On the outbreak of the war with Austria he took command of the Lombard volunteers as major-general, and in the campaign of 1849 he was aide-decamp to the king.
They have a language of their own, and are an unsociable people, suspicious of strangers, ever ready to decamp if they think a tax-collector is near.
He was promoted captain during the first year of the Civil War, and towards the close of 1861 became lieutenant-colonel and aide-decamp to General Halleck, who in the spring of 1862 sent him to General Grant as chief engineer.
His father, vicar of Charlton and Westport, an illiterate and choleric man, quarrelled, it is said, with a brother clergyman at the church door, and was forced to decamp, leaving his three children to the care of an elder brother Francis, a flourishing glover at Malmesbury.
