d the
artfully prepared quaker-cartridges increase the improbability of the
statement. Lieutenant Grattan scouts the tale as a base fabrication,
lashes out in fine style at its propagator, and claims great merit for
the officers who taught their men to beat the best troops in the world
with timber ammunition. He puts forward a more serious refutation by a
string of certificates from men and officers of all ranks who served
with him in the Peninsula, and who strenuously repel the charge as a
malignant calumny.

It was at the close of the campaign of 1809, that the historian of the
Connaught Rangers, then a newly commissioned youngster, joined, within a
march of Badajoz, the first battalion of his regiment. The palmy and
triumphant days of the British army in the Peninsula could then hardly
be said to have begun. True, they had had victories; the hard-earned one
of Talavera had been gained only three months previously, but the
general aspect of things was gloomy and disheartening. The campaign had
been one of much privation and fatigue; rations were insufficient,
quarters unhealthy, and Wellington's little army, borne on the
muster-rolls as thirty thousand men, was diminished one-third by
disease. The Portuguese, who numbered nearly as many, were raw and
untried troops, scarce a man of whom had seen fire, and little reliance
could be placed upon them. In spite of Lord Wellington's judicious and
reiterated warnings, the incompetent and conceited Spanish generals
risked repeated engagements, in which their armies--numerous enough, but
ill disciplined, ill armed, and half-starved--were crushed and
exterminated. The French side of the medal presented a very different
picture. Elated by their German victories, their swords yet red with
Austrian blood, Napoleon's best troops and ablest marshals hurried
southwards, sanguinely anticipating, upon the fields of the Peninsula,
an easy continuation of their recent triumphs. Three hundred and sixty
thousand men-at-arms--French, Germans, Italians, Poles, even
Mamelukes--spread themselves over Spain, occupied her towns, and
invested her fortresses. Ninety thousand soldiers, under Massena,
"_l'enfant cheri de la Victoire_," composed the so-called "army of
Portugal," intended to expel from that country, if not to annihilate,
the English leader and his small but resolute band, who, undismayed,
awaited the coming storm. In the ever-memorable lines of Torres Vedras,
the legions of Buonapart