day. New Castile, which I passed through also in my journey, was not more tranquil than the province of La Mancha. The Spanish partisans were at the point of taking King Joseph prisoner in one of his own country-houses near Madrid; and often the French were carried off before the gates, and sometimes from the very streets of the capital.

I staid near a month at Madrid, waiting for an opportunity to depart. It was an easy matter to get there from Bayonne, because numerous detachments were always going from thence to reinforce the armies in Spain. But to get permission to return to France, it was necessary to be lame. The Board of Health received the strictest orders; and they granted no leave but to those wounded officers or soldiers of whom they had not the slightest hope of recovery. I was numbered with those who had thus a right to return. Even at the price I paid, I was most glad to quit a war so inglorious and unjust; where the deep feelings of my soul never ceased to disapprove of the mischief which my hands were constrained to commit.

I left Madrid with a numerous caravan of broken-down officers, who were going to France under an escort of only seventy-five foot-soldiers.. We formed a platoon of cripples, commanded by the senior wounded, that we might die in arms if we were attacked. We were incapable of defending ourselves; and many of us had to be tied on horse-> back, to enable us to keep our seats.

Two of our company were insane. The first was a hussar, who had lost his reason in conse

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quence of severe wounds he had received on the head. He marched on foot, having been deprived of his horse and his arms, for fear of his escaping or doing mischief. Notwithstanding his derangement, he had not forgotten his degree of rank, and the name of his regiment. Sometimes he took off his hat before us, and showed us the scars of real wounds, which he pretended to have gotten in imaginary battles, of which he spoke incessantly. Our convoy being one day attacked on the march, he eluded the vigilance of his keepers, and recovered his former intrepidity for thrashing enemies, armed with nothing but a simple stick. He called this cane, "the magic sceptre of the Grand Sultan of Morocco, his predecessor.

The other was an old Flemish musician of light infantry, whose brain the warmth of Spanish wine had inspired for life with an unmoveable gaiety. He had exchanged his clarinet for a fiddle, which he used to play at the entertainments of his native village when a boy. He marched in the middle of our melancholy troop, both playing and dancing everlastingly.

Not one solitary traveller appeared on the long lonely road we journied; only, we met every two or three days convoys of ammunition, or other escorts, who lodged with us under the shelter of crumbling huts, whose windows and doors had been carried off to supply the French armies with wood. Instead of that crowd of children and idlers that flock, in time of peace, to meet strangers at the entrance of villages, we perceived a small post of French issuing from behind palisades and barriers, calling to us to "halt," that they might know who we were. Sometimes, too, a sentinel

would unexpectedly appear, stationed on some old tower in a deserted village-like a solitary owl among ruins.

The nearer we approached France, the more our danger from the partisans increased. At every station we came to, we found detachments from different parts of the Peninsula, waiting our arrival to go with us. Whole battalions-whole regiments, reduced to mere skeletons, or to a very few men-sadly returned with their eagles and colours, to recruit in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland. Our convoy left Spain at the end of July, twenty days after Ciudad Rodrigo, a strong fortress of the province of Salamanca, had fallen into the hands of the French.

CHAPTER IX.

HERE I ought to close these Memoirs; because, having left Spain at this period of the war, I have not witnessed what followed with my own eyes. But since then, during a year's stay in England, I have collected materials which could not, at the time, be procured on the Continent; and am, therefore, enabled to add to my narrative that of the Campaign of Portugal-the masterpiece both of national and military defence.

After the campaign of Austria, and the peace concluded at Vienna in 1809, France saw herself free from all her Northern wars; and the whole of Europe believed, that once again would Spain and Portugal fall under the feet of the mighty armies of which the Emperor Napoleon could dispose. That conqueror had announced, that he would chase the English from the Peninsula; and that, in one year, the world would witness his triumphal eagles planted on the forts of Lisbon. He forthwith sent powerful supplies to Spain, for the purpose of invading Portugal.

The French army destined for that invasion, was more than 80,000 strong. The Commanderin-chief was Marshal Massena; and it was divided into three divisions, under the orders of Mar

shals Ney, Junot, and Reynier. The first two of these corps united in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, and occupied the country between the Douro and the Tagus. The third, that of General Reynier, was in Estremadura, opposite the frontier of Alentejo; its right communicating at Alcantara, with the left of the corps of Marshal Ney. A fourth corps of reserve assembled at Valladolid, under the command of General Drouet, to reinforce and support the invading army if required.

The army of Lord Wellington, opposed to that of Marshal Massena, counted 30,000 English, and as many Portuguese in its ranks. The Regency of Portugal had, besides that, 15,000 regular troops under arms, several flying corps of Portuguese militia, led by chiefs of their own nation, or by English officers,-and levies en masse, known by the name of Ordenanzas, which the English estimated only at 45,000, but in fact consisted, in a case of invasion, of the whole armed population of Portugal. They were exasperated against the French by patriotism, hatred, vengeance, and the memory of recent evils they had endured for the two preceding years, during the expeditions of Marshals Junot and Soult-all unsuccessful though they were.

The undisciplined native bands did incalculable mischief to the French when they fought for their homes, in the gorges of their mountains, where their numbers and local knowledge gave them a great advantage. But beyond their own country they were useless. It was for this reason that the Anglo-Portuguese regular army of Lord Wellingtop would not move a step from the line of de