ing part of the year 1811 both armies were inactive. The
batteries had been at work at Badajoz and breaches had been made, but
these had proved impracticable, twelve forlorn hopes and storming
parties having advanced into them with no better result than that many
met their deaths and the remainder had to withdraw owing to obstacles.
The siege was therefore converted into a blockade, and Lord
Wellington, who after taking Almeida and driving the French out of
Portugal, had come southward with two divisions to reinforce
Beresford's army, moved the general South Army into cantonments and
encampments near the River Caza, a tributary of the Guadiana. There we
remained till July, when we were marched northward again across the
Tagus, and took up our position at Guinaldo. While there no particular
engagement ensued; the enemy indeed falling on another part of our
line, but no success being obtained on either side.

Although Lord Wellington had now driven the French clean out of
Portugal, he had still other work to do; work that praised him more
than he had been before, work that raised him to higher honours than
he yet possessed, but likewise work that sacrificed more thousands of
human beings than had been through the whole three years. There can be
no doubt that if he had had as many troops as the French, he would
long before this have driven them out of Portugal and perhaps Spain as
well; he seemed to understand their every movement, and was thus
always ready waiting to receive them; and they on their part seemed to
think they had more than found their match in him, and had become very
cautious in contending with him. But he actually had only half their
number, or even less, that he could depend on, and these were
sometimes not fit for service from want or other privations, as these
tales of the hospitals or rather deadly convents go to prove, where so
many of my comrades passed the end of their lives, and their remains
were carried out with no more ceremony than I described as at Elvas.

The Portuguese themselves were mostly exempt from the actual
slaughter, but their country had already been left by the enemy in
about as bad a state as it could; for if it had been infested with
swarms of locusts, the devastation could not have been paralleled. The
war could not have left one family quite untouched by its
destructiveness or by misery and grief irrecoverable for many years;
and indeed, in some cases, for ever, for many a ch