The British Military Service is fertile in curious contrasts. Among the officers who sailed from England for the East in the spring of 1854 were three veterans who had soldiered under the Great Duke in Portugal and Spain. The fighting career of each of those men began almost simultaneously; the senior of the three first confronted an enemy's fire in 1807, the two others in the following year. In 1854 one of these officers, who was the son of a duke and who had himself been raised to the peerage, was the Commander-in-Chief of the expeditionary army. Lord Raglan was a lieutenant-colonel at the age of twenty-four, a colonel at twenty-seven, a major-general at thirty-seven. He had been colonel-in-chief of a regiment since 1830 and a lieutenant-general since 1838; and he was to become a field-marshal before the year was out. Another, who belonged, although irregularly, to an old and good family, whose father was a distinguished if unfortunate general, and who enjoyed the patronage and protection of one of our great houses, belonging though he did to an arm of the service in which promotion has always been exceptionally slow, was a lieutenant-colonel at thirty and a colonel at forty, and was now a lieutenant-general on the Staff and second in command of the expeditionary force.