Colour-Sergeant Thomas Faughnan - Stirring Incidents in the Life of a British Soldier: An Autobiography [Illustrated Edition]

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In laying the history of my life and travels before the public, I deem it right to state that I am past the middle age; this I feel compelled to mention, because it is my opinion that no man should write a history of himself until he has set foot upon the border land where the past and the future begin to blend. When the past has receded so far that he can behold it as in a picture, and his share in it as the history of a soldier who has fought for his Queen and country, and had many narrow escapes of death. But, thank God, I have been spared thus far to confess my faults, and my good deeds look miserably poor in my own eyes; indeed, I would no more claim a reward for them than expect a captain's commission.

The countries and incidents described in this work will be found I trust, interesting to all classes of persons. The history of a soldier's life and travels is always an entertaining and instructive one. Many books on the lives of officers have been written by learned men containing much information, and highly useful to the scholar, but they do not interest the mass of common readers. Others, again, pass so rapidly from place to place, and are so general in their description, the reader gets but very imperfect ideas from reading them. These extremes the writer has endeavoured to avoid. It has been my object to select the most important events of my life, and to describe them in a plain and familiar style. I have not indulged in learned dissertations, my common, old-fashioned Irish school education being too limited to give that classical finish to the work which a learned writer would have done. Indeed, it has not been my intention to write a book for the learned or critical, but to give to the public a volume written in a homely style, by a non-commissioned officer, to instruct and interest the family and the common reader, as well as my comrades. If, while dilating on the exploits of my comrades in arms, I have omitted to pay proper respect to gallant foes, it is because I know that history will supply the deficiency. Time will gild with glory a Trojan defence, fitly closed by a successful retreat across a burning bridge, under a heavy fire. But come along, dear reader, and try whether in my first chapter I cannot be a boy again, in such a way that my reader will gladly linger a little in the meadows of childhood, ere we pass to riper years and stirring battle-fields.