Explore "The Bugle-Boy of Badajoz" by James Grant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
'Mother! mother! come out of the cold ground; come to your little José, who is so lonely now! ' wailed a boy stretched on his mother's grave, while wetting with his tears the flowers that had been laid there, and the green turf, into which he dug his little hands in the wildness of his great grief.
It was in the cemetery of the Penha Convent at Cintra, and when ravaged Portugal lay wasted and bleeding under the feet of the French army, led by Marshal Junot, the Duc d'Abrantes, to Lisbon, in 1808, a period that seems long ago now, yet was fresh enough in the memory of our fathers.