Note 264 — SECTION XIX: CHAPTER V

For Craufurd’s life and personality see his biography by his grandson the Rev. Alex. Craufurd, London, 1890. The most vivid picture of him is in Rifleman Harris’s chronicle of the Corunna retreat, a wonderful piece of narrative by a writer from the ranks, who admired his general despite of all his severity, and acknowledges that his methods were necessary. Though Napier as a historian is on the whole fairly just to his old commander, whose achievements were bound up indissolubly with the glories of the Light Division, as a man he disliked Craufurd: in one of his hooks which I possess (Delagrave’s Campagne de Portugal) he has written in the margin several bitter personal remarks about him, very unlike the language employed in his history. The unpublished Journal of Colonel McLeod of the 43rd is (as Mr. Alex. Craufurd informs me) written in the same spirit. So is Charles Napier’s Diary.