furd to the unhappy captain," and go through the water like the others. I will not allow the officers to ride upon the men's backs through the rivers." Craufurd established an almost wizardlike authority over the Rifles. Says Harris: : "The Rifles being always at his heels, he seemed to think them his familiars. If he stopped his horse, and halted to deliver one of his stern reprimands, you would see half-a-dozen lean, unshaven, shoeless, and savage Riflemen, standing for the moment leaning upon their weapons, and scowling up in his face as he scolded; and when he dashed the spurs into his reeking horse, they would throw up their rifles upon their shoulders, and hobble after him again." The severities of the march grew yet more terrible. At last Harris himself fell exhausted on the snow. Let him die quietly," said his captain to the sergeant, I know him well; he is not the man to lie here if he could get on," and the ranks moved on, leaving Harris to his fate. After a while Harris staggered to his feet. "On the road behind me," he says, "I saw men, women, mules, and horses dead or dying, whilst far away in front I could just discern the enfeebled army crawling out of sight." He found shelter in a Spanish hut, and the next morning crept on the tracks of the army, passing clusters of exhausted soldiers and women sitting huddled together in the road, their heads drooping forward, apparently patiently waiting their end. A party of the 42nd was sweeping up all stragglers who could walk, much as a drover would keep together a flock of tired sheep. "Many of them had thrown away their weapons, and were linked together, arm-in-arm, in order to sup port each other, like a party of drunkards. These were, I saw, composed of various regiments; many were bare-headed, and without shoes; and some with their heads tied up in old rags and fragments of handkerchiefs." At last from the head of the long straggling column came a faint shout. From the top of the hill the sea was visible, and the tall masts of many transports. Harris," said a rifleman notorious for his foulness of language, "if it pleases God to let me reach those ships, I swear never to utter a bad or discontented word again," and the tears ran down his haggard cheeks as he spoke. Harris was the very last man who embarked at Vigo. He crawled on to the beach just as the last boat was pushing off, almost totally blind with mere fatigue. The boat put back for him, and he lived to reach Spithead; where, he says, "our poor bare feet once more touched English ground." Never was such a gaunt, ragged, hunger-bitten, war-wasted, shoeless collection of scarecrows as those that landed at Spithead. The Rifles at the beginning of the retreat numbered 900 men in the highest state of efficiency; when they landed at Spithead they paraded some 300 ragged invalids. Harris's company consisted of exactly three men. Harris took part afterwards in the unhappy Walcheren expedition, one of the worst-managed and most tragical enterprises in the whole Napoleonic war. The forces employed numbered 30,000; in fighting quality they were equal to the men of the Peninsula. “It was as fine an expedition," says Harris, "as ever I looked at, and the army seemed to stretch the whole distance from Hythe to Deal." The expedition was ruined by bad general ship and the ague, and it may be doubted whether the generalship was not the more deadly of these two mischiefs. The Walcheren sickness, it may be added, was of a very dreadful and mysterious character. The victims seized by it were shaken as with an exaggerated palsy; their bodies were swollen up like barrels; they died like flies in a frost., Harris himself, in spite of his constitution tempered to the hardness of steel by three campaigns, was seized, and lying in a ward of the hospital which held eleven beds, he saw these emptied and filled ten times in succession, each batch of patients in turn being carried out to the grave. Harris survived, but his fighting days were ended. It will be seen that the experiences of this particular soldier were of a very distressing character. He shared the twin horrors of Sir John Moore's retreat and of the Walcheren expedition. And yet there is not a whining note in Harris's "Recollections." He is proud of his flag, of his comrades, of his officers, of his country. Naturally Harris thinks his particular regiment is the finest in the world. "There never were such a set of devil-may-care fellows, and, so completely up to their business," he says, "as the 95th. It would be invidious to make a distinction, or talk of any one regiment being better, or more serviceable, than another; but the Rifles were generally in the mess before the others began, and also the last to leaye off." The tales he tells of the daring of his comrades are sometimes quaint, sometimes thrilling, sometimes absurd. At Vimieiro his lieutenant had to check, with angry energy, not unflavoured with oaths, the eagerness of his men : "D-n you!' he said to them, 'keep back, and get under cover. Do you think you are fighting here with your fists, that you are running into the teeth of the French ?"" As another example of the daring of the individual soldier, Harris says: I remember a fellow, named Jackman, getting close up to the walls at Flushing, and working a hole in the earth with his sword, into which he laid himself, and remained there alone, spite of all the efforts of the enemy and their various missiles to dislodge him. He was known, thus earthed, to have killed, with the utmost coolness and deliberation, eleven of the French artillerymen, as they worked at their guns. As fast as they relieved each fallen comrade did Jackman pick them off; after which he took to his heels, and got safe back to his comrades." But Harris's soldierly pride is not confined to his own regiment. He held that the French officers, man for man, were far behind the British officers. "The French army had nothing to show in the shape of officers who could at all compare with ours. There was a noble bearing in our leaders, which they on the French side (as far as I was capable of observing) had not.” Of British soldiers, as a whole, Harris says:- "The field of death and slaughter, the march, the bivouac, and the retreat, are no bad places in which to judge of men. I have had some opportunities of judging them in all these situations, and I should say that the |