thus supinely occupied in this
lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and
hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no
reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good
deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of
which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the
British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the
advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields
contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of
America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to
devastate their blooming country."

To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a
misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the
demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers
at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly
observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal
advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting
in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain.
The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the
Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my
past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers
"participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery,
conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark
ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies
of such a warfare."

In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination
to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change
his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He
had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared
his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In
his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty
of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by
seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption
in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its
genuine claim to honour." Feted by the planters of Jamaica, he had
yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.

Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began
the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he
discovered. The yardsmen did a secret