martinet and refused to lock the wheels,
declaring that it would damage the carriages. Of damage to his men
he never seemed to think: and I, being fool enough to volunteer--
though my weight on the rope could have counted for next to nothing--
found myself on the second day without heels to my shoes, and on the
third without shoes at all. Nor is it likely that I had ever reached
the Agueda in time for the fighting had we not been met at Coimbra by
an order to leave our guns in the magazine there and hurry forward to
Ciudad Rodrigo, where my comrades were required to work the
24-pounders which composed the bulk of Lord Wellington's siege-train.

Having been supplied with new boots from the stores in Coimbra,
we pushed on eastward through torrents of rain which converted
every valley bottom into a quag, so that our march was scarcely
less toilsome than before, and the men grumbled worse than
they had when dragging the guns over the frozen hill-roads.
They had been forced to leave their wagons behind at Coimbra, and
marched like infantry soldiers, each man carrying a haversack
with four days' provisions, as well as an extra pair of boots.
But what seemed to vex and deject them most was a rumour that
Quartermaster-General Murray had been sent down from the front on
leave of absence for England. They argued positively that, with
Murray absent, the Commander-in-Chief could not be intending any
action of importance: they doubted that he had twenty siege-guns at
his call even if he stripped Almeida and left that fortress
defenceless. Moreover, who would open a siege in such a country,
in the depth of such a winter as this?

Nevertheless we had no sooner passed the bridge of the Coa than
we discovered our mistake; the roads below Almeida being choked
with a continuous train of mule transports, tumbrils, light carts,
and wagons heaped with fascines, gabions, long balks of timber,
sheaves of spades and siege implements--all crawling southwards.
Our artillerymen were now halted to await and take charge of three
brass guns said to be on their way down from Pinhel under an escort
of Portuguese militia; and, taking leave of them, I was handed over
to a company of the 23rd Regiment--hurrying in from one of the
outlying hamlets near Celorico--with whom I reached on the 7th of
January the squalid village of Boden, in and around which the 52nd
lay in face of the doomed fortress across the river.

"Here then is war at last," though