NOTICE.
In this publication, the combats of Roriça, Vimiero, and Coruña, and the character of Sir John Moore, have been entirely recomposed. The other battles and sieges are, with more or less compression of details, transcripts from the History of the Peninsula War. Thus arranged they will perhaps most effectually exhibit the constant energy of the British soldier, and draw attention in their neighbourhoods to the veterans who still survive. Few of those brave men have more than a scanty provision, many have none; and nearly all, oppressed with wounds, disease, and poverty, sure attendants on an old soldier’s services, feel life a burthen, so heavy as to make them envy the lot of comrades who threw it off early on the field of battle.
For the authenticity of the events the reader has this guarantee. The author was either an eye-witness of what he relates, or acquired his knowledge from those who were. Persons of no mean authority. Commanders-in-chief, generals, and other officers on both sides; private official correspondence of the English envoys; military journals and reports of the French leaders; the correspondence of the intrusive King Joseph, and his ministers, and the private military notes and instructions of the Emperor Napoleon, have all contributed to establish the truth of the facts and motives of action.
For the great Captain who led the British troops so triumphantly, this record gives no measure of ability. To win victories was the least of his labours. Those who desire to know what an enormous political, financial, and military pressure he sustained, what wiles he circumvented, what opposing skill he baffled, what a powerful enemy he dealt with and overcame, must seek the story in the original History from which this work has been extracted. For the soldiers it is no measure of their fortitude and endurance: it records only their active courage. But what they were, their successors now are—witness the wreck of the Birkenhead, where four hundred men, at the call of their heroic officers, Captain Wright and Lieutenant Girardot, calmly and without a murmur, accepted death in a horrible form rather than endanger the women and children already saved in the boats. The records of the world furnish no parallel to this self-devotion!