always reflect immortal honour on the troops engaged, and will
always attract the strongest interests of an English reader; but which
must, nevertheless, be appealed to as illustrations of the straits
to which an army may be led by want of military experience in the
government at home. By this time the repeated victories of Wellington
and his colleagues had raised the renown of British soldiers to at
least an equality with that of Napoleon's veterans, and the incomparable
efficiency, in particular, of the Light Division was acknowledged to be
without a parallel in any European service. But in those departments of
the army where excellence is less the result of intuitive ability, the
forces under Wellington were still greatly surpassed by the trained
legions of the emperor. While Napoleon had devoted his whole genius to
the organization of the parks and trains which attend the march of
an army in the field, the British troops had only the most imperfect
resources on which to rely. The engineer corps, though admirable in
quality, was so deficient in numbers, that commissions were placed at
the free disposal of Cambridge mathematicians. The siege trains were
weak and worthless against the solid ramparts of Peninsular strongholds.
The intrenching tools were so ill made that they snapped in the hands of
the workmen, and the art of sapping and mining was so little known
that this branch of the siege duties was carried on by drafts from
the regiments of the line, imperfectly and hastily instructed for the
purpose. Unhappily, such results can only be obviated by long foresight,
patient training, and costly provision; it was not in the power of a
single mind, however capacious, to effect an instantaneous reform, and
Wellington was compelled to supply the deficiencies by the best blood of
his troops." *

* "Memoir of the Duke of Wellington."

The terms in which this illustrious man complained of the incompetency
of the government at home are instructive to those who, in the present
generation, contend for reform. "I do not receive one-sixth part of the
money necessary to keep so great a machine in motion." "The French
army is well supplied," he wrote on one occasion, "the Spanish army has
everything in abundance, and we alone, on whom everything depends, are
dying of hunger." "I am left entirely to my own resources," he wrote in
1810, "and find myself obliged to provide, with the little which I
can procure, for the wants of