nity to wear his
conspicuous scarlet uniform upon all occasions, or at most to cover
it with his short dark-blue riding cloak. This, while to be sure it
enhanced the showiness of his exploits, obliged him to carry them
through with a suddenness and dash foreign to the whole spirit of
my patient work. I must always maintain that mine were the sounder
methods; yet if I had no other reason for my admiration I could not
withhold it from a man who, when I first met him, had been wearing a
British uniform for three days and nights within the circuit of the
French camp. I myself had been living within it in a constant twitter
for hard upon three weeks.

It happened in March, 1812, when Marmont was concentrating his forces
in the Salamanca district, with the intent (it was rumoured) of
marching and retaking Ciudad Rodrigo, which the Allies had carried
by assault in January. This stroke, if delivered with energy, Lord
Wellington could parry; but only at the cost of renouncing a success
on which he had set his heart, the capture of Badajos. Already he had
sent forward the bulk of his troops with his siege-train on the march
to that town, while he kept his headquarters to the last moment in
Ciudad Rodrigo as a blind. He felt confident of smashing Badajos
before Soult with the army of the south could arrive to relieve it;
but to do this he must leave both Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo exposed
to Marmont, the latter with its breaches scarcely healed and its
garrison disaffected. He did not fear actual disaster to these
fortresses; he could hurry back in time to defeat that, for he
knew that Marmont had no siege guns, and could only obtain them by
successfully storming Almeida and capturing the battering train which
lay there protected by 3,000 militia. Nevertheless a serious effort by
Marmont would force him to abandon his scheme.

All depended therefore (1) on how much Marmont knew and (2) on his
readiness to strike boldly. Consequently, when that General began to
draw his scattered forces together and mass them on the Tormes before
Salamanca, Wellington grew anxious; and it was to relieve that anxiety
or confirm it that I found myself serving as tapster of the Posada del
Rio in the village of Huerta, just above a ford of the river, and six
miles from Salamanca. Neither the pay it afforded nor the leisure had
attracted me to the Posada del Rio. Pay there was little, and leisure
there was none, since Marmont's lines came down to the