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still more calm and collected." George Napier, 220-1.
    encountered two or three Frenchmen, he would bowl one over with a well-placed rock, flatten another with his firelock, and petrify a third with a shout, tripping him up or, if he bolted, pelting him with pebbles—a spectacle which never failed to delight his men. 1
    It was this offensive spirit—itself the outcome of perfect training, fitness and teamwork—that made Wellington's army so formidable. It was always on its toes; healthy, collected, well-provisioned, wary, impudent and out to make trouble. Apart from the old Scots champion, Sir Thomas Graham, and Picton, who was fifty-three, the average age of its divisional commanders in the spring of 1812 was slightly under forty. Stapleton Cotton, who commanded the cavalry, was thirty-eight; Alexander Dickson of the Artillery, thirty-four; George Murray, the Quartermaster-General and Chief-of-Staff, forty.
    Of those they led, the crown and exemplar was still the Light Division—capable, as Harry Smith claimed, of turning the tide of victory any day. "There perhaps never was, nor ever again will be," wrote Kincaid, "such a war brigade as that which was composed of the 43rd, 52nd and the Rifles/' Its officers, who took a pride in being gay of heart, were always ready to enter into whatever amusement was going—a practical joke, a hare or fox-hunt, an impromptu donkey-race, a day after the partridges, a dance with guitar, cakes and lemonade in some draughty, candlelit barn where the raven-haired, garlic-scented village senoritas, screeching with excitement, pinned up their dresses for bolero and fandango. At the head of this famous Division went the green-jacketed Rifles—"the most celebrated old fighting corps in the Army"—who in the whole war never lost a piquet. And the scarlet-coated 43rd and 52nd—that beloved corps of George Napier's, "where every officer was a high-minded gentleman and every private a gallant and well-conducted soldier"—were their equals. "We had only to look behind," wrote Kincaid, "to see a line in which we might place a degree of confidence equal to our hopes in Heaven; nor were we ever disappointed." Grattan of the 88th—though a member of the rival 3 r d Division— acknowledged the 43 rd to be the best regiment in the Army. 2
    There were many competitors: the peerless Fusilier regiments
    1 Bell, I, 163. See idem, I, 24, 64, 81-2; Grattan, 176; Johnny Newcome, 170; Tomkinson, 137; Kincaid, 33, 42-8, 60, 211; Random Shots, 87-90; Leslie, 83-5; Donaldson, 206-7; Tomkirison, 37; Simmons, 15-16, 57.
    8 Grattan, 120; Bell, I, 12, 37, 54-5, 156; George Napier, 207-8; Kincaid, 96, 153-4, 179*. Random Shots, 16; Simmons, XXI, 279; Smith, I, 185, 190; Schaumann, 339; Larpent, I, 89, 102; Costello, 148; Cooke, 71-2.
    which snatched victory out of defeat at Albuera; the Guards with their grace and nonchalance and unbreakable discipline; the fiery Highlanders; the great, undemonstrative regiments of the Line—the 5th, the 28th, the 29th, the 45th, the 48th, the 57th. On their capacity to rise, when called upon, to the highest capacity of human endurance and valour, their commander, though he seldom misused it, knew he could rely. "Ah," he said during a near-run fight to an officer who informed him that he had placed the Royal Welch in a dangerous gap, "that is the very thing!"
    Pride in the continuing regiment—the personal individual loyalty which each private felt towards his corps—gave to the British soldier a moral strength which the student and administrator ought never to under-estimate. It enabled him to stand firm and fight forward when men without it, however brave, would have failed. To let down the regiment, to be unworthy of the men of old who had marched under the same colours, to be untrue to the comrades who had shared the same loyalties, hardships and perils were things that the least-tutored, humblest soldier would not do. Through the dusty, tattered ranks the spirit of