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WEL saved Poonah from destruction, and brought back the peishwa to his capital in triumph. He next turned his arms against the strong fort of Ahmednuggur, which he reduced on the 9th of August, and converted into an excellent base of operations. On the 23rd of September, after a long day's march, he unexpectedly found himself in the presence of Scindiah's whole army, which had suddenly shifted from the ground where he had expected to find it, and had taken up a strong position on the delta formed by the confluence of the Kaitna and the Juah. It was to him an anxious and a critical moment. He had under his orders seven thousand five hundred men, of whom only fifteen hundred were Europeans, with seventeen guns; while the enemy amounted to fifty thousand men, covered by one hundred and twenty-eight pieces of cannon, worked by French artillerymen. But although a strong reinforcement was on its march, and would certainly join him next day, he preferred to attack the enemy, even against such fearful odds, to the hazard of a retreat, or the chance of their escape during the night. His own account of the manner in which he fought this famous battle, the first in which he held supreme command, is eminently characteristic of the man. Many years afterwards he told an intimate friend that he was indebted for his success at Assaye to a very ordinary exercise of common sense. To reach the enemy, and to get out of an exposed position, it was absolutely necessary that he should cross the river, but his native guides all assured him that it was impassable. He pushed forward, however, till he could see with his glass one village on the near bank of the river, and another village exactly opposite on the other bank, and he immediately concluded that men could not have built two villages so close to one another on opposite sides of a stream without some habitual means of communication, either by boats or a ford, most probably by the latter. "My guides still persisted," he said, "that there was neither; but on my own conjecture, or rather reasoning, I took the desperate (as it seemed) resolution of m arching for the river—and I was right. I found a passage, crossed my army over, had no more to fear from the enemy's cloud of cavalry; and my force, small as it was, was just enough to fill the space between that river and another stream that fell into it thereabouts, and on which Assaye stood, so that both my flanks were secure. And there I fought and won the battle, the bloodiest for the number that I ever saw; and this was all from the common sense of guessing that men did not build villages on opposite sides of a stream without some means of communication between them." General Wellesley had two horses killed under him in this obstinate struggle—the hardest fought affair, as he himself describes it, that ever took place in India—and his men suffered very severely from the well-served guns of the enemy. Nearly one-third of the British force engaged were killed or wounded, but the Mahrattas lost ninety-eight guns, and about six thousand men. This "fabulous exploit," as M. Maurel terms it, "fixed every eye in that region of bold and skillful soldiercraft on the victor, and marked him at once as one of the men most evidently destined to sustain the honours of the British arms." It was followed up and crowned by another victory over the whole remaining force of the enemy, at the village of Argaum, and by the capture of the strong fortress of Gawulghur in December, which put an end to the war. The Mahratta chiefs saw that further resistance was useless, and accepted the terms which the conquerer imposed upon them.

In common with his brother. General Wellesley suffered no small annoyance from the mean and ungenerous policy of the company at this period; but when shortly after the close of the Mahratta war he quitted India, it was amid the most gratifying testimonies to the value of his services from soldiers and civilians alike. After an absence of nine years he again set foot on the shores of England, in the month of September, 1805. In November of the same year he was sent to Hanover in command of a brigade of infantry, in one of those absurd expeditions which were then supposed to be most suitable to the military resources and position of England. But he returned home in February, 1806, without striking a blow. His appointment to the colonelcy of the 33rd regiment, his marriage to Lady Catherine Pakenham, third daughter of the earl of Longford, to whom he had been long attached, and his election as member for the borough of Rye, all took place in the course of this spring. In April, 1807, he was appointed secretary for Ireland—the duke of Richmond being lord-lieutenant. In August of the same year he was nominated to a command in the expedition to Copenhagen, and rendered important services both in dispersing the Danish troops, who menaced the rear of our force, and in conducting the negotiations for the capitulation of the city—for which he received the special thanks of parliament.

At this juncture Napoleon, who had again crushed Austria and Prussia and formed an alliance with Russia, put into execution his infamous designs upon Portugal and Spain; he had sent Junot to take possession of Lisbon, which the court immediately quitted, and having poured his troops into Spain, avowed his intention of bestowing that kingdom on his brother. The nations of the peninsula, however, rose almost as one man against the fraudulent oppressor, and sent to England to solicit assistance. A force of ten thousand men was at this juncture waiting at Cork to be despatched on some expedition or other, and the Portland ministry resolved to send these troops to Portugal under General Wellesley, but apparently without any definite plan either as to his exact destination or the service he was expected to perform. Such was the origin of the peninsular war, one of the most memorable contests recorded in the annals of Europe.

It has recently been affirmed that towards the close of his service in India General Wellesley became exceedingly impatient to return home, for the purpose of measuring swords with that terrible adversary who had completely prostrated continental Europe, and was even menacing Britain itself. Be this as it may, it is now certain that he had meditated long and deeply on the best mode of encountering the French troops; that he alone at this period had "scanned the situation with a steady eye, and measured the whole depth of the chasm." He saw how the finest armies of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, notwithstanding their numbers, courage, and discipline, had again and again been beaten in the contest with France, and had the sagacity to discover that it required an entirely different system of tactics to cope successfully with Bonaparte. "He saw at once," as M. Maurel felicitously remarks, "that Napoleon was not to be beaten a la Napoleon—with his own weapons; that it was folly to stake all on one cast of the die, and to beard his colossal antagonist in his own stronghold; and that before he could hope to obtain great victories, he must, in the first place, learn himself and teach his army not to be beaten, and rather than run such a risk not to fight at all. This, to be sure, seems a very simple idea, but it was in the circumstances a flash of genius. Men of the greatest ability, both in theory and in practice, in the cabinet and on the field of battle, had been looking for some such principle for the last fifteen years, but they had not found it." As General Wellesley told the friend already referred to, in June, 1808, he was satisfied that the French system of attacking in column would fail when tried against troops sufficiently firm and well disciplined to receive them with the bayonet, and the first encounter in Portugal proved the correctness of this sagacious prediction.

On the 12th of July the expedition, consisting of about ten thousand men, put to sea, and having touched at Corunna in passing, for the purpose of communicating with the Spanish junta of Galicia, Sir Arthur disembarked his troops at the mouth of the Mondego on the 5th of August. Having received some reinforcements, which raised the force under his command to near fourteen thousand men, he began his march on the 9th towards Lisbon, and on the 17th attacked and defeated a French corps under Laborde at Roliça. Meanwhile Junot, the French commander-in-chief, at the head of sixteen thousand men, had taken up a strong position on the heights of Torres Vedras, for the purpose of protecting the capital. Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had been joined on the 20th by two additional brigades, which made his force rather superior in numbers to that of the enemy, prepared at once to give him battle. But at this stage the blundering and short-sighted policy of the English cabinet made itself felt in the field. Their original instructions to Sir Arthur were vague and unsatisfactory, and only three days after the expedition sailed fresh and contradictory instructions were drawn, and the plan of operations was entirely changed. The army was to be raised to thirty thousand men. Sir Arthur was to surrender the command to Sir Harry Burrard, who was in turn to make way for Sir Hew Dalrymple, and no fewer than six general officers were placed above the only British officer then living who had commanded great armies, and conducted successfully great operations. Sir Harry Burrard most unfortunately arrived on the evening of the 20th, and without quitting his ship, or troubling himself to examine the position of the British army or of the enemy, to Sir Arthur's great annoyance immediately countermanded the