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1 The Duke of Wellington, we are told, used to say: ‘All troops ran away—that he never minded—all he cared about was, whether they would come back.’ Croker Papers, volume I, page 352. If the truth must be told in this instance, the regiment, in the confusion from misunderstanding an order, broke, and commenced a precipitate retreat, but the color-sergeant, Dominick Spillman, and others, refusing to leave, the men reformed on the colors, and then, with well-dressed line, at the word of command went through the motions of loading and firing and facing about to retire, and again to deliver their fire as if on parade, and so retreated to the position at which they were joined by the Twelfth. They demonstrated the truth of the Duke's aphorism: ‘Brave men sometimes run. It requires the greatest of all courage to come back into the fight.’
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