We may rejoin George Fairburn, some three weeks after the day when he had been picked up by the Dutch transport.  With others he had been landed in the Tagus, and at once drafted into one of the regiments under the Earl of Galway, a Frenchman by birth, but now, having been driven out of France by the persecutions he and the rest of the Protestants had had to endure, a general in the English army.  George learned that Portugal had joined the Grand Alliance, in consequence of the Methuen Treaty between her and England, by which Portuguese wines were to be admitted into English ports at a lower customs duty than those of other countries.  This step on the part of Portugal had greatly enraged the French King, and he had poured his troops into Spain.  The Allies, therefore, were preparing to attack Spain from the eastern and the western sides of the Peninsula at the same time.  So George and his comrades began their march eastward, while the gallant admiral Sir George Rooke was attacking Barcelona on the opposite coast.

It was a new life for the English lad, and the heavy marches in a hot climate tried him.  But he was growing into a stout youth, and was not afraid of a bit of hard work.

“Besides,” he would say to himself, when disposed to grumble, “am I not a soldier?  And isn’t that what I’ve always wanted to be?  And I might have been chained up in a French prison still!  A thousand times better be here, even in this scorching place.”

If it seemed odd to the lad that the English soldiers were commanded by a Frenchman, it was still stranger that the French forces they were marching to meet were under an Englishman.  Yet so it was; the commander of Louis’s army in Spain being the Duke of Berwick, a son of James II and Arabella Churchill, Marlborough’s sister.  The two generals were well matched, according to the opinion that prevailed among the troops.

Weeks passed, and as yet George Fairburn had seen no actual fighting.  He was all eager to get into action, and was not much comforted by the declaration of the old sergeant under whom he marched.

“Bide your time, my lad,” the veteran would say, “you will get your full share of fighting; enough to satisfy even a fire-eater such as I can see you’re going to be.”

One evening, to his intense delight, the lad was sent forward with a skirmishing party, a report having come in that the enemy was concealed somewhere in one of the wooded valleys of the neighbourhood.  After a cautious march of three or four miles, the little company, commanded by a lieutenant of foot, dropped down into a dingle, at the bottom of which ran a stream almost everywhere hidden by the thick growth of trees.  The men were startled, on turning a corner in the break-neck path, to see below them the French flag flying from what appeared to be an old mill.  Scattered about were the roofs of a dozen cottages, and at the doors could be perceived a number of soldiers lolling at their ease.