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captain's safety. His brother, William Napier, related how John Henessy of the 50th, a drunken, thieving brute, sev eral times flogged for his evil ways, who was captured with him at Corunna, tramped two hundred miles on his return home in order to deliver to Napier's sister a silver spur entrusted to his charge.
    The British soldier's incurable vice was drink. An old woman of Pontalegre, after four years' acquaintanceship with Wellington's army, always assumed, when an Englishman asked a question, that he was after wine. To obtain it, he would commit every species of depredation; rob a house, plunder a church, steal from his comrade and strip his own dead officer after death. Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th, who wrote an account of life in the ranks, thought that the craving for liquor was often pathological—the result of harsh usage and brutal punishment. Soldiers had to endure so much and had so few normal pleasures that they turned automatically to drink when they relaxed. Men who could take three or four hundred lashings without a groan, chewing a musket ball or a bit of leather to keep themselves from crying out while the blood ran down their backs, were scarcely likely to restrain themselves when they got into a wine vault.
    Yet Wellington's remark that the bulk of his men enlisted for drink concealed the representative character of his army. Though poverty was its recruiting ground, many of its soldiers were thoughtful and serious men of refinement and education. One Scottish private related how he found a comrade on guard reading Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song; another how the eyes of himself and his comrades filled with tears as they sang the songs of their native land before a battle. 1 And running through the tough fibre of the rank and file was a strain of chivalry. Foul-mouthed, obscene, irreligious, they would yet give their last bit of biscuit to a starving Portuguese peasant or shoulder the burden of a woman or child. When he was sober and his blood not roused, the British soldier, so fierce and implacable in battle, could show an almost childlike tenderness towards an enemy: would tear the shirt off his own back to bind his wounds, carry him to safety or share the contents of his flask. Having never known invasion at home, he seldom evinced the revengeful spirit of his German and Iberian allies. A Scottish sergeant who was shot at by a wounded Frenchman for whom he had gone to fetch a drink, after a moment's reflection with raised firelock, quietly went on with his mission of mercy. A private of the same
    1 Donaldson, 180; Journal of a Soldier, 115-16.
    race, finding a Portuguese muleteer robbing a peasant girl, faced his knife with his bare fists and knocked him down.
    Among the officers this chivalrous sense of honour was more than an instinct; it was a code. They were almost too ready to take on a bully or punish a cheat; Charles Napier flattered himself that his leg was as straight a one as ever bore up the body of a gentleman or kicked a blackguard. He regarded the treatment of women as the measure of civilisation; tenderness towards the helpless and adherence to one's word constituted for him the tests of a gentleman. A man who broke his parole was beneath contempt; George Napier held it up to his children as the unforgivable offence—that and cowardice. One rode straight, spoke the truth and never showed fear. There was little outward religion in Wellington's officers; skylarking and often uproariously noisy, they were like a pack of schoolboys. Yet under the surface was a deep fund of Christian feeling; their beau idé al was a man like John Colborne of the 52nd— upright, fearless and gentle—or John Vandeleur, whom his friends never heard speak harshly of any man. "The British Army is what it is," Wellington said long afterwards, "because it is officered by gentlemen; men who would scorn to do a dishonourable thing and who have something more at stake than a reputation for