskets, were there, for those who were to keep the breaches; in these, too, were hundreds of live bombs and sunken powder-barrels, ready to blow an assaulting force to pieces; and it became evident that the chances of that force proving successful were small, unless some of the unforeseen accidents of war turned the tide in their favour. This point, say the Portuguese, it was the good fortune of José de Castro to achieve. For the actual truth of the episode which won him the name of 'The Bugle Boy of Badajoz,' we do not vouch. There is not a word of it in Napier, or in the despatches of the Duke of Wellington; but yet it was universally believed in the army of Marshal Beresford. It is related in history that when the final, and, to so many, fatal, night of the 6th of April came--that awful night of horror and of triumph when Badajoz was won--when more than two thousand of our officers and men perished in the breaches alone, and when the heart of the 'Iron Duke' gave way to a passionate burst of grief for the slaughter of his gallant soldiers--on that night, we say, the 'unforeseen accident,' recorded by history, was a feint attack unexpectedly becoming a real one; but the Portuguese have it that José de Castro, being of an inquiring turn of mind, and having, during his service, had many opportunities of hearing the French bugle-calls, had learned them all to perfection, and now resolved to turn his knowledge thereof to good account.