Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1

16 January 1809

Battle of Corunna

CHAPTER XXXV.

Of my travelling companions I have already told my readers something. Power is now an old acquaintance; to Sparks I have already presented them; of the adjutant they are not entirely ignorant; and it therefore only remains for me to introduce to their notice Major Monsoon. I should have some scruple for the digression which this occasions in my narrative, were it not that with the worthy major I was destined to meet subsequently; and indeed served under his orders for some months in the Peninsula. When Major Monsoon had entered the army or in what precise capacity, I never yet met the man who could tell. There were traditionary accounts of his having served in the East Indies and in Canada in times long past. His own peculiar reminiscences extended to nearly every regiment in the service, “horse, foot, and dragoons.” There was not a clime he had not basked in; not an engagement he had not witnessed. His memory, or, if you will, his invention, was never at fault; and from the siege of Seringapatam to the battle of Corunna he was perfect. Besides this, he possessed a mind retentive of even the most trifling details of his profession,--from the formation of a regiment to the introduction of a new button, from the laying down of a parallel to the price of a camp-kettle, he knew it all. To be sure, he had served in the commissary-general’s department for a number of years, and nothing instils such habits as this.

CHAPTER XLIV.

When I contrasted the gay and lively tone of the conversation which ran on around our bivouac fire, with the dry monotony and prosaic tediousness of my first military dinner at Cork, I felt how much the spirit and adventure of a soldier’s life can impart of chivalrous enthusiasm to even the dullest and least susceptible. I saw even many who under common circumstances, would have possessed no interest nor excited any curiosity, but now, connected as they were with the great events occurring around them, absolutely became heroes; and it was with a strange, wild throbbing of excitement I listened to the details of movements and marches, whose objects I knew not, but in which the magical words, Corunna, Vimeira, were mixed up, and gave to the circumstances an interest of the highest character. How proud, too, I felt to be the companion-in-arms of such fellows! Here they sat, the tried and proved soldiers of a hundred fights, treating me as their brother and their equal. Who need wonder if I felt a sense of excited pleasure? Had I needed such a stimulant, that night beneath the cork-trees had been enough to arouse a passion for the army in my heart, and an irrepressible determination to seek for a soldier’s glory.