eat opponent. Wellington,
on the other hand, had almost every possible disadvantage. The weather
was bitter; incessant rains fell; he had to operate on both sides of a
dangerous river; the roads were mere ribbons of tenacious clay, in
which the infantry sank to mid-leg, the guns to their axles, the
cavalry sometimes to their saddle-girths. Moreover, Wellington's
Spanish troops had the sufferings and outrages of a dozen campaigns to
avenge, and when they found themselves on French soil the temptations
to plunder and murder were irresistible. Wellington would not maintain
war by plunder, and, as he found he could not restrain his Spaniards,
he despatched the whole body, 25,000 strong, back to Spain. It was a
great deed. It violated all military canons, for by it Wellington
divided his army in the presence of the enemy. It involved, too, a
rare sacrifice of personal ambition. "If I had 20,000 Spaniards, paid
and fed," he wrote to Lord Bathurst, "I should have Bayonne. If I had
40,000 I do not know where I should stop. Now I have both the 20,000
and the 40,000, . . . but if they plunder they will ruin all."
Wellington was great enough to sacrifice both military rules and
personal ambition to humanity. He was wise enough, too, to know that a
policy which outrages humanity in the long-run means disaster.

Wellington's supreme advantage lay in the fighting quality of his
troops. The campaigns of six years had made them an army of veterans.
"Danger," says Napier, "was their sport," and victory, it might also be
added, was their habit. They fought with a confidence and fierceness
which, added to the cool and stubborn courage native to the British
character, made the battalions which broke over the French frontier
under Wellington perhaps the most formidable fighting force known in
the history of war. To quote Napier once more: "What Alexander's
Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal's Africans at Cannae, Caesar's
Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon's Guards at Austerlitz, such were
Wellington's British soldiers at this period."

On November 10, 1813, was fought what is called the battle of Nivelle,
in which Wellington thrust Soult roughly and fiercely from the strong
positions he held on the flanks of the great hills under which the
Nivelle flows. The morning broke in great splendour; three signal-guns
flashed from the heights of one of the British hills, and at once the
43rd leaped out and ran swiftly forward from the f