OF MY WINTER CAMPAIGN IN PRUSSIA, AND ANOTHER MEETING WITH MACKELLAR OF
KILBRIDE
I have no intention here of narrating at large what happened in my
short career as a soldier of the French Army, curious though some of
the things that befell me chanced to be. They may stand for another
occasion, while I hurriedly and briefly chronicle what led to my
second meeting with MacKellar of Kilbride, and through that same to the
restoration of the company of Father Hamilton, the sometime priest of
Dixmunde.
The Regiment d'Auvergne was far from its native hills when first I
joined it, being indeed on the frontier of Austria. 'Twas a corps not
long embodied, composed of a preposterous number of mere lads as soft as
kail, yet driven to miracles of exertion by drafted veteran officers of
other regiments who stiffened their command with the flat of the sword.
As for my lieutenancy it was nothing to be proud of in such a battalion,
for I herded in a mess of foul-mouthed scoundrels and learned little of
the trade of soldiering that I was supposed to be taught in the interval
between our departure from the frontier and our engagement on the field
as allies with the Austrians. Of the Scots that had been in the regiment
at one time there was only one left--a major named MacKay, that came
somewhere out of the Reay country in the shire of Sutherland, and was
reputed the drunkenest officer among the allies, yet comported himself,
on the strength of his Hielan' extraction, towards myself, his Lowland
countryman, with such a ludicrous haughtiness I could not bear the
man--no, not from the first moment I set eyes on him!
He was a pompous little person with legs bowed through years of riding
horse, and naturally he was the first of my new comrades I introduced
myself to when I joined the colours. I mind he sat upon a keg of
bullets, looking like a vision of Bacchus, somewhat soiled and pimply,
when I entered to him and addressed him, with a certain gladness, in our
tongue.
“Humph!” was what he said. “Another of his Royal Highness's Sassenach
friends! Here's a wheen of the lousiest French privates ever shook in
their breeks in front of a cannon, wanting smeddum and courage drummed
into them with a scabbard, and they send me Sassenachs to do the
business with when the whole hearty North of Scotland is crawling with
the stuff I want particularly.”
“Anyway, here I am, major,” said I, slightly taken aback at this, “and
you'll have to make the best of me.”
“Pshaw!” cried he vulgarly and cracked his thumb. “I have small stomach
for his Royal Highness's recommendations; I have found in the past that
he sends to Austria--him and his friends--only the stuff he has no use
for nearer the English Channel, where it's I would like to be this day.
They're talking of an invasion, I hear; wouldn't I like to be among the
first to have a slap again at Geordie?”
My birse rose at this, which I regarded as a rank treason in any man
that spoke my own language even with a tartan accent.
“A slap at Geordie!” I cried. “You made a bonny-like job o't when you
had the chance!”
It was my first and last confabulation of a private nature with Major
Dugald MacKay. Thereafter he seldom looked the road I was on beyond to
give an order or pick a fault, and, luckily, though a pleasant footing
with my neighbours has ever been my one desire in life, I was not much
put up or down by the ill-will of such a creature.
Like a break in a dream, a space of all unfriended travelling, which
is the worst travelling of all, appears my time of marching with the
Regiment d'Auvergne. I was lost among aliens--aliens in tongue and
sentiment, and engaged, to tell the truth, upon an enterprise that never
enlisted the faintest of my sympathy. All I wished was to forget the
past (and that, be sure, was the one impossible thing), and make a
living of some sort. The latter could not well be more scanty, for
my pay was a beggar's, and infrequent at that, and finally it wholly
ceased.
I saw the world, so much of it as lies in Prussia, and may be witnessed
from the ranks of a marching regiment of the line; I saw life--the
life of the tent and the bivouac, and the unforgettable thing of it was
death--death in the stricken field among the grinding hoofs of horses,
below the flying wheels of the artillery.
And yet if I had had love there--some friend to talk to when the
splendour of things filled me; the consciousness of a kind eye to share
the pleasure of a sunshine or to light at a common memory; or if I
had had hope, the prospect of brighter days and a restitution of my
self-respect, they might have been much happier these marching days that
I am now only too willing to forget. For we trod in many pleasant places
even when weary, by summer fields jocund with flowers, and by autumn's
laden orchards. Stars shone on our wearied columns as we rested in the
meadows or on the verge of woods, half satisfied with a gangrel's supper
and sometimes joining in a song. I used to feel then that here was a
better society after all than some I had of late been habituated with
upon the coast. And there were towns we passed through: 'twas sweet
exceedingly to hear the echo of our own loud drums, the tarantara of
trumpets. I liked to see the folks come out although they scarce were
friendly, and feel that priceless zest that is the guerdon of the corps,
the crowd, the mob--that I was something in a vastly moving thing even
if it was no more than the regiment of raw lads called d'Auvergne.
We were, for long in our progress, no part of the main army, some
strategy of which we could not guess the reasoning, making it necessary
that we should move alone through the country; and to the interest
of our progress through these foreign scenes was added the ofttimes
apprehension that we might some day suffer an alarm from the regiments
of the great Frederick. Twice we were surprised by night and our
pickets broken in, once a native guided us to a _guet-apens_--an
ambuscade--where, to do him justice, the major fought like a lion, and
by his spirit released his corps from the utmost danger. A war is like a
harvest; you cannot aye be leading in, though the common notion is
that in a campaign men are fighting even-on. In the cornfield the work
depends upon the weather; in the field of war (at least with us 'twas
so) the actual strife must often depend upon the enemy, and for weeks on
end we saw them neither tail nor horn, as the saying goes. Sometimes it
seemed as if the war had quite forgotten us, and was waging somewhere
else upon the planet far away from Prussia.
We got one good from the marching and the waiting; it put vigour in our
men. Day by day they seemed to swell and strengthen, thin faces grew
well-filled and ruddy, slouching steps grew confident and firm. And thus
the Regiment d'Au-vergne was not so badly figured when we fought the
fight of Rosbach that ended my career of glory.
Rosbach!--its name to me can still create a tremor. We fought it in
November month in a storm of driving snow. Our corps lay out upon the
right of Frederick among fields that were new-ploughed for wheat and
broken up by ditches. The d'Auvergnes charged with all the fire of
veterans; they were smashed by horse, but rose and fell and rose again
though death swept across them like breath from a furnace, scorching
and shrivelling all before it. The Prussian and the Austrian guns
went rat-a-pat like some gigantic drum upon the braes, and nearer
the musketry volleys mingled with the plunge of horse and shouting of
commanders so that each sound individually was indistinguishable, but
all was blended in one unceasing melancholy hum.
That drumming on the braes and that long melancholy hum are what most
vividly remains to me of Rosbach, for I fell early in the engagement,
struck in the charge by the sabre of a Prussian horseman that cleft
me to the skull in a slanting stroke and left me incapable, but not
unconscious, on the field.
I lay for hours with other wounded in the snow The battle changed
ground; the noises came from the distance: we seemed to be forgotten. I
pitied myself exceedingly. Finally I swounded.
When I came to myself it was night and men with lanterns were moving
about the fields gathering us in like blackcock where we lay. Two
Frenchmen came up and spoke to me, but what they said was all beyond
me for I had clean forgotten every word of their language though that
morning I had known it scarcely less fully than my own. I tried to speak
in French, it seems, and thought I did so, but in spite of me the words
were the broadest lallands Scots such as I had not used since I had run,
a bare-legged boy, about the braes of, home. And otherwise my faculties
were singularly acute, for I remember how keenly I noticed the pitying
eye of the younger of the two men.
What they did was to stanch my wound and go away. I feared I was
deserted, but by-and-by they returned with another man who held the
lantern close to my face as he knelt beside me.
“By the black stones of Baillinish!” said he in an unmistakable Hielan'
accent, “and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed the
bylie? You were not in your mother's bosom when you got that stroke!”
I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, 'twas no other than
MacKellar of Kilbride!
He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade in
another part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised me
for a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot.
Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him)
I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over the
frontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of all
the Continent of Europe in these stirring days.
I mended rapidly, and cheery enough were these days of travel in a cart,
so cheery that I never considered what the end of them might be, but was
content to sit in the sunshine blithely conversing with this odd surgeon
of the French army who had been roving the world for twenty years like
my own Uncle Andrew, and had seen service in every army in Europe, but
yet hankered to get back to the glens of his nativity, where he hoped
his connection with the affair of Tearlach and the Forty-five would be
forgotten.
“It's just this way of it, Hazel Den,” he would say to me, “there's
them that has got enough out of Tearlach to make it worth their while
to stick by him and them that has not. I am of the latter. I have been
hanging about Paris yonder for a twelvemonth on the promise of the body
that I should have a post that suited with my talents, and what does he
do but get me clapped into a scurvy regiment that goes trudging through
Silesia since Whitsunday, with never a sign of the paymaster except the
once and then no more than a tenth of what was due to me. It is, maybe,
glory, as the other man said; but my sorrow, it is not the kind that
makes a clinking in your pouches.”
He had a comfortable deal of money to have so poor an account of his
paymaster, and at that I hinted.
“Oh! Allow me for that!” he cried with great amusement at my wonder.
“Fast hand at a feast and fast feet at a foray is what the other man
said, and I'm thinking it is a very good observation, too. Where would I
be if I was lippening on the paymaster?”
“Man! you surely have not been stealing?” said I, with such great
innocency that he laughed like to end.
“Stealing!” he cried. “It's no theft to lift a purse in an enemy's
country.”
“But these were no enemies of yours?” I protested, “though you happen to
be doctoring in their midst.”
“Tuts! tuts, man!” said he shortly. “When the conies quarrel the quirky
one (and that's Sir Fox if ye like to ken) will get his own. There seems
far too much delicacy about you, my friend, to be a sporran-soldier
fighting for the best terms an army will give you. And what for need you
grumble at my having found a purse in an empty house when it's by virtue
of the same we're at this moment making our way to the sea?”
I could make no answer to that, for indeed I had had, like the other
three wounded men in the cart with me, the full benefit of his purse,
wherever he had found it, and but for that we had doubtless been
mouldering in a Prussian prison.
It will be observed that MacKellar spoke of our making for the sea, and
here it behoves that I should tell how that project arose.
When we had crossed the frontier the first time it was simply because
it seemed the easiest way out of trouble, though it led us away from
the remnants of the army. I had commented upon this the first night we
stopped within the Netherlands, and the surgeon bluntly gave me his mind
on the matter. The truth was, he said, that he was sick of his post and
meant to make this the opportunity of getting quit of it.
I went as close as I dared upon a hint that the thing looked woundily
like a desertion. He picked me up quick enough and counselled me to
follow his example, and say farewell to so scurvy a service as that I
had embarked on. His advices might have weighed less with me (though in
truth I was sick enough of the Regiment d'Auvergne and a succession
of defeats) if he had not told me that there was a certain man at
Helvoetsluys he knew I should like to see.
“And who might that be?” I asked.
“Who but his reverence himself?” said Kilbride, who dearly loved an
effect. “Yon night I met you in the Paris change-house it was planned by
them I was with, one of them being Buhot himself of the police, that the
old man must be driven out of his nest in the Hôtel Dieu, seeing they
had got all the information they wanted from him, and I was one of the
parties who was to carry this into effect. At the time I fancied Buhot
was as keen upon yourself as upon the priest, and I thought I was doing
a wonderfully clever thing to spy your red shoes and give you a warning
to quit the priest, but all the time Buhot was only laughing at me, and
saw you and recognised you himself in the change-house. Well, to make
the long tale short, when we went to the hospital the birds were both
of them gone, which was more than we bargained for, because some sort
of trial was due to the priest though there was no great feeling against
him. Where he had taken wing to we could not guess, but you will not
hinder him to come on a night of nights (as we say) to the lodging I
was tenanting at the time in the Rue Espade, and throw himself upon my
mercy. The muckle hash! I'll allow the insolency of the thing tickled
me greatly. The man was a fair object, too; had not tasted food for two
days, and captured my fancy by a tale I suppose there is no trusting,
that he had given you the last few _livres_ he had in the world.”
“That was true enough about the _livres_,” I said with gratitude.
“Was it, faith?” cried Kilbride. “Then I'm glad I did him the little
service that lay in my power, which was to give him enough money to pay
for posting to Helvoetsluys, where he is now, and grateful enough so far
as I could gather from the last letters I had from him, and also mighty
anxious to learn what became of his secretary.”
“I would give the last plack in my pocket to see the creature,” said I.
“Would you indeed?” said Kilbride. “Then here's the road for you, and
it must be a long furlough whatever of it from the brigade of Marshal
Clermont.”