CHAPTER I

BARRACKS

BIVOUACS AND BATTLES

BARRACKS

BIVOUACS AND BATTLES

BY

ARCHIBALD FORBES, LL.D.

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1891

_All rights reserved_

All the pieces in this little volume are reprints. I have to express my

obligations to the proprietors and editors of the periodicals to which

they were originally contributed, for the permission to reproduce them.

A. F.

CONTENTS

PAGE

HOW “THE CRAYTURE” GOT ON THE STRENGTH 1

THE FATE OF “NANA SAHIB’S ENGLISHMAN” 31

THE OLD SERGEANT 56

THE GENTLEMAN PRIVATE OF THE “SKILAMALINKS” 72

JELLYPOD; ALIAS THE MULETEER 89

THE DOUBLE COUP DE GRÂCE 112

BILL BERESFORD AND HIS VICTORIA CROSS 129

LA BELLE HÉLÈNE OF ALEXINATZ 151

AN OUTPOST ADVENTURE 175

THE DIVINE FIGURE FROM THE NORTH 190

A YARN OF THE “PRESIDENT” FRIGATE 206

FIRE-DISCIPLINE 218

A CHRISTMAS DINNER DE PROFUNDIS 242

ABSIT OMEN! 251

A FORGOTTEN REBELLION 291

MY CAMPAIGN IN PALL MALL 307

HOW “THE CRAYTURE” GOT ON THE STRENGTH

Mick Sullivan was a private soldier in G troop, 30th Light Dragoons, of

some six years’ service. Since the day old Sergeant Denny Lee ’listed

him in Charles Street, just outside the Cheshire Cheese, close by

where the Council door of the India Office now is, Mick had never been

anything else than a private soldier, and never hoped or needed hope to

be anything else if he served out his full twenty-four years, for he

could neither read nor write, and his regimental defaulter sheet was

much fuller of “marks” than the most lavish barrack-room pudding is

of raisins. Nevertheless the Queen had a very good bargain in honest

Mick, although that was scarcely the opinion of the adjutant, who

was a “jumped-up” youngster, and had not been in the Crimea with the

regiment. The grizzled captain of G troop, who was a non-purchase man,

and had been soldiering for well on to twenty years, understood and

appreciated Mick better. Captain Coleman knew that he had come limping

up out of that crazy gallop along “the valley of death” with a sword

red from hilt to point, a lance-thrust through the calf of his leg, and

a wounded comrade on his back. He had heard Mick’s gay laugh and cheery

jest during that dreary time in the hollow inland from Varna, when

cholera was decimating the troop, and the hearts of brave men were in

their boots. He remembered how Mick was the life and soul of the gaunt

sorry squad inside the flimsy tent on the bleak slope of Kadikoi during

that terrible Crimean winter, when men were turning their toes up to

the daisies by sections, and when the living crawled about half frozen,

half sodden. Mick’s old chestnut mare (G 11) was the only horse of

the troop that survived the winter, kept alive by her owner’s patient

and unremitting care: if it was true, as fellows swore who found her

cruelly rough--she was known by the name of the “Dislocator,” given

to her by a much-chafed recruit, whose anatomy her trot had wholly

disorganised--if it was true that in that hard winter she had frozen

quite hard, and had never since come properly thawed, it was to Mick’s

credit that she was still saving the country the price of a remount.

There was no smarter man or cleaner soldier in all the corps than the

harum-scarum Tipperary man; he had a brogue that you could cut with a

knife; and there was nothing he would not do for whisky but shirk his

turn of duty and hear his regiment belittled without promptly engaging

in single combat with the disparager of the “Ould Strawboots.”

Mick did a good deal of punishment drill at varying intervals, and his

hair was occasionally abnormally short as a result of that species

of infliction known as “seven days’ cells.” He had seldom any other

crime than “absent without leave,” and he had never been tried by

court-martial, although more than once he had had a very narrow squeak,

especially once when he was brought into barracks by a picket after

a three days’ absence, with a newspaper round his shoulders instead

of stable jacket and shirt. No doubt he had drunk those articles

of attire, but the plea that they had been stolen saved him from

the charge of making away with “regimental necessaries,” which is a

court-martial offence. The 30th Light, just home from the Crimea, were

quartered at York; and Mick, after two or three escapades which were

the pardonable result of his popularity as one of the heroes of the

Light Cavalry charge, had settled down into unwonted steadiness. He

went out alone every evening, and at length his chum took him to task

for his unsociality, and threatened to “cut the loaf.”

“Arrah now,” was Mick’s indignant reply, “it’s a silly spalpeen ye are

to go for to think such a thing. Sure if it hadn’t been a great saycret

intirely, ye’d have known all about it long ago. I’ve been coortin’, ye

divil! Sure an’ she’s the purtiest crayture that iver ye clapt yer two

eyes upon, aye, an’ a prudent girl too. So that’s the saycret, chum;

an’ now come on up to the canteen, an’ bedad we’ll drink luck an’ joy

to the wooin’!”

Over their pot of beer Mick told his comrade the simple story of his

love. His sweetheart, it seemed, was the daughter of a small shopkeeper

in the outskirts of the city, and, as Mick was most emphatic in

claiming, a young woman of quite exemplary character. Thus far, then,

everything was satisfactory; but the obvious rock ahead was the all but

certainty that Mick would be refused leave to marry. He had not exactly

the character entitling him to such a privilege, and the troop already

had its full complement of married people. But if the commanding

officer should say him nay, then “Sure,” Mick doughtily protested,

“I’ll marry the darlint widout lave; in spite of the colonel, an’ the

gineral, and the commander-in-chief himself, bedad!”

Next morning Mick formed up to the adjutant and asked permission to

see the colonel. The adjutant, after the manner of his kind, tried to

extract from him for what purpose the request was made, but Mick was

old soldier enough to know how far an adjutant’s ill word carries, and

resolutely declined to divulge his intent. After the commanding officer

had disposed of what are called at the police-courts the “charges

of the night,” Mick was marched into the presence by the regimental

sergeant-major; and as he stood there at rigid attention, the nature

of his business was demanded in the curt hard tone which the colonel

with a proper sense of the fitness of things uses when addressing the

private soldier.

“Plase yer honour, sor, I want to get--to get married,” blurted Mick,

for the moment in some confusion now that the crisis had come.

“And, plase yer honour, Mr. Sullivan,” retorted the chief with sour

pleasantry, “I’ll see you d--d first!”

“Och, sor, an’ how can ye be so cruel at all, at all?” pleaded Mick,

who had recovered from his confusion, and thought a touch of the

blarney might come in useful.

“Why, what the deuce do you want with a wife?” asked the colonel

angrily.

“Sure, sor, an’ pwhat does any man want wid a wife?”

The regimental sergeant-major grinned behind his hand, the adjutant

burst into a splutter of laughter at the back of the colonel’s chair,

and that stern officer himself found his gravity severely strained. But

he was firm in his refusal to grant the indulgence, and Mick went forth

from the presence in a very doleful frame of mind.

At “watch-setting” the same night Mr. Sullivan was reported absent, nor

did he come into barracks in the course of the night. The regimental

sergeant-major was a very old bird, and straightway communicated to

the adjutant his ideas as to the nature of Mick’s little game. Then

the pair concerted a scheme whereby they might baulk him at the very

moment when his cup of bliss should be at his lips. At nine in the

morning about a dozen corporals and as many files of men paraded

outside the orderly-room door. To each of the likeliest religious

edifices licensed for the celebration of marriages a corporal and a

file were told off, with instructions to watch outside, and intercept

Sullivan if he should appear in the capacity of a bridegroom. Clever as

was the device, it came very near failing. The picket charged with the

duty of watching an obscure suburban chapel, regarding it as extremely

improbable that such a place would be selected, betook themselves to

the taproom of an adjacent public-house, where they chanced on some

good company, and had soon all but forgotten the duty to which they had

been detailed. It was, however, suddenly recalled to them. A native who

dropped in for a pint of half-and-half, casually observed that “a sojer

were bein’ spliced across the road.” The moment was a critical one,

but the corporal rose to the occasion. Hastily leading out his men,

he stationed them at the door, while he himself entered, and stealing

up to the marriage party unobserved, clapped his hand on Sullivan’s

shoulder just as the latter was fumbling for the ring. The bride

shrieked, the priest talked about sacrilege, and the bride’s mother

made a gallant assault on the corporal with her umbrella; but the

non-commissioned officer was firm, and Mick, whose sense of discipline

was very strong, merely remarked, “Be jabers, corporal, an’ in another

minute ye would have been too late!”

He was summarily marched off into barracks, looking rather rueful at

being thus torn from the very horns of the altar. Next morning he paid

another visit to the orderly-room, this time as a prisoner, when the

commanding officer, radiant at the seeming success of the plot to baulk

Mr. Sullivan’s matrimonial intentions, let him off with fourteen days’

pack drill. Having done that punishment, he was again free to go out

of barracks, but only in the evening, so that he could not get married

unless by special license, a luxury to which a private dragoon’s pay

does not run. Nevertheless he cherished his design, and presently

the old adage, “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” had yet another

confirmation.

One fine morning the regiment rode out in “watering order.” About

a mile outside the town, poor Mick was suddenly taken very ill. So

serious appeared his condition that the troop sergeant-major directed

him to ride straight back into barracks, giving him strict orders to

go to hospital the moment he arrived. Presently, Mick’s horse, indeed,

cantered through the barrack gate, but there was no rider on its back.

The sentry gave the alarm, and the guard, imagining Mick to have been

thrown, made a search for him along the road outside; but they did not

find him, for the reason that at the time he was being thus searched

for he was being married. The ceremony was this time accomplished

without interruption; but the hymeneal festivities were rudely broken

in upon by a picket from the barracks, who tore the bridegroom

ruthlessly from the arms of the bride, and escorted him to durance in

the guard-room.

Mick had seven days’ cells for this escapade, and when he next saw his

bride, he had not a hair on his head a quarter of an inch long, the

provost-sergeant’s shears having gone very close to the scalp. He had

a wife, it was true; but matrimonial felicity seemed a far-off dream.

Mick had married without leave, and there was no place in barracks

for his little wife. Indeed, in further punishment of Mick, her name

was “put upon the gate,” which means that the sentry was charged to

prohibit her entrance. Mick could get no leave; so he could enjoy the

society of his spouse only between evening stables and watch-setting;

and on the whole he might just as well have been single--indeed better,

if the wife’s welfare be taken into consideration. Only neither husband

nor wife was of this opinion, and hoped cheerily for better things.

But worse, not better, was to befall the pair. That cruellest of all

blows which can befall the couple married without leave, suddenly

struck them; the regiment was ordered on foreign service. It was to

march to the south of England, give over its horses at Canterbury,

Christchurch, and elsewhere, and then embark at Southampton for India.

Next to a campaign, the brightest joy in the life of the cavalry

soldier is going on “the line of march,” from one home station to

another. For him it is a glorious interlude to the dull restrained

monotony of his barrack-room life, and the weary routine of mounted

and dismounted drill. “Boots and saddles” sounds early on the line of

march. The troopers from their scattered billets concentrate in front

of the principal hotel of the town where the detachment quarters for

the night, and form up in the street or the market-place, while as

yet the shutters are fast on the front of the earliest-opening shop.

The officers emerge from the hotel, mount, and inspect the parade;

the order “Threes right!” is given, and the day’s march has begun.

The morning sun flashes on the sword-scabbards and accoutrements,

as the quiet street echoes to the clink of the horse-hoofs on the

cobblestones. Presently the town is left behind, and the detachment

is out into the country. There had been a shower as the sun rose--the

“pride of the morning” the soldiers call the sprinkle--just sufficient

to lay the dust, and evoke from every growing thing its sweetest

scent. The fresh crisp morning air is laden with perfume; the wild

rose, the jessamine, the eglantine, and the “morning glory” entwine

themselves about the gnarled thorn of the hedgerows, and send their

tangled feelers straggling up the ivy-clad trunks of the great elms and

oaks, through whose foliage the sunbeams are shooting. From the valley

rises a feathery haze broken into gossamer-like patches of diverse

hues; and here and there the blue smoke of some early-lit cottage

fire ascends in a languid straightness through the still atmosphere.

The hind yoking his plough in the adjacent field chants a rude ditty,

while his driver is blowing his first cloud, the scent of which comes

sluggishly drifting across the road with that peculiarly fresh odour

only belonging to tobacco-smoke in the early morning. As the rise is

crowned, a fair and fertile expanse of country lies stretched out

below--shaggy woods and cornfields, and red-roofed homesteads, and long

reaches of still water, and the square tower of the venerable church

showing over the foliage that overhangs the hamlet and the graveyard.

Then the command “Trot!” is passed along from the front, and away

go the troopers bumping merrily, their accoutrements jingling and

clanking, their horses feeling the bit lightly, tossing their heads,

arching their necks, and stepping out gallantly, in token that they too

take delight in being on the road. Three miles of a steady trot; then

a five minutes’ halt to tighten girths and “look round” equipments;

then up into the saddle again. The word comes back along the files,

“Singers to the front!” whereupon every fellow who has, or thinks he

has, a voice, presses forward till the two front ranks are some six

abreast across the road. Now the premier vocalist--self-constituted or

acclaimed--strikes up a solo whose principal attribute is unlimited

chorus; and so to the lusty strain the detachment marches through the

next village, bringing all the natives to their doors, and attracting

much attention and commendation, especially from the fair sex. The

day’s march half over, there is a longer halt; and the kindly officers

send on a corporal to the little wayside beerhouse just ahead, whence

he speedily returns, accompanied by the landlord, stepping carefully

between a couple of pailsful of foaming beer. Each man receives his

pint, the officers’ “treat”; and then, all hands in the highest

spirits, the journey is resumed; trot and walk alternate, the men

riding “at ease,” until the verge is reached of the town in which

the detachment is to be billeted for the night. Then “Attention!” is

called, swords are drawn, the files close up, and the little array

marches right gallantly through the streets to the principal hotel.

Here the “billeting sergeant,” who is always a day’s march ahead,

distributes the billets, each for a couple of troopers, and chums are

allowed to share the same billet. A willing urchin shows the way to

the Wheatsheaf, whose hearty landlord forthwith comes out with a frank

welcome, and a brown jug in hand. Horses cleaned and bedded down,

accoutrements freed from the soil of the road, dinner--and a right good

dinner--is served, the troopers sitting down to table with their host

and hostess. The worthy Boniface and his genial spouse have none of

your cockney contempt for the soldier, but consider him not only their

equal, but a welcome guest; and the soldier, if he is worth his salt,

does his best to conduct himself so as not to tarnish the credit of his

cloth.

Than Mick Sullivan no soldier of the gay 30th Light Dragoons was wont

to enjoy himself more on the line of march. But now the honest Irishman

was silent and depressed. He was a married man. That of itself did

not sadden him; he did not repent his act, rash as it had been. But

he had married without leave, and his little wife was entitled to no

privileges--she was not “on the strength.” Mick had prayed her to

remain at home with her father, for he could not afford her travelling

expenses, and even if he could, he knew, and he had to tell her,

that they must part at the port of embarkation. But “the Crayture,”

as Mick called her, was resolute to go thus far. Poll Tudor and Bess

Bowles, accredited spouses, “married women on the strength,” took train

at Government expense, and knew their berths on the troopship were

assured. But for “the Crayture” there was no railway warrant, far less

any berth aboard. March for march, with weary feet and swelling heart,

the poor little woman made with the detachment, tramping the long miles

between York and Southampton. Mostly the kind souls where Mick was

billeted gave her bite and sup and her bed; now and then the hayloft

was her portion. Ah me! in the old days such woful journeys were often

made; I believe that nowadays the canteen fund helps on their way

soldiers’ wives married without leave.

The troopship, with her steam up, was lying alongside the jetty in

Southampton Dock, and troop by troop as they quitted the train, the

men of the 30th Light were being marched aboard. Mick had bidden

“the Crayture” farewell, and had drowned his grief in drink; as they

marched toward the jetty, his chum reproached him on account of his

unsoldierly condition.

“Arrah now,” wailed Mick piteously, “sure, an’ if it wor yersilf lavin’

the darlint av a young wife behind ye, glad an’ fain ye would be to

take a dhrap to deaden yer sorrow. Whin I sed good-bye to the Crayture

this mornin’ I thought she’d have died outright wid the sobs from the

heart av her. Och, chum, the purty, beautiful crayture that I love so,

an’ that loves me, an’ me lavin’ her to the hard wurrld! Be gorra, an’

there she stands!”

Sure enough, standing there in the crowd, weeping as if she would break

her heart, was Mick’s poor little wife.

“Hould me carabine, chum, just for a moment, till I be givin’ her just

wan last kiss!” pleaded the poor fellow, and with a sudden spring he

was out of the ranks unobserved, and hidden in the crowd that opened

to receive him. His chum tramped on, but he reached the main-deck of

the troopship still carrying two carbines, for as yet Mick had not

re-appeared.

The comrade’s anxious eyes searched the crowded jetty in vain. But they

scanned a scene of singular pathos. The grizzled old quarter-master

was wiping his shaggy eyelashes furtively as he turned away from the

children he was leaving behind. There were poor wretches of wives

who had been married without leave, as “the Crayture” had been--some

with babes in their arms, weeping hopelessly as they thought of

the thousands of miles that were to part them from the men of their

hearts. And there were weeping women there also who had not even the

sorrowful consolation of being entitled to call themselves wives; and

boys were cheering, and the band was playing “The Girl I left behind

me,” and non-commissioned officers were swearing, and some half-drunk

recruit-soldiers were singing a dirty ditty, and heart-strings were

being torn, and the work of embarkation was steadily and relentlessly

progressing.

The embarkation completed, the shore-goers having been cleared out of

the ship and the gangway drawn, there was a muster on deck, and the

roll of each troop was called. In G troop one man was missing, and

that man was Mick Sullivan. The muster had barely broken off, when

a wild shout from the jetty was heard. There stood Mick very limp

and staggery, “the Crayture” clinging convulsively round his neck,

and he hailing the ship over her shoulder. Behind the forlorn couple

was a sympathising crowd of females sobbing in unmelodious concert,

with here and there a wilder screech of woe from the throat of some

tender-hearted country-woman of Mr. Sullivan. After some delay, Mick

was brought on to the upper deck of the trooper, where he stood

before the lieutenant of his troop in an attitude meant to represent

the rigidity of military attention, contrasting vividly with his

tear-stained face, his inability to refrain from a frequent hiccough,

and an obvious difficulty in overcoming the propensity of his

knee-joints to serve their owner treacherously.

“Well, Sullivan,” said the young officer, with an affectation of

sternness which under the circumstances was most praiseworthy, “what do

you mean by this conduct?”

“Plase, sor, an’ beg yer parrdon, sor, but I didn’t mane only to fall

out just for wan last worrd. It wasn’t the dhrink at all, at all,

sor; it’s the grief that kilt me intirely. Ah, sure, sor,” added Mick

insinuatingly, “it’s yersilf, yer honour, that is lavin’, maybe, a

purty crayture wapin’ for yer handsome face!”

The touch of nature made the officer kind. “Get out of sight at once,

you rascal,” said he, turning away to hide rather a sad smile, “and

take care the colonel don’t set eyes on you, else you’ll find yourself

in irons in double-quick time.”

“Thank ye, sor; it’s a good heart ye have,” said Mick over his

shoulder, as his chum hustled him toward the hatchway. “The

Crayture” was on the pier-head waving her poor little dud of a white

handkerchief, as the troopship, gathering way, steamed down Southampton

Water, and the strains of “The Girl I left behind me” came back fainter

and more faint on the light wind.

Bangalore, up country in the Madras Presidency, was the allotted

station of the 30th Light. The regiment had barely settled down in the

upland cantonment, when tidings came south of the mutiny of Bengal

native troops on the parade-ground of Berhampore. Every mail brought

news from the north more and more disquieting, and in the third week

of May the devilry of Meerut was recounted in the gasping terseness of

a telegram. The regiment hoped in vain for a summons to Bengal, but

there was no other cavalry corps in all the Madras Presidency, and the

authorities could not know but that the Madras native army might at any

moment flame out into mutiny. In the early days of June a sergeant’s

party of the 30th Light was sent down from Bangalore to Madras to

perform some exceptional orderly duty, and to this party belonged Mick

Sullivan and his chum. A week later Sir Patrick Grant, the Madras

Commander-in-Chief, was summoned by telegraph to Calcutta, to assume

the direction of military operations in Bengal, consequent on poor

General Anson’s sudden death. The _Fire Queen_ anchored in the roads

with Havelock aboard, fresh from his successes in Persia, and it was

arranged that the two old soldiers should hurry up to Calcutta without

an hour’s delay. Grant wanted a soldier-clerk to write for him on the

voyage, and a soldier-servant warranted proof against sea-sickness to

look after his chargers aboard ship. There was no time for ceremony,

and Mick’s chum, who was a well-educated man, was laid hold of as the

amanuensis, while Mick himself was shipped as the general’s temporary

groom. The services of the pair ceased when Calcutta was reached,

and they were attached to the Fort William garrison, pending the

opportunity to ship them back to Madras. But the two men, burning for

active service, determined to make a bold effort to escape relegation

to the dull inactivity of Bangalore. Watching their chance, they

addressed their petition to Sir Patrick, as he sat in the verandah

of his quarters in the fort “Quite irregular,” exclaimed the veteran

Highlander, “but I like your spirit, men! Let me see; I’ll arrange

matters with your regiment. You want to be in the thick of it at once,

eh? Well, you must turn infantrymen; the Ross-shire Buffs are out at

Chinsurah, and will have the route to-morrow. You can reach them in a

few hours, and I’ll give you a _chit_ to Colonel Hamilton which will

make it all right for you. One of you is a Highlander born, and as for

you, Sullivan, if you talk Erse to the fellows of the 78th, they won’t

know it from Argyllshire Gaelic.”

Three hours later the comrades had ceased for the time to be Light

Dragoons, and were acting members of the Grenadier Company of the

Ross-shire Buffs. Hart, the regimental sergeant-major, had presented

them to Colonel Hamilton, who duly honoured Sir Patrick’s _chit_, and

had sent them over to the orderly-room tent, where they found the

adjutant, that gallant soldier now alas! dead, whom later his country

knew as Sir Herbert Macpherson, V.C.

“What is your name, my man?” asked Macpherson of Sullivan.

“Michael Donald Mactavish Sullivan, sor,” responded Mick, with a face

as solemn as a mute’s at a funeral.

“What countryman are you?”

“An Argyllshire Tipperary man, sor,” replied Mick, without the twinkle

of an eyelash.

“How came you by your two middle names? They are surely not common in

Tipperary?”

“Och, yer honour, I was christened by thim two afther me grandmother,

an’ she was, I belave, a pure-bred Scotchman. It is in dutiful mimory

of her, rest her sowl, that I want for to jine the Ross-shire Buffs.”

“Well,” replied Mr. Macpherson imperturbably, “your dutiful aspiration

shall be gratified.”

The chum answered the formal questions regarding himself, and then

the regimental sergeant-major was directed to take the pair to the

quarter-master sergeant, to receive the clothing and accoutrements of

infantrymen.

Quarter-master Sergeant Tulloch, “Muckle Tulloch,” as he was called

in the regiment because of his abnormal bulk, was, although a Scot, a

man of humour; and it occurred to him that the new Irish Ross-shire

Buff might furnish some amusement. Highland regiments do not wear the

kilt on Indian service; indeed the tartans are not brought out from

home. But there happened by some odd chance to be a Highland uniform

among the quarter-master’s stores; and this Tulloch solemnly made over

to Mick Sullivan, instructing him to attire himself in it at once,

that its fit might be ascertained. The store had been temporarily

established in the unoccupied house of a wealthy native, and Sullivan

went into one of the empty rooms to don the unaccustomed garments.

Tulloch and the sergeant-major, as well as Mick’s chum, stood listening

to Mick fervently d--ing the “quare blankets,” as he struggled with

the difficulties presented by kilt and plaid. At length it seemed as

if he had accomplished the task somehow, and he was heard to stride

to the farther end of the long bare apartment. The partly-open door

revealed Mr. Sullivan, drawn up to his full height in front of a large

panel-mirror. He certainly presented an extraordinary aspect. For one

thing, the kilt, which had been made for a short man, was very much too

short for Mick, and a yard or two of naked leg protruded from below it.

Then he had fastened on the sporran behind instead of in front, and it

hung down in the former region like a horse’s tail. The plaid was put

on something in the fashion of a comforter, and his lower extremities

were encased in his long cavalry Wellington boots, from the heels of

which the spurs stuck out fiercely. He had struck an attitude, and was

soliloquising--

“Be the holy, Michael Donald Mactavish Sullivan, an’ it’s yersilf is

the purty spictacle intirely! Troth, an’ it would puzzle that dacent

woman your mother to idintify the fruit of her womb in this disguise.

Sure an’ it’s a beautiful dress, an’ the hoighth av free vintilation!

Supposin’ I was sittin’ down on an ant-hill? Och, musha, an’ pwhat

would Tipperary think if she wor to see me this day? Faix,” he went on,

after a long scrutinising gaze, “it’s mesilf is doubtful whether I’m

pwhat ye would call dacent; but the divil a ha’p’orth care I,” with a

sudden burst of reassurance, “sure, if I’m ondacent, that’s the Quane’s

look-out, may the hivins be her bed!”

At this the listeners could not refrain from a burst of laughter, which

brought Mick’s soliloquy to an abrupt conclusion. He became a little

angry when he found he had been sold, and was not to have the kilt

after all his trouble; but presently found consolation in the ant-hill

view of the subject, and accepted his woollen doublet and dungaree

trousers with a bland condescension. Next day the 78th began to move up

country to the Allahabad concentration, and a few weeks later Havelock

led out into the country of bloodthirsty mutiny that scant devoted

vanguard of the British force which was to reconquer India.

Spite of cruel heat, sunstrokes, cholera, and the exhaustion of long

marches, the little column pressed on blithely, for the stimulus of

hope was in the hearts of the men. But that hope was killed just when

its fulfilment was all but accomplished. To the soldiers, spent with

the fighting of the day, as they lay within but one short march of

Cawnpore, came in the dead of night the woful tidings of the massacre

of the company of women and children, the forlorn remnant of the

Cawnpore garrison whom the Nana Sahib had spared from the butchery

of the Slaughter Ghaut. Next morning Havelock’s little army camped

on the Cawnpore _maidan_, and Mick and his chum, accompanied by big

Jock Gibson, one of the 78th pipers, with his pipes under his arm, set

out in a search for the scene of the tragedy. Directed by whispering

and terrified natives, they reached the Bibi Ghur, the bungalow in

which the women and children had been confined, and in which they had

been slain. With burning eyes and set faces, the men looked in on the

ghastly and the woful tokens of the devilry that had been enacted

inside those four low walls--the puddles of blood, the scraps of

clothing, the broken ornaments, the leaves of bibles, the children’s

shoes--ah, what need to catalogue the pitiful relics! Then they

followed the blood-trail to the brink of the awful well, filled and

heaped with the hacked and battered dead. Sullivan lifted up his voice

and wept aloud. His comrade, of dourer nature, gazed on the spectacle

with swelling throat. Big Jock Gibson sank down on the ground, sobbing

as he had never done since the day his mother said him farewell, and

gave him her Gaelic blessing in the market-place of Tain. As he sobbed,

his fingers were fumbling mechanically for the mouthpiece of his

pipes. Presently he slipped it absently into his mouth. As the wind

whistles through the bare boughs of the trees in winter, so came, in

fitful soughs, the first wayward notes from out weeping Jock’s drone

and chanter. At length he mastered the physical signs of his woe, or

rather, it might have been, he transferred his emotion from his heart

into his pipes; and as the other two left him, he was sitting there,

over the great grave, pouring forth a wild shrill dirge--a pibroch and

a coronach in one.

An hour later, to a group of comrades gathered in a little tope in

front of the tents, Mick Sullivan was trying, in broken words, to tell

of what he had seen. He was abruptly interrupted by Jock Gibson, who

strode into the midst of the circle, his face white and drawn, his

pipes silent now, carried under his arm.

“Comrades,” began Jock, in a strange far-away voice, “I hae seen a

sicht that has curdlet my bluid. The soles o’ my brogues are wat wi’

the gore o’ women an’ bairns; I saw whaur their corpses lay whummled

ane abune anither, strippit and gashed, till the well was fu’ ow’r its

lip. Men, I can speak nae mair o’ that awesome sicht; but I hae broucht

awa’ a token that I fand--see!”

And Jock pulled from out his breast a long heavy tress of golden hair

cut clean through, as if with a slash of a sharp sword that had missed

the head. As he held it out, it hung limp and straight in a sunbeam

that fell upon it through the leaves of the mango-trees. The rough

soldiers bared their heads in the presence of it.

Old Hamish Macnab, the Kintail man, the patriarch of the regiment,

stepped forward--

“Gie me that, Jock Gibson!”

Jock handed Macnab the token from the place of the slaughter.

“Stan’ roun’ me, men!” commanded Macnab.

The Highlanders closed about him silently, impressed by the solemnity

of his tone.

Then Macnab bade them to join hands round him. When they had done so,

he lifted up his voice, and spoke with measured solemnity, his eyes

blazing and the blood all in his old worn face--

“By the mithers that bore ye, by yer young sisters and brithers at hame

in the clachan an’ the glen, by yer ain wives an’ weans some o’ ye,

swear by this token that henceforth ye show nae ruth to the race that

has done this accursed deed of bluid!”

Sternly, from deep down in every throat, came the hoarse answer, “We

swear!” Then Macnab parted out the tress into as many locks as there

were men in the circle, distributing to each a lock. He coiled up the

lock he had kept for himself, and opening his doublet, placed it on his

heart. His comrades silently imitated him.

All the world knows the marvellous story of Havelock’s relief of

Lucknow; against what odds the little column he commanded so gallantly

fought its way from Cawnpore over the intervening forty miles; with

what heroism and what losses it battled its way through the intricacies

and obstacles of the native city; till at length, Havelock and Outram

riding at its head, it marched along the street of death till the

Bailey-guard gate of the Residency was reached, and greetings and

cheers reached the war-worn relievers from the far-spent garrison

which had all but abandoned hope of relief. Before the advance from

Cawnpore began, Mick Sullivan and his chum, remaining still nominally

attached to the Highland regiment, had joined the little force of

irregular cavalry which Havelock had gathered from the infantrymen

who could ride, while he waited at Cawnpore for reinforcements. As

scouts, on reconnaissance duty, in pursuits and in sheer hard fighting,

this little cohort of mounted men had its full share of adventure and

danger, and the Light Dragoon comrades had great delight in being once

again back in the saddle.

When the main column had pressed on into the Residency, the wounded

of the fighting in the suburbs and native town had been left behind

in the Motee Mahal along with the rearguard. On the morning after the

entrance, a detachment of volunteers sallied out to escort into the

Residency the doolies in which the wounded still lay inadequately cared

for. The return journey from the first was much molested by hostile

fire, many of the native bearers bolting, and leaving the doolies to be

carried by the escorting Europeans. The guide became bewildered, and

the head of the procession of doolies deviated from the proper route

into a square which proved a perfect death-trap, and has passed into

history as “Doolie Square.” The handful of escorting soldiers, of whom

Mick’s comrade was one, fought desperately to protect the poor wounded

lying helpless in the doolies; but the rebels drove them back by sheer

weight, and massacred a large proportion of the hapless inmates. Too

late to save these, the fire of the escort cleared the square, and

fortunately no more doolies entered the fatal _cul-de-sac_. Suddenly

the little party holding their ground there became aware of a great

commotion in the street, just outside the archway which formed the

entrance to the square. Pistol-shots were heard, and loud shouts in

Hindustanee mingled with something that sounded like a British oath. A

sally was at once made. Darting out of the square through the archway,

the sallying party fought their way through the swarm of Sepoys outside

to where a single European swaying a cavalry sabre, his back against

the wall, and covering a wounded boy-officer who lay at his feet,

was keeping at bay, now with a dexterous parry, anon with a swift

sweeping cut, and again with a lightning thrust, the throng of howling

miscreants who pressed around him. The foremost man of the sallying

party, cutting down a Pandy who turned on him, sprang to the side of

the man with the dripping sabre in his hand.

“Look if the lad’s alive,” were the first words of Mick Sullivan, for

he was the man with the sabre.

Mick’s chum, for he it was who had headed the rescuers, stooped down,

and found the young officer alive and conscious. He told Mick so.

“Thin hould me up, acushla, for it’s kilt intirely I am,” and poor

Mick threw his arm over his chum’s shoulder, and the gallant fellow’s

head fell on his breast.

The Pandies were massing again, so the little party, carrying Mick and

the officer, struggled back again into their feeble refuge inside the

square. The youngster was seen to first, and then Dr. Home proceeded to

investigate Mick’s condition.

“Och an’ sure, docthor jewel, ye may save yersilf the trouble. I’m

kilt all over--as full of wownds as Donnybrook is of drunk men at

noightfall. I’ve got me discharge from the sarvice, an’ that widout a

pinsion. There’s niver a praiste in an odd corner av the mansion, is

there, chum?”

The chum told him the place was not a likely one for priests.

“I’d fain have confissed before I die, an’ had a word wid a praiste,

but sure they can’t expict a man on active sarvice to go out av the

wurrld as reg’lar as if he were turnin’ his toes up in his bed. Chum,”

continued the poor fellow, his voice becoming weaker as the blood

trickled from him into a hollow of the earthen floor, “chum, dear, give

us a hould av yer hand. Ye mind that poor young crayture av a wife of

mine I left wapin’ fur me on the quay av Southampton. There’s some

goold and jools in the dimmickin’ bag in me belt, an’ if ye could send

them to her, ye would be doin’ yer old chum a kindness.”

The chum promised in a word--his heart was too full for more. Mick

lay back silent for a little, gasping in his growing exhaustion. But

suddenly he raised himself again on his elbow, and in a heightened

voice continued--

“An’, chum, if ever ye see the 30th Light again, tell them, will ye,

that Mick Sullivan died wid a sword in his hand”--he had never quitted

the grip of the bloody sabre--“an’ wid spurs on his heels. I take ye

all to witness, men, that I die a dhragoon, an’ not a swaddy! Divil a

word have I to say against the Ross-shire Buffs, chaps--divil a word;

but I’m a dhragoon to the last dhrap av me blood! Ah me!”--here honest

Mick’s voice broke for the first time--“ah me! niver more will I back

horse or wield sword!”

And then he fell back, panting for breath, and it seemed as if he had

spoken his last words. But the mind of the dying man was on a train

of thought that would still have expression. Again he raised himself

into a sitting posture, and loud and clear, as if on the parade-ground,

there rang out from his lips the consecutive words of command--

“Carry swords!”

“Return swords!”

“Prepare to dismount!”

“Dismount!”

A torrent of blood gushed from his mouth, and he fell forward dead.

Mick Sullivan had dismounted for ever.

* * * * *

When the great mutiny was finally stamped out, Mick Sullivan’s chum

got himself sent back to the 30th Light, down in the Madras Presidency.

He delivered his poor comrade’s dying message to the regiment, and told

the tale of his heroic death; and how Outram had publicly announced

that, had he survived, he would have recommended Mick for the Victoria

Cross. From colonel to band-boy, the 30th Light was deeply moved by the

recital. The regiment subscribed to a man to place a memorial-stone

over Mick’s grave in the cemetery inside the Lucknow Residency, where

he had been laid among the heroes of the siege. The quarter-master took

temporary charge of the “goold and jools” which were Mick’s legacy to

“the Crayture,” and the colonel himself wrote home instructions that

every effort should be made to find the little woman and have her cared

for.

* * * * *

One morning, about a month later, the colonel and his wife were taking

their early canter on the Bangalore _maidan_. As they crossed the high

road from down country, they noticed, tramping through the deep dust, a

white woman with a child in her arms. She dragged herself wearily; the

pale fagged face, and the wistful upward look at them as she trudged

by, moved the good heart of the colonel’s wife.

“Speak to her,” she said to her husband; “she is a stranger, and

forlorn.”

“Where are you bound for, my good woman?” asked the colonel; “have you

come far?”

The woman set down the child, a well-grown boy, who looked about two

years old, and with a long sigh of weariness replied--

“I’ve come from England, sir, and I am on my way to the 30th Light

Dragoons to find my husband.”

“That little chap is quite too heavy for you to carry. What is your

name, young one?”

The urchin sprang to “attention,” saluted with rigid accuracy, and

gravely replied--

“Mick Tullivan, Tir!”

“Good God!” whispered the colonel’s wife; “it’s Sullivan’s widow--it’s

‘the Crayture’ herself. Gallop to barracks for a gharry, and while you

are gone, I will tell her. God pity her!”

And the kind lady was out of the saddle, and had the boy in her arms,

and her tears were raining on his face, as the colonel rode away on his

errand.

When the gharry arrived “the Crayture” was sitting by the wayside, the

skirt of her dress drawn over her face, her head on the shoulder of the

colonel’s wife, her boy gripped tight in her arms.

The Mem Sahib carried the poor thing to her own bungalow for a day or

two; and then good-hearted old Bess Bowles, the trumpeter’s wife of G

troop, came and took her and her boy away to the room that had been

prepared for her in the married quarters. Perhaps it was not exactly

in accordance with strict regulations, but the colonel had put the

widow woman “on the strength”--she was no longer an unrecognised waif,

but had her regimental position. Her ration of bread and meat her

husband’s comrades of G troop contributed; the officers made a little

fund that sufficed to give her soldier’s pay. She earned it, for a week

after she “joined,” the surgeon found her in the hospital, in quiet

informal possession of the ward in which lay the most serious cases;

and when next year the cholera smote the regiment, the rugged old Scot

pronounced her “worth her weight in gold.” She has long ago been a

member of the sisterhood of army nurses. I remember her out in Africa

during the Zulu war, and since then she has smoothed soldiers’ pillows

in the Egyptian campaigns; but she is still, and will be till the day

she dies, a supernumerary “on the strength” of the 30th Light. She

never married again; she is an elderly woman now, and the winsomeness

of the days when we knew her as “the Crayture” has gone; but the quiet

faithful courage that sustained her on the weary line of march and the

forlorn-hope expedition to the East, is staunch still in her honest

heart. The sergeant-major of to-day of G troop in the 30th Light--I

call the corps by its old familiar name still, but they are Hussars

now--is a straight, clean-built young fellow, with a light heart, a

bright eye, and a quaint humour. His name is Mick Sullivan, and he is

the son of “the Crayture,” and of the man who died in the porch of

“Doolie Square.”

THE FATE OF “NANA SAHIB’S ENGLISHMAN”

One fine evening in September 1856, young Mr. Kidson entered Escobel

Castle by the great front door, and was hurrying across the hall on

his way to the passage leading to his own apartments, when his worthy

old mother, who had seen from her parlour window her son approach the

house, ran out into the hall to meet him in a state of great agitation.

It was little wonder that the aspect the young man presented excited

the good creature’s maternal emotion. The region around his right

optic was so puffed and inflamed as to give the surest promise of a

black eye of the first magnitude in the course of a few hours; to say

that his nose was simply “bashed” is very inadequately to describe the

condition of that feature; his lower lip was split and streaming with

blood; and he carried in his left hand a couple of front teeth which

had been forcibly dislodged from their normal position in his upper

jaw. He was bareheaded, and he carried on his clothes enough red clay

to constitute him an eligible investment on the part of an enterprising

brickmaker. “Guid be here, my ain laddie!” wailed the poor mother in

her unmitigated Glasgow Doric, “what’s come tae you? Wha has massacred

my son this fearsome bloodthirsty gait?” “Oh, hang it!” was the genial

youth’s sole acknowledgment of the maternal grief and sympathy,

as, dodging her outstretched arms, he slunk to his rooms and rang

vehemently for hot water and a raw beef-steak.

Young Mr. Kidson’s parents were brand-new rich Glasgow folks, who in

their old age of vast wealth had recently bought the Highland estate of

Escobel, in the hope to gratify Mr. Kidson senior’s ambition to gain

social recognition as a country gentleman and to become the founder

of a family, an aspiration in which he received but feeble assistance

from his simple old wife, who had a tender corner in her memory for

the Guse-Dubs in which she was born. Their only son, the hero of the

puffed eye and the “bashed” nose, had been ignominiously sent down from

Oxford while yet a freshman. At present he was supposed to be doing a

little desultory reading in view of entering the army; in reality he

was spending most of his time in boozing with grooms and gamekeepers in

a low shebeen. A downright bad lot, this young Mr. Kidson, of whom, in

the nature of things, nothing but evil could come.

While he was skulking into the privacy of his “den,” an extremely

pretty girl was sobbing convulsively on the breast of a stalwart

fair-haired young fellow, whose eyes were flashing wrath, whose face

still had an angry flush, and the knuckles of whose right hand were

cut open, the blood trickling unheeded down the weeping girl’s white

dress. She, Mary Fraser, was the daughter of the clergyman of the

parish; the young man, by name Sholto Mackenzie, was the orphan nephew

of the old laird of Kinspiel, a small hill-property on the mountain

slope. The two were sweethearts, and small chance was there of their

ever being anything more. For Kinspiel was strictly entailed, and the

old laird, who was so ill that he might die any day, had a son who had

sons of his own, and was in no position, if he had the will, to help

on his dead sister’s manchild. Mary Fraser and Sholto Mackenzie had

trysted to meet this evening in the accustomed pine glade on the edge

of the heather. The girl was there before the time. Young Mr. Kidson,

listlessly smoking as he lounged on a turf bank, caught a glimpse of

her dress through the trees, and promptly bore down on her. There was

a slight acquaintance, and she returned his greeting, supposing that

he would pass on. But he did not--on the contrary, he waxed fluent

in coarse flatteries, and suddenly grasping the girl in his arms was

making strenuous efforts to snatch kisses from her, undeterred by her

struggles and shrieks. At this crisis Sholto Mackenzie, hearing the

cries, came running up at the top of his speed. Young Mr. Kidson,

fancying himself a bit as a man who could use his fists, had not the

poor grace to run away. While the girl leant half fainting against a

tree there was a brief pugilistic encounter between the young men, as

the issue of which Mr. Kidson was disabused of a misconception, and

presented the aspect which a few minutes later brought tribulation to

his mother. As he carried himself and his damages off, he muttered

through his pulped lips with a fierce oath that the day would come when

his antagonist should rue the evening’s work. Whereat the antagonist

laughed contemptuously, and addressed himself to the pleasant task of

calming and consoling his agitated sweetheart.

Before the grouse season closed the old laird of Kinspiel was a dead

man, and there was no longer a home for Sholto Mackenzie in the quaint

old crow-stepped house in the upland glen among the bracken. What

career was open to the penniless young fellow? He had no interest

for a cadetship, and that Indian service in which so many men of his

race have earned name and fame was not for him. In those days there

was no Manitoba, no ranching in Texas or Wyoming; the Cape gave no

opportunities, the Argentine was not yet a resort for English youth of

enterprise, and he had not money enough to take him to the Australian

gold-diggings or to the sheep-runs of New Zealand. He saw no resource

but to offer himself to the Queen’s service in the capacity of a

private soldier, in the hope that education, good conduct, and fervent

zeal would bring him promotion and perhaps distinction. By the advice

of a local pensioner he journeyed to London and betook himself to

the metropolitan recruiting centre in Charles Street, Westminster. No

Sergeants Kite now patrol that thoroughfare in quest of lawful prey;

nay, the little street with its twin public-house headquarters is

itself a thing of the past. About the centre of the long wooden shanty

recently built for the purposes of the census, stood the old “Hampshire

Hog,” with its villainous _rendezvous_ in the rear; nearer the Park on

the opposite side, just where is now the door of the India Office, the

“Cheshire Cheese” reared its frowsy front. In the days I am writing

of, recruits accepted or had foisted on them the “Queen’s Shilling,”

received a bounty, gave themselves for twenty-four years’ service,

and were escorted by a staff-sergeant to their respective regiments.

Now there is neither Queen’s shilling nor bounty, and the recruit,

furnished with a travelling warrant, is his own escort to Ballincollig

or Fort George. What scenes had dingy Charles Street witnessed in its

day! How much sin and sorrow; too late remorse, too late forgiveness!

In many a British household has Charles Street been cursed with bitter

curses; yet has it not been, in a sense, the cradle of heroes? It sent

to battle the men whose blood dyed the sward of the Balaclava valley;

it fed the trenches of Sebastopol; it was the sieve through whose

meshes passed the staunch warriors who stormed Delhi and who defended

Lucknow, who bled and conquered at Sobraon and Goojerat.

Sholto Mackenzie had eaten Queen Victoria’s rations for some six

months, had been dismissed recruits’ drill, and become a duty soldier,

when the order was issued that the “30th Light,” the regiment into

which he had enlisted, was to go out for its turn of service in India,

and of course the young soldier went with his regiment. Those were the

days before big Indian troopships and the Suez Canal; reinforcements

for India went out round the Cape. Sholto’s troop was accompanied by

two married women who were on the strength of the regiment. Nowadays

the soldier’s wife adorns her room in the married quarters with cheap

Liberty hangings, and walks out in French boots and kid gloves. Mrs.

Macgregor and Mrs. Malony lived each her married life and reared her

family in a bunk in the corner of the troop-room of which she had

the “looking after.” Such a life seems one of sheer abomination and

barbarism, does it not? Yet the arrangement had the surprising effect,

in most instances, of bringing about a certain decency, self-restraint,

and genuinely human feeling alike in the men and the married woman of

the room. Neither Mrs. Macgregor nor Mrs. Malony had ever been abroad

before; and both evinced a strong propensity to take with them copious

mementoes of their native land. Mrs. Macgregor, honest woman, had

manifested that concentrativeness which is a feature in the character

of the nation to which, as her name indicated, she belonged. She had

packed into a great piece of canvas sheeting a certain feather-bed,

which, as an heirloom from her remote ancestors, she was fond of

boasting of when the other matrons were fain to sew together a couple

of regimental palliasse covers, and stuff the same with straw. In

the capacious bosom of this family relic she had stowed a variety of

minor articles, among which were a wash-hand jug of some primeval

earthenware, a hoary whisky decanter--which, trust Mrs. Macgregor, was

quite empty--a cradle, sundry volumes of Gaelic literature, and a small

assortment of cooking utensils. Over those collected properties stood

grimly watchful the tall, gaunt woman with the gray eye, the Roman

nose, and the cautious taciturnity. Of another stamp was Mrs. Malony,

a little, slatternly, pock-marked Irishwoman. Her normal condition was

that of a nursing-mother--nobody could remember the time when Biddy

Malony had not a brat hanging at that bosom of hers which she was

wont partially to conceal by an old red woollen kerchief. Biddy was a

merry soul, spite of many a trial and many a cross--always ready with

a flash of Irish humour, just as ready as she always was for a glass

of gin. She had not attempted the methodical packing of her goods and

chattels, but had bundled them together anyhow in a chaotic state. Her

great difficulty was her inability to perform the difficult operation

of carrying her belongings “in her head,” and after she had pitchforked

into the baggage-van a quantity of incongruous _débris_, she was still

in a bewildered way questing after a wicker bird-cage and “a few other

little throifles.”

Embarking along with his comrades and reaching the main deck of the

troopship, Sholto found the two ladies already there--Mrs. Macgregor

grimly defiant, not to say fierce, in consequence of a request

just made to her by a sailor for a glass of grog; Mrs. Malony in a

semi-hysterical state, having lost a shoe, a wash-tub, and, she much

feared, one of the young Malonys. Matters were improved, however,

when Sholto found the young bog-trotter snugly squatted in the cows’

manger. The shoe was gone hopelessly, having fallen into the water

when its wearer was mounting the gangway; and Mrs. Malony happily

remembered that she had made a present of the missing wash-tub to a

“green-grosher’s lady” in the town of embarkation.

Sholto had been made lance-corporal soon after the troopship sailed,

and served in that rank during the long voyage with so much credit that

when the regiment reached Bangalore the colonel of the 30th Light gave

him the second stripe, so that he was full corporal in less than a year

after he had enlisted. During a turn of guard duty about three months

after he joined at Bangalore, he happened to hear it mentioned in the

guard-room that a new officer--a cornet--had arrived that day, and had

been posted to the vacancy in the troop to which Sholto belonged. The

new-comer’s name was not stated, and beyond a cursory hope that he

would turn out a good and smart officer, Corporal Mackenzie gave no

further heed to the matter. Late the same night, he was relieving the

sentry on the mess-house post when the merry party of officers broke

up. Laughing and chatting they came out under the verandah, a little

more noisy than usual, no doubt because of the customary “footing”

in champagne paid by the new arrival. As they passed Sholto, a voice

caught his ear--an unfamiliar voice, yet that stirred in him an angry

memory; and as the officers lounged past him in the moonlight, he gazed

into the group with earnest inquisitiveness. Arm and arm between two

subalterns, his face inflamed with drink, his mouth full of slang,

rolled the man he had thrashed among the Scottish pines. As he grinned

his horse-laugh Sholto discerned the vacuum in his upper teeth which

his fist had made that evening; and now this man was his officer. The

eyes of the two met, and Kidson gave a sudden start and seemed about

to speak, but controlling the impulse, he smiled a silent smile, the

triumphant insolence of which stung Sholto bitterly. Verily his enemy

was his master; and Sholto read the man’s nature too truly not to be

sure that he would forgo no jot of the sweet revenge of humiliation.

Very soon the orderly sergeant of the troop fell unwell, and Sholto had

to take up his duty, one detail of which was to carry the order-book

round to the bungalows of the troop-officers for their information.

This duty entailed on Sholto the disagreeable necessity of a daily

interview with Mr. Kidson. That officer took the opportunity of

throwing every imaginable slight on the corporal, but was careful not

to give warrant for any specific complaint. But it was very bitter

to be kept standing at attention for some ten minutes at a time,

orderlybook in hand, until Mr. Kidson thought fit to lay aside his

book, or to desist from pulling his terrier’s ears. Often the cornet

was in his bedroom; and while waiting for his appearance Sholto noticed

how ostentatiously careless his officer was as to his valuables--a

handful of money or a gold watch and chain left lying on the table amid

spurs and gloves and soda-water bottles.

The morning after an exceptionally long wait for Mr. Kidson’s emergence

from his bedroom, Sholto was returning from the horse lines when the

regimental sergeant-major met him and ordered him to his room under

arrest. In utter bewilderment he begged for some explanation, but

without success. When he reached his cot, he casually noticed that his

box was open and the lock damaged, but he was too disturbed to give

heed to this circumstance. Presently a sergeant came and escorted him

to the orderlyroom. Here he found the colonel sitting in the windsor

arm-chair with the discipline book open before him, the adjutant

standing behind him, and on the flank Mr. Kidson and the sergeant-major

of his own troop. The colonel, if a stern, was a just man; and in a

grave tone he expressed his concern that so heinous a charge should

come against a young soldier of character hitherto so creditable.

Sholto replied that he had not the remotest idea what the nature of the

charge was. The old chief shot a keen glance at him as he spoke--

“Corporal Mackenzie, you are accused of stealing a gold watch and

chain, the property of Mr. Kidson. What have you to say to this charge?”

The lad’s head swam, and for a moment he thought he was going to faint.

Then the blood came back to his heart and flushed up into his face as

he looked the colonel straight between the eyes and answered--

“It is a wicked falsehood, sir!”

“Then of course you deny it?”

“I do, sir, if it were the last word I had to say on earth!”

“Mr. Kidson,” said the old soldier in a dry business tone, “will you

state what you know about this matter?”

Thus enjoined, Kidson briefly and with a certain nervous glibness

stated that after Corporal Mackenzie had left his quarters on the

previous afternoon, he had missed his watch and chain. That morning

he had renewed the search unsuccessfully. He had previous suspicions

of Corporal Mackenzie having from time to time stolen money from off

his table. He had reported the matter to his troop sergeant-major, who

had at once searched Corporal Mackenzie’s kit, with what result the

sergeant-major would himself state.

The sergeant-major for his part had only to testify that having been

spoken to by Mr. Kidson on the subject of his loss, he had taken

another sergeant-major with him, and searched Corporal Mackenzie’s box,

where he had found the missing watch and chain, which he had at once

handed to the adjutant, who now held it.

The evidence was strong enough to hang a man.

“Corporal Mackenzie,” said the colonel, with some concern, “the case

seems very clear. What you have to say, if anything, you must say

elsewhere. It is my duty to send you back for a district court-martial.”

Sholto was confined in a room adjacent to the quarter-guard for a few

days, when he was brought before the court-martial, which heard the

evidence against the prisoner, to whom then was given the opportunity

to cross-examine the witnesses. But the president would not allow

interrogations tending to establish animus on Mr. Kidson’s part against

the prisoner, and finally poor Sholto lost his temper, and exclaimed

with passion--

“Your permission to cross-examine is nothing better than a farce!”

“Perhaps,” retorted the president, with a grim smile,--“perhaps you may

not think the punishment which will probably befall you a farce!”

Sholto’s defence was in a sentence--the assertion of his complete

innocence. He had known Mr. Kidson in other days, he said, when as yet

both were civilians, and they had parted in bad blood.

A member of the court demanded that Mr. Kidson should have the

opportunity of contradicting this assertion, if in his power to do

so; whereupon that officer emphatically swore that to his knowledge

he had never seen Corporal Mackenzie in his life before he joined the

30th Light there in Bangalore. So Sholto was put back to wait for many

days while the finding of the court-martial was being submitted to the

Commander-in-Chief.

One evening Mick Sullivan his comrade brought him his tea as usual--the

good fellow never would let the mat-boy carry his chum his meals. He

stood looking at Sholto for a while with a strange concern in his

honest face; and then he broke silence--

“Sholto, me lad, it’s me heart is sore for you this day. Yer

coort-martial will be read out to-morrow morning! Aye, and--and”--his

voice sank into a whisper--“the farrier-major has got the ordhers for

to rig the thriangles. It’s to be flogged ye are, my poor fellow!”

Sholto sent his chum away abruptly; he could not talk, he could hardly

think; all he could do was to wish himself dead and spared this

unutterable shame. Death came not, but instead the morning; and with

the morning came Mick with a copious dose of brandy, which he entreated

his comrade to drink, for it would “stun the pain.” “Every fellow,” he

argued, “primed himself so before a flogging, and why shouldn’t he?”

But Sholto refused to fortify himself with Dutch courage; and then poor

Mick produced his last evidence of affection in the shape of a leaden

bullet which he had beaten flat, and which held tight between the

teeth, he knew from personal experience, was a great help in enabling a

fellow to resist “hollerin’ out.”

Presently the escort fell in and marched the prisoner to the

riding-school. Sholto found there two troops of the regiment drawn

up, in front of them a knot of officers, among whom he noticed Mr.

Kidson, and in front of them again the colonel, with the court-martial

documents in his hand. The lad’s eye took in the doctor, the

farriers--each with his cat--and the triangle rigged against the wall

under the gallery. The sergeant of the escort ordered him to take two

paces to the front, remove his cap, and stand at attention. And so he

stood, outwardly calm, waiting for his sentence.

“Proceedings of a district court-martial”--the colonel began, reading

in a loud voice from the scroll in his hand. To Sholto the document

seemed interminable. At last the end came. “The Court, having

considered the evidence brought before it, finds the prisoner, No. 420,

Corporal Sholto Mackenzie, G troop, Thirtieth Light Dragoons, guilty of

the said charge of theft, and does hereby sentence the said prisoner

to be reduced to the rank and pay of a private dragoon”--here the

colonel paused for a moment and then added--“and further to undergo the

punishment of fifty lashes.”

The regimental sergeant-major strode up to Sholto, with a penknife

ripped the gold lace corporal stripes from the arm of his jacket, and

threw them down on the tan. Then the colonel’s stern cold voice uttered

the word “Strip.” There was a little momentary bustle, and then Sholto

was half hanging, half standing, lashed by the wrists and ankles to

the triangles, while the farrier-major stood measuring his distance,

fingering the whip-cords of his “cat,” and waiting for the word “Begin”!

Suddenly a wild shriek pealed through the great building from the

gallery above the head of the man fastened up there to be flogged.

“Arrah musha, colonel dear!” followed in shrill accents--“for the love

of the Holy Jasus and the blissed Vargin, hould yer hand, and spare an

innocent man! I tell ye he’s as innocent as the babe unborn, and it’s

mesilf, Bridget Malony, an honest married woman on the strength, that

can pruve that same! Ochone, colonel dear, listen to me, won’t yez?”

All eyes were concentrated on the little gallery. It was a sort of

gazebo, built out from the wall at the height of about ten feet, and

the only access to it was from outside. Bending eagerly over the

rail, attired in nothing but a petticoat and a chemise, her hair

streaming wildly over her shoulders, and with a round bare place like a

tonsure on the crown of her head, which gave her a most extraordinary

appearance, was visible Mrs. Malony. She had been struck down by a

sunstroke the day Sholto was put under arrest, and had been in hospital

ever since.

The general opinion was that the good woman was crazy: but Mrs. Malony

knew her own mind--she had something to say, and she was determined to

say it. She had just finished her wild appeal to the colonel, when she

cast a hurried glance over her shoulder, and then, indifferently clad

as she was, nimbly climbed over the rail, and dropped upon the tan. At

that moment a couple of nurses rushed into the balcony, but they were

too late. Mrs. Malony had got the “flure”; straight up to the colonel

she ran on her bare feet, and broke out again into vehement speech.

“I swear to yer honner the corporal is as innocent as my little

Terence, what should be at his mother’s breasht this moment. He is,

so help me God! There is the rapscallion uv a conspirator,” she

yelled, pointing a long, bare, skinny arm at Mr. Kidson; “there is his

white-livered tool!”--and up went the other arm like a danger-signal

pointing to the sergeant-major. “Hear me shpake, sor,” cried the woman,

“and sure am I ye’ll belave me!”

“Nonsense,” said the chief, “you are mad or drunk, woman! Here, take

her away!” and he beckoned to the nurses.

But the major, a Scotsman, intervened.

“At least hear her story,” he argued; “there must be some reason in all

this fervour of hers. I know the woman; she is no liar.”

“Well, what have you to say, Mrs. Malony?” said the colonel.

“One moment, sir!” interposed the major, and there passed a few words

in an undertone between him and the colonel--then the latter spoke

aloud.

“Mr. James,” said he, addressing the adjutant, “take Mr. Kidson outside

and remain there with him, and you, Sergeant-Major Norris, take charge

of Sergeant-Major Hope. Mr. James, you will see that the two are kept

apart.”

And then Mrs. Malony gained her point and was allowed to tell her

story. She had been “doing for” Mr. Kidson, she said, ever since he

joined. The day before Sholto was put under arrest, when she was in the

lumber-room of Mr. Kidson’s bungalow, she overheard the plot concocted

between him and the sergeant-major. Early next morning, when the

regiment was out at “watering order,” she had watched Sergeant-Major

Hope go to Corporal Mackenzie’s cot, pick the lock of his trunk, take

out his holdall, and therein place Mr. Kidson’s watch and chain. An

hour later, when she was on her way to the bungalow of the “praste” to

ask “his riverence’s” advice as to what she should do, she received

a sunstroke, and was insensible for several days. When she recovered

consciousness she had forgotten everything that happened for a day or

more before her accident until that morning, when she happened to hear

the attendants gossiping amongst themselves that Corporal Mackenzie

was to be flogged that day for stealing Mr. Kidson’s watch and chain.

Then everything flashed vividly back into her memory, and she had made

her escape from the hospital and reached the scene just in time.

Mrs. Malony spoke with amazing volubility, and the telling of her story

did not occupy more time than a few minutes. When she was done, and

stood silent, panting and weeping, the colonel turned to the sergeant

of the guard and ordered the prisoner to be unfastened and marched

back to the guard-room. While Mrs. Malony had been speaking, nobody

had noticed Sholto, and when they went to cut him loose, they found

that he had fainted. The parade was dismissed; and the colonel, the

major, and the adjutant adjourned to the orderly room. Mr. Kidson

was ordered to be brought in. He met Mrs. Malony’s accusation with

a flat and contemptuous denial, desiring with some insolence in his

tone to know whether the colonel could think it proper to take the

word of a crazy Irish barrack-room slut before that of an officer and

a gentleman. “That depends on circumstances, and whether I happen to

accept your definitions,” was the colonel’s dry comment, as he formally

put Mr. Kidson under arrest, and having ordered him to his quarters,

called for the sergeant-major to be brought in. This man was a poor

faint-hearted rascal. He was ghastly pale, and his knees trembled as

he flinched under the colonel’s searching eye. On cross-examination

he broke down altogether, and at length, with many protestations of

remorse, confessed the whole truth, and that Mr. Kidson had bribed

him to co-operate in the scheme to ruin Corporal Mackenzie. This

wretched accomplice was in his turn sent away into close arrest, and

Mr. Kidson was re-summoned into the orderly room and informed that his

sergeant-major had confessed everything.

The two field-officers were fain to avert from the regiment the

horrible scandal, even at the cost of some frustration of justice. The

option was given to Kidson of standing a court-martial, or of sending

in the resignation of his commission within an hour and quitting the

station before the day was out. Then and there the shameless blackguard

wrote out the document, made an insolent sweeping salaam all round,

mounted his tat, and rode off to his bungalow. As he was crossing

the parade-ground he encountered Sholto Mackenzie, who had just been

released by the colonel’s orders, leaving the guard-room a free man

and surrounded by a knot of troop-mates, conspicuous among whom was

Mick Sullivan, half mad with delight. As Kidson passed the group with a

baleful scowl, the trammels of discipline snapped for once, and a burst

of groans and hooting made him quicken his pace, lest worse things

should befall. In two hours more the disgraced man was clear of the

cantonment.

In the previous article it has been told how in the early days of

the great mutiny Mick Sullivan and his comrade were transmogrified

from cavalrymen into members of that gallant regiment the Ross-shire

Buffs--the old 78th Highlanders--and did good service in the “little

fighting column” at the head of which Havelock fought his way up

country from Allahabad to Cawnpore. It was on the afternoon of

Havelock’s first fight, the sharp action of Futtehpore, that Sholto

Mackenzie and Mick Sullivan were lying down in the shade of a tree

waiting for the baggage to come up. Futtehpore town had been carried

by a rush, and there had been some hand-to-hand fighting in the

streets--for the mutinied Sepoys dodged about among the houses and had

to be driven out. There was a delay in following up the fugitives; for

a waggon-load of rupees had been upset in the principal street and the

temptation of the silver caused the soldiers to dally, while others

straggled in search of food and drink. Meanwhile the mutineer cavalry

rallied beyond the town. Palliser’s Irregulars were sent forward to

disperse the formation, followed by such men of our infantry as could

hastily be mustered. Among those who went forward was Sholto Mackenzie.

Palliser’s native troopers were half-hearted and hung back when their

chief charged the Sepoy horse, with the result that Palliser was dashed

from his horse, and would have been cut to pieces but for the devotion

of his ressaldar, who lost his own life in saving that of his leader.

“Did you notice,” said Sholto to his comrade as they rested, “the

squadron leader of the Pandy Cavalry that handled Palliser’s fellows so

roughly out yonder?”

“Bedad, an’ I did not!” replied Sullivan. “Every divil av thim was

uglier than the other, an’ it’s their own mothers should be ashamed to

own the biling av thim!”

“Look here, Mick,” said Sholto, “I’ll take my oath I saw that dog

Kidson to-day, in command of the Pandy Squadron!”

“Kidson!” ejaculated Sullivan in the wildest astonishment. “It’s

dhramin’ ye are! Sure Kidson must be either prowlin’ somewhere in

Madras, or else on his road home to England!”

“I tell you I am as sure I saw him to-day as I am that I see you now.

It was he who dismounted Palliser and cut down the ressaldar. I am

convinced it was he and none other!”

“Well, if you’re so sure as that, it’s no use to conthradick ye. Plase

the saints, ye may get a close chance at him soon, and then--Lord pity

him!”

Mick’s aspiration was fulfilled. The “close chance” came to Sholto

a few days later, in the heart of the battle of Cawnpore. The

Highlanders had rolled up the Sepoy flank by a bayonet charge, had

shattered their centre, and captured the village on which it rested.

The mutineer infantry of the left and centre were in full rout, their

retreat covered by a strong body of native cavalry which showed a very

determined front.

Sholto and his comrade were close together in the ranks of the

Ross-shire Buffs, when the former suddenly grasped the latter’s arm,

and in a low earnest voice asked--

“Mick, do you see that officer in charge of the covering squadron of

the Pandies?”

Sullivan gazed long and intently, and then burst out--

“By the holy poker, it’s that treacherous blackguard Kidson!”

“Right, Mick, and I must get at him somehow!”

“Wid all my heart, chum, but it’s aisier said than done, just now, at

any rate. You must mark time, and trust to luck!”

Just then Barrow came galloping up at the head of his handful of

horsemen, and besought the chief to let him go at the mutineer sowars.

But Havelock shook his head, for Barrow’s strength all told was but

eighteen sabres. But a little later Beatson, the Adjutant-General,

who, stricken with cholera and unable to sit his horse, had come up to

the front on a gun-carriage, saw an opportunity after the General had

ridden away, and took it on himself to give Barrow leave to attack. The

flank of the grenadier company of the Highlanders, where Sholto stood,

was close to Beatson’s gun-carriage, in rear of which his horse was

led, and a sudden thought struck the young fellow. Stepping forward

with carried rifle, he told Captain Beatson that he was a cavalry

soldier, and noticing the led horse, begged eagerly to be allowed

to mount it and join the charge for which the volunteer cavalry were

preparing.

“Up with you, my man!” said poor dying Beatson. “Here, you shall have

my sword, and I don’t want it back clean, remember!”

Sholto was in the saddle with a spring, and made the nineteenth man

under Barrow’s command; a mixed lot, but full of pluck to a man. As he

formed up on the flank, there reached his ears honest Mick’s cheery

advice--

“Now, Sholto, me dear lad, keep yer sword-hand up and yer bridle-hand

down, an’ remimber ye reprisint the honour an’ glory of the ould 30th

Light!”

Barrow threw away his cigar, gathered up his reins, and with a shout

of “Charge!” that might have given the word of command to a brigade,

rammed his spurs into his horse’s flank and went off at score, his

little band close on his heels. Hard on the captain’s flank galloped

Sholto Mackenzie, a red spot on each cheek, his teeth hard set, his

blazing eyes never swerving from the face of one man of that seething

mass on which they were riding. “Give ’em the point, lads!” roared

Barrow, as he skewered a havildar and then drove right in among them.

The white-faced man with the black moustache, who was Sholto’s mark,

rather shirked out of the _mêlée_ when he saw it was to be close

quarters; but Mackenzie, looking neither to the right nor to the left,

with his bridle-hand well down, and Beatson’s sword in full play,

drove his way at length within weapon’s length of the other.

“Now, liar and perjurer!” he hissed from between his teeth, “if you are

not coward as well, stand up to me and let us fight it out!”

Kidson’s answer was a lurid scowl and a pistol bullet, which just

grazed Sholto’s temple. Lifting his horse with his bridle-hand, and

striking its flanks with his spurless heels, the latter sent his

sword-point straight at Kidson’s throat. The thrust would have gone

through and out at the further side, but that the sword-point struck

some concealed protection and was shivered up to the hilt. The renegade

Briton smiled a baleful smile as he brought his weapon from guard to

point, as if the other was at his mercy. But this was not so; with a

shout Sholto tightened the curb-rein till his horse reared straight on

end, striking it as it rose with the shattered sword hilt. The maddened

animal plunged forward, receiving in his chest the point of Kidson’s

sword; and Sholto on the instant bending forward fastened a deadly grip

on the other’s throat. The impetus hurled both of them to the ground,

and now, down among the horses’ feet, the close-locked strife swaying

and churning above them, their struggle unto the death was wrought

out. Kidson struggled like a madman; he bit, he kicked, he fought with

an almost superhuman fury; but the resolute grip of the avenger never

slackened on his throat. Sholto held on with his right hand, groping

about with his left for some weapon wherewith to end the contest. At

length his grasp closed on the hilt of a dropped sword;--and a moment

later it was all over with the man whom the survivors of Havelock’s

Ironsides speak of with scorn and disgust to this day by the name of

“Nana Sahib’s Englishman.”

THE OLD SERGEANT

The scene of my little story is a sequestered hill-parish away up among

the brown moors and sullen pinewoods of northern Scotland, and the date

of it is full forty years ago, when I was a boy living in the grey old

manse down in the sheltered glen which was the only picturesque “bit”

of all the parish whose minister my father was. It was a curiously

primitive region. Its crofters and farmers lived out their lives and

were laid in the old graveyard up on the hillock--hardly a soul of them

having ever been twenty miles outside the parish bounds. There was a

vague lingering tradition concerning a scapegrace son, long since dead

and gone, of old Sandy McCulloch of the Calternach--how the daring

young ne’er-do-well had actually left his native land, made his way to

India--we boys used to look up the map of India in the manse atlas--had

married a “begum” there, and had finally been poisoned off by that

mysterious female. This tradition had engendered a fine wholesome

terror of begums, and all kinds of adventures that haply might involve

matrimonial connections therewith, with disastrous results to follow.

So our young men stayed at home and tilled the sour cold land

laboriously but contentedly. There were a few exceptions, it is true.

Now and then a young fellow would take the Queen’s shilling, and go out

from among us on a career of soldiering. They seldom came back, for

Cardwell’s name had not yet been heard in the land, and short service

in the army was a reform undreamed of. When a man ’listed then, it was

nominally for life; actually, until his bodily vigour was so impaired

that he was held no longer fit for service, and then he got a pension

for the remainder of his days. But what with hard service abroad, what

with cholera in Hindustan and Yellow Jack in the West Indies, what

with poor fare in barracks and on noxious crowded transports, no great

proportion of the soldiers of those days managed to keep alive long

enough to attain the pensioned period. There was but one army-pensioner

in our parish, and he is “the old sergeant” of my story.

They were grand old specimens, those veterans of a bypast era. To

them the credit of their old regiment and the honour of the service

were dearer than anything else in all the world. They had a great

self-respect that had been instilled by the discipline they had

undergone, and by the dangers they had passed through. They had a

single-hearted loyalty to the Crown they had served, and a manly belief

in the country which their strong arms and ready weapons had helped to

save. It is no doubt all right in a military sense that there are no

old soldiers among us now; but of this I am sure, that in a good many

respects the country is the worse for the want of them.

There was a Sunday morning of my boyhood which I remember as if it

were yesterday. The Sunday school, held in the grey old schoolroom on

the edge of the wood in the centre of which stood the parish kirk, had

just been dismissed. The bell had not yet begun to ring, but it was the

custom of the great straggling parish to hold its grand weekly palaver,

summer and winter alike, on the little wood-encircled open space

around the kirk, during the half-hour before the simple Presbyterian

service began. To this end, the folk who were to constitute the

congregation were gathering, coming in by twos and threes along the

various paths centring on the kirk. Good old Willie Duffus, the elder

from the far-distant Forgie district, had climbed and descended the

bleak shoulder of Muldearie, had picked his devious way across the

moss, had forded the burn, and was now so close at hand that I could

discern the weather-beaten fluffiness of his ancestral beaver, and the

resplendent brass buttons on the mediæval blue coat which had not been

new when it had been his grandfather’s wedding-garment. Johnny Mills,

the cripple tailor, who was wont to carry his goose and ironing-board

from farmhouse to farmhouse, and to accept his food as part of his poor

pay, came shambling up the dykeside from his hovel in the kailyard

under the old willow-tree. With an air of rustic patronage which he

could well afford, since most of the poor folk were in his books,

Sandy Riach, the “merchant” of the Kirktoun, came strutting up the path

from the little wooded hamlet. The farm lads, with their straw-coloured

or red hair cut square in the nape of the neck, brilliant as to chest

in their scarlet or blue plush vests studded with big white bone

buttons, clumped kirkward in their heavy hobnailed boots, exchanging

now and then a word of clumsy badinage with the lasses in their tartan

shawls, and the rig-and-fur stockings and stout shoes they had put

on after wading the burn down in the hollow. Old Maggie Dey, as she

wended her slow way leaning on her stick, would stop now and again for

a confidential whisper with a good-wife; for Maggie was the parish

“howdie”--_Anglice_, midwife--and had officiated at the introduction

into this vale of tears of more than half of the population of the

parish. Just on the rise of the “manse-brae” I could discern my

mother’s bonnet as she climbed the steep knoll, with a little cohort

of my younger brothers and sisters by her side, walking orderly, as

beseemed the day and the occasion.

Ha! there was old Robbie Strachan nailing up a notice on the half-open

church door, and now he was unfastening the bell-rope from its hook

high up on the porch wall, preparatory to the statutory twenty minutes’

tolling of the clangorous old bell up there on the stumpy belfry. We

boys, keenly alert, were watching Robbie’s every motion, rejoicing in

the prospect of one of our chiefest weekly joys; for Robbie when he

was in a good humour would let us have the rope and do the ringing, all

save the peremptory final peals known as the “ringing in,” while he

conversed sedately with a knot of his cronies.

Robbie Strachan, the bellman and “kirk officer” of our parish, was

a tall, gaunt old fellow, lean-faced and high-featured, straight

still as a pine, although in his time he had put in forty years of

hard soldiering. His regulation mutton-chop whiskers, white as snow,

just reached the corners of his grim old mouth, the rest of his

lined visage closely shaven. You would have known him at a glance

for an old soldier, by his balanced step, his square shoulders, and

his disciplined attitudes; he stood proclaimed yet more plainly by

the well-brushed threadbare trews of Gordon tartan that encased his

lean and wiry nether limbs. Robbie had been a sergeant in the local

regiment, the gallant Ninety-Second, and in its ranks had borne the

brunt of many a stubborn fray. He had worn the brogues from off his

feet in Moore’s disastrous retreat on Corunna, and had helped to bury

that noble chief “by the struggling moonbeam’s misty ray and the

lantern dimly burning.” He had been in the thick of the fierce bayonet

struggle in the steep street of Fuentes de Oñoro, had climbed the ridge

to the desperate fight of Albuera, and had taken a hand in carrying

the bridge of Almarez. A wound had kept him from Salamanca, but he was

in Graham’s front line on the day of Vittoria, and had many a tale

of the rich plunder that fell to the conquerors in that short, sharp,

and decisive combat. He had heard the bullets patter on the rocks of

Roncesvalles, had waded the “bloody Bidassoa” under the shadow of the

lofty Rhune, and was only hindered from being in at the death in the

final desperate struggle on the glacis of Toulouse, by having got a

bullet in the chest as he waded up to the knees behind Picton through

the marsh which Soult vainly imagined protected his front at Orthez.

Robbie was but a corporal when he went down at Orthez, but he was full

sergeant on that wet June morning of the following year when “Cameron’s

pibroch woke the slumbering host” to range itself in “battle’s

magnificently stern array!” Bullets had an unpleasant habit of finding

their billets in him, and he was knocked over again on the forenoon

of Waterloo when hanging on to the stirrup-leather of a Scots Grey in

the memorable charge of the “Union Brigade” and shouting “Scotland for

ever!” in unison with the comrades of horse and foot hailing from the

land of cakes. The army surgeons in their cheery manner pronounced

him as full of holes as a cullender, and were for invaliding him then

and there as unfit for further service; but Robbie stoutly pleaded

that he would be as good a man as ever when his wounds were healed,

and triumphantly made good his words. So he had put in fifteen years’

subsequent soldiering, and had heard the British drum-beat all round

the world, ere, some ten years before the date of my story, he

had been retired with a sergeant’s pension for life and something

additional for wounds. He was an old man now, but he carried his years

well, and was still a good man in the harvest field, or with the spade.

Most of his work with that implement was done in the manse garden, and

we manse boys used to spend hours in listening to his stories of his

old fighting days, while he made the drills for the garden peas, or

dibbled in the kail plants in the plot behind the gooseberry bushes.

An exemplary man in a general way, Sergeant Robbie had his little

failings; but for which he would have been an elder of the parish

instead of being but the bellman and kirk officer. He was rather

quick-tempered, and when moved to wrath, he swore in a manner which

conclusively proved he had been with the army in Flanders. Then again,

occasionally, on pension days mostly, he would take more whisky than

was good for him. When he got “fou,” it was always in the light of

day, and so he exposed himself. As he marched home from the little

public-house down at Blackhillock, with “the malt abune the meal,” his

effort to appear preternaturally sober was quite a spectacle. Always

stiff of attitude, he was then positively rigid: he would sway, but it

was the swaying of a ramrod; when haply he fell into the ditch, there

was no collapsing in a limp heap--he went down all of a length, as if

there was not a joint in all his long body. But these exhibitions were

comparatively infrequent, and were excused in the eyes of the parish

censors because of the hole in the sergeant’s head made by the Waterloo

bullet.

He and his old wife, who had seen a great deal of the world from the

top of a baggage-waggon, but who was a most worthy domestic soul,

lived together in a cottage at the back of the wood. The couple had

an only son. When the youth grew into a strapping lad, Robbie had

marched him down to Gordon Castle, to take counsel concerning his

boy’s future, with his patron the Duke. It was in Robbie’s strong

arms that the Duke--then Lord March--had lain, when the surgeons

probed unsuccessfully for the bullet that pierced his chest on the day

of Orthez, and which His Grace carried in him to the grave. As the

result of this conference, Robbie had taken his son into Aberdeen, and

enlisted him in his own old corps, the Gordon Highlanders. I remember

the young fellow coming home on furlough, and the sensation among the

simple folk as he swaggered up to the kirk in his flowing tartans and

with the ostrich-feather bonnet on his handsome head. Old Robbie was a

proud man that day, for his son had the corporal’s stripe already on

his arm, although he had been barely three years a soldier.

If I have been over-minute in the attempt to depict Sergeant Robbie,

I advance the double excuse, that he was among the prominent figures

of my youth time, and that the type is now as extinct as the dodo. The

old man stepped out from under the kirk wall with the bell-rope in his

hand, and we boys darted forward to make our request that he would

hand it over to us and let us do the ringing for him. But there was a

strange stern expression in his face that gave us pause. “No the day,

laddies,” was all he said, as he took post at the corner of the stone

dyke, and began to sway the chafed old rope. We stood silently by, in

wonder at his mood. We had known him cross; but he was not cross now:

in the gloomy set face and the unwonted silence there was something

quite new and strange to us. And yet another strange thing, his wonted

cronies held away from him this morning. There was something mysterious

in the air. The people, as they gathered in the open space outside the

kirk, formed little muttering knots. From these, every now and then, a

person would drop out, and strolling up to the kirk door in a seemingly

purposeless way, would stand there a while looking up at the notices

displayed on it, and then saunter back to the group he had left, or

drift into another. It was curious that, no matter wherever you looked,

every one seemed to be stealing furtive glances at Sergeant Robbie,

standing out there by himself swaying the bell-rope with his long lean

arms. And furtive as they were, the old man was clearly conscious of

those glances. His face grew harder, grimmer, and more set; yet once

or twice gazing up at him in my bewilderment with a boy’s curiosity, I

thought I noticed a quivering of the muscles about the close-gripped

lips.

The “ringing in” was finished, and the congregation had passed into

the kirk. As Sergeant Robbie, carrying the big pulpit Bible, strode

up the aisle in front of the minister, it seemed to me that I had

never seen him carrying so high that old white head of his, with the

cicatrix of the Waterloo bullet in the gnarled forehead. Every eye

was on the old fellow, and he knew it, and bore himself with a quiet

courage in which somehow there came to be felt an element of pathos. It

was curious again how all eyes centred upon him when in his extempore

prayer the minister besought “consolation for those who were in sore

trouble and mourning over the falling away of one near and dear to

them.” Robbie stood straight and square, his face fixed--only his lean

brown throat swelled for a moment as if he were resolutely forcing down

a spasm of emotion. Tibbie his wife stood by his side, and when the old

soldier laid his hand on her shoulder she quelled with a strong effort

her rising sobs.

The simple service ended, the people streamed out through the door

that Robbie had thrown open; we of the manse party were the last to

emerge. It was part of Robbie’s duty, as kirk officer, to “cry” to the

dispersing congregation all notices placed in his hands for purposes of

publicity, the duplicates of which he had previously nailed on the kirk

door. The kirk officer in those primitive regions was the chief medium

for giving good advertisement. As we came out Robbie was standing in

the centre of a large circle, calling out in his high falsetto the

particulars of a “displenish sale.” “Fower good stots, three milk kye,

a pair of workhorses, farm implements, household furniture,” and so on.

This finished, there was a pause. Sergeant Robbie folded up the sale

advertisement; as he did this his hand was trembling so that it fell

to the ground. He stooped, picked the paper up and put it in the rear

pocket of his coat; then from out his breast-pocket he pulled a folded

blue document. He braced himself firmly, came to rigid “attention” as

if he were in the presence of his commanding officer, and slowly opened

out the blue paper.

“Dinna read it, Robbie!” “Dinna read it, sergeant!” came from a dozen

voices in the sympathising circle around him. “It’s no necessar’--ye

needna, ye maunna read it,” cried the senior elder, James Cameron, of

the Gauldwell, with a sob in his thin old voice.

It was as if the sergeant heard no word of dissuasion. He had opened

out the paper and was holding it between his hands, standing there

braced at “attention” and fighting down the working in his throat that

momentarily was staying his voice.

Behind him, as he thus struggled, broke out the piteous wail “Oh,

my laddie, my laddie!” from the very depths of poor Tibbie’s heart,

followed by a burst of loud sobs.

The sergeant did not turn to his wife--boy as I was, I remember it

struck me that he dared not.

“Belnabreich,” he said to an old farmer standing directly in front of

him, “Belnabreich, tak’ her hame, tak’ her awa’ frae this, in the name

of God!”

Old Belnabreich moved towards Tibbie, but before he reached her she got

the mastery of herself again.

“Thank ye, Belnabreich,” she said, “ye’ve a kind heart; but I’m gaun

tae bide here, whaur my man is. We’ve come through muckle thegither,

and we’ll thole this disgrace thegither, and syne him an’ me, bairnless

noo, will tak’ our sorrow hame thegither.”

The water was standing in the sergeant’s eyes, but the spasm was out

of his throat now, and in a steady strong voice that carried far, he

read out the print on the face of the blue paper. And this was what it

befell him to have to read:

WHEREAS NO. 1420, Corporal Peter Strachan of the 92nd Regiment,

age twenty-four years, height five feet eleven inches, complexion

ruddy, hair red, eyes blue, distinguishing marks none, enlisted

at Aberdeen on the ---- day of ---- 1844, born in the Parish of

Auchterturff, in the County of Banff, and resident in said parish

before enlistment: DESERTED from the said regiment at Montreal,

Canada, on the ---- day of ---- 1848: The lieges are hereby warned

under pain of law against harbouring the said deserter, and are

strictly enjoined to give immediate information to the nearest

police officer should they become cognisant of his whereabouts, to

the end that he may be apprehended and duly punished.

ALASTAIR MCPHERSON, Col., Comg.

Gordon Highlanders.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

The sergeant uttered the final invocation in a loud firm tone, and a

graceless callant in the background, unwitting of the tragedy of the

situation, cried “Hurrah.” Otherwise there reigned a dead silence,

as the old man, turning to his wife, gave her his arm with a certain

courtliness rare among north country husbands of the humbler classes,

and conducted her out of the little throng. The pair were allowed to

get out of hearing ere the little stir of comment and condolence set

in--it did not last long, for most of the folk had to trudge some

distance to their homes. I remember watching the lonely couple as they

wended their way along the path by the side of the wood, the dumpy

huddled figure in the duffle shawl leaning against the tall spare form

in the quaint old blue coat that had once belonged to the Duke, and the

threadbare tartan trews that were a relic of the old regimentals.

From that Sunday old Sergeant Robbie was an altered man. Never more did

he cross the hill for the once cherished “crack” with his Peninsular

friend the Duke. Never more could the lads entice him to a dram in

the Blackhillock public-house. He duly came to his work in the manse

garden, but we boys hung about him in vain for stories of his old

fighting days; a great silence had fallen upon the old man. His lean

figure began to lose its erectness, and soon you scarcely would have

known him for a veteran soldier. There remained one link only between

him and my father, the interchange of the snuff-mull. But there were

no more of the genial little chats that had been wont to accompany the

give-and-take. From that Sunday Robbie was a man of monosyllables, and

even my mother could not penetrate his grim reserve. He became yet more

laconic after he lost Tibbie, who never held her head up from the day

she knew of her son’s disgrace. The poor old woman faded out within a

couple of years, and Robbie had no longer the consolation that comes

from having sorrow shared. After her death he gave up his duties as

bellman and kirk officer, and scarcely left his cottage except to

attend church. When I went to say farewell to him before leaving home

to go to school, I found him sitting in front of the fire, staring

blankly at the smouldering peats. That was the last time I saw the old

man.

A year or two later a letter from home told me that old Robbie had

heard from his son. The deserter, it appeared, had made his way to

Chicago, had gone into some business in that stirring place, and was

making money fast. He had written home begging his parents--he had not

heard of his mother’s death--to come out to him in America, and had

enclosed a draft for an ample sum of money to pay the charges of the

voyage and journey. The stern old man would hold no terms with the son

who had disgraced his parents and dishonoured his uniform. He told my

father curtly that he had folded the draft in a blank sheet of paper,

and sent it back by return of post.

The tough old soldier, weary of life as he was, lasted a few years

longer. At length one day the parish was stirred by the news that he

had been found lying dead in a ditch some three miles away from his

cottage, about half-way between it and the village of Keith. And before

that day was done, the parish throughout its length and breadth knew

also that Robbie’s son, the deserter, had been apprehended and carried

off to jail by Neil Robertson, the head of the county police.

The strange details were gathered piecemeal. A niece, a girl, who had

come to live with the old man in his later feebleness, told that one

night late a knock had come to the cottage door. The old man had opened

it himself and was confronted by his son. She had overheard their

brief colloquy. The son had begged the father to forgive him, and to

leave home at once with him for America; he had a conveyance close

by, and they might start immediately. The stern father had bidden the

son begone out of his sight. He would not let the young man pass the

threshold of the cottage, and told him plainly that if he did not quit

the neighbourhood without an hour’s delay, he would inform against him.

With that he had shut the door in his son’s face, prayed with tears

and groans for two hours, and then lain down in his clothes. Before

daylight the son had returned to the cottage, having, he told her,

spent the night in the adjacent wood, and from outside the window had

adjured his father to see him, if but for a moment. The old man would

speak no word, lying silent in the press-bed opposite the fire; and as

the day dawned the son had gone away, calling out to his father that he

would come back again at night. The old man had lain late, groaning and

praying in bed; about noon he had got up, read a chapter of the Bible

aloud, and taking his stick had gone forth. She had hoped he was gone

to look for his son; but he never came back, and the next thing she

heard was that he had been found dead. The son had returned at night,

but she had “steekit” the door, and made no answer when he called.

Neil Robertson, the head of the county police, furnished the sequel

of the sad story. The old sergeant had come to his house in Keith as

the short day was waning, and said he had come to do his duty and

formally lodge the information that Peter Strachan, a deserter from

the 92nd Regiment, had been to his cottage that morning, and that he

believed him to be still in its neighbourhood. Robertson, knowing the

relationship, had been reluctant to take the information, but the

sergeant had sternly bidden him do his duty, as he was doing his. The

old man was quite exhausted, Robertson testified, and he had begged him

to take some rest and had offered him refreshment. But he had declined

either to rest or to eat and drink, and had gone straight away.

The life had gone out of the old sergeant as he was sadly trudging

homeward, having done what he held to be his duty, as a true liegeman

of the Crown, in whose service he had fought and bled.

THE GENTLEMAN PRIVATE OF THE “SKILAMALINKS”

It was in the autumn of the year 1856 that a squadron of that gallant

Light Cavalry Regiment familiarly known as the “Skilamalinks” crossed

Sheffield Moor, rode down Snighill, and proceeded along the valley of

the dirty Don to the old cavalry barracks in the angle made by the

divagation of the upper and lower Western roads. The “Skilamalinks” had

followed Cardigan in that glorious, crazy gallop up the long valley of

Balaclava, and when the eventful twenty-five minutes were over, their

gallant array had dwindled to a weak troop, in which there was scarcely

a scatheless man and horse. The bitter winter on the Chersonese had yet

further thinned the handful that had escaped the Russian cross-fire,

and there was a time when the “Skilamalinks” could barely furnish for

duty a weak picket. But when the cruel winter ended, reinforcements

came pouring in so freely that before the battle of the Tchernaya

the regiment was near its full strength. It had returned to England,

dismounted, early in 1856, had spent the summer in south of Ireland

quarters, engaged in reorganisation and breaking in the remounts

which had been sent to it, and in the autumn it had got the route for

Yorkshire, headquarters at York, with out-quarters at Sheffield, and,

if I remember rightly, at Leeds. Captain Jolliffe, the senior captain

of the regiment, was in command of the Sheffield squadron, and it was

as a lance-corporal in that fine soldier’s troop that I, No. 420,

Arthur Fraser, rode into the cramped little barrack-yard at the fork of

the roads. My moustache is snow-white now, and, as I walk, I limp a bit

from the Cossack lance-thrust through the calf of the leg which is my

souvenir of the memorable Light Cavalry charge; but when I dismounted

in the Sheffield barrack-yard thirty-five years ago, there was not in

Queen Victoria’s army, although I say it, a more strapping young fellow

than Lance-Corporal Arthur Fraser, of A troop in the “Skilamalink”

Hussars.

It is many a long year since I last saw the dense smoke under whose

pall Sheffield breathes hard over its grindstones, and no doubt there

are many changes in the dingy, rough, cordial town. When I last

soldiered there our quarters were in the fine new barracks, a mile

beyond the ramshackle old structure at the fork of the roads. The

young soldiers took delight in the airy spaciousness of the former,

whose front looks across to the public-house famous in my day for the

tenpenny ale one glass of which made a fellow garrulous, and whose

flank overhangs the beautiful valley which has long since recovered

from the devastation wrought by the bursting of the great dam high up

in its throat; but the old soldiers still nourished pleasant memories

of the cramped old quarters nearer to the heart of the town. For aught

I know, those may have been demolished long ago, and the Sheffielder

of to-day may know them no more; but when our out-marching squadron on

its way to Norwich last rode along the lower road toward Snighill, we

oldsters looked rightward at the dingy tiled roofs, and at the little

windows of what had been our troop-rooms, but which were now let out

to civilian inhabitants who cultivated scrawny geraniums and reluctant

fuchsias in stumpy little window-boxes. And as I gazed my heart swelled

and the water came into my eyes, for the scene recalled the memory of a

tragic occurrence which had for years cast a gloom on my life.

Most people are aware that nowadays no inconsiderable number of young

gentlemen are serving in the ranks of the army. These are mostly men

with a specific aim. They are fellows who have failed to get into

the service as officers either through the front door of Sandhurst,

or through the easier side door of the Militia. So they enlist, work

hard, and keep steady, while their connections meanwhile are exciting

all the influence in their power to further their promotion to

commissioned rank. But it is not so generally known that in the old

purchase days there was quite a considerable leaven of gentle-manhood

in the ranks, without any such specific anxiety for promotion as

actuates the gentleman-ranker of to-day. The gentleman-ranker of the

old days--so far back as the Peninsular War he was common enough in

the army--for the most part enlisted because he had come to grief in

some fashion or other. Nowadays, a fellow who has done this has many

resources other than the ranks. You find him in the Australian bush,

in a mining camp of the Western States, in a Florida orange garden, on

a ranche in Texas, or in the “fertile belt” out beyond Winnipeg. He

may be prospecting in the Transvaal or galloping after steers in the

Argentine. I have shaken the hand--and a deuced greasy hand it was--of

a broken baronet doing duty as cook in a New Zealand timber-cutting

camp, and have had a hackman at Portage la Prairie who was the son

of a noble marquis, and had himself a courtesy title. For the broken

gentleman of the Crimean war time there were no such opportunities of

obscurity and possible redemption. The alternatives for him were utter

blackguardism or the ranks of the army. When he chose the latter he

invariably went for cavalry, ignorant or regardless of the harder work

devolving on that arm; and almost invariably it was a light cavalry

regiment in which he enrolled himself--always under a false name. The

“Skilamalinks” were a favourite corps with gentlemen recruits under a

cloud. Its chief was proud of this preference, and showed kindness to

the waifs of good family. In my day they were invariably posted to A

troop, which Captain Jolliffe ruled so kindly and yet so firmly, and

which went in the regiment by the name of “the Gentlemen’s Troop.”

When possible the gentlemen were always quartered together in the same

troop-room, and were on their honour to behave creditably and show a

good example in every respect. There were twelve of us, I remember, in

one of those low-roofed attics above the stables in the old cavalry

barracks of Sheffield. The corporal in charge of the room was the son

of a great squire and M.P.; his mother the daughter of a Scotch marquis.

My chum was a stalwart and handsome young fellow, who had joined on

the same day I became a “Skilamalink.” He was reticent as to his

antecedents; but he had confided to me that he had held a commission in

an Indian native cavalry regiment, had come a mucker over high play at

Simla, could not bring himself to face his mother (who was the widow

of a clergyman of small means), had thrown up his commission, come

home, and had ’listed for “the Skilamalinks” at the old “Hampshire

Hog” in Charles Street, Westminster, on the very day he landed. As we

rode back together from out the hell of slaughter on the morning of

Balaclava, Charlie Johnstone (of course a “purser’s” name) had killed

the Cossack who had speared me, and cut down another who was in the act

of skewering me from behind. Farther up the valley I believe I saved

his life when the cannon-shot that bowled over his horse broke his

leg, and when, lame though I was, I managed to carry him on my back up

to the cover of Brandling’s battery on the Causeway Ridge. So you may

believe we were friends and comrades, and had a love for each other

“passing the love of woman.”

My chum was not a very social person, although always on perfectly

good terms with his comrades of the “gentlemen’s” barrack-room. He had

frequent accesses of gloom, caused, I assumed, by the sudden shipwreck

he had made of a career that must have been very promising, for he

was a man of strong intellect, highly accomplished, a fine linguist,

and well versed in military history and the science of war. When the

shadow fell upon him, he used to spend much of his time in the stable

with his mare. She was rather a notable animal. Desperately wounded

as she was in the retreat from the Balaclava Charge, she had pulled

herself together, reached the rallying-place of the Light Brigade,

and formed up on the flank of the troop to which she belonged. She

had recovered from her injuries with extraordinary rapidity, and had

withstood with singular fortitude the hardships and starvation of the

terrible winter; and she now among all troop horses in the regiment was

the only survivor of the famous Charge. The dreadful Crimean winter

had left its mark upon her. Before that evil time her nature had been

gentle, and her paces smooth and easy. But during the worst of it, too

weak to stand, she had long lain embedded in frozen mud and snow.

She had risen, indeed, out of this misery, and had regained strength

and shapeliness, but ever after she was the roughest trotter in the

regiment. And with the ease of her paces had gone, too, the mare’s

temper. She had become a vicious and dangerous savage, to approach

which was unsafe for any one save only the trooper who had ridden her

in the Charge, to whom she was uniformly gentle and affectionate.

Johnstone would sit by her for hours at a time on the manger at her

head, or on the hanging bale by her side, talking in low tones to

the old jade, and she listened to him for all the world as if she

understood him, which, indeed, I am sure, he more than believed that

she did.

Christmas Day in the army is the great festival of the year. The

preparations for its adequate celebration are commenced days in

advance. I hear--but I do not know whether it is true--that the cost

of the Christmas dinner is now defrayed out of the canteen fund. But

in our day--at all events in the cavalry regiments--the captain of

each troop took, and was proud to take, that obligation upon himself

as regarded his own men. There used to be quite a little ceremony

about the matter. Some ten days in advance the troop sergeant-major

would go round the barrack-rooms, and make a little speech in each

room. “Men,” he would say, striking an attitude, “our worthy captain

has commissioned me to inform you that he will have great pleasure

in having the men of his troop eat their Christmas dinner at his

expense, and that he will also contribute toward the celebration of the

day half a gallon of stout per man, which he regards as an adequate

allowance if his men, as he anxiously desires, are to keep reasonably

sober, and not discredit him and themselves by getting drunk.” Cheers

would follow this intimation, and a sarcastic old soldier might

interject the remark, “The captain don’t know, Sergeant-Major, how

strong A troop heads are. We could drink a gallon per man, and never

turn a hair!” Whereunto the honest sergeant-major would retort, “Ah,

Lucas, we know what a power of suction you have without showing the

drink, but remember it’s not a fortnight since when you were walking

pack-drill for being as drunk as a boiled owl.” Lucas thus suppressed,

the sergeant-major would proceed: “Now, men, take a day or two to make

your minds up what you prefer for dinner--geese, turkeys, roast pork,

veal--whatever delicacies of the season you may fancy, and then let the

orderly corporal know your choice, so that he may give the order in

good time. The materials for the plum-pudding--they are--of course you

know.”

Then the artistic genius of the room would betake himself to mural

decorations, representations in colours of the banners of the regiment,

the captain’s coat-of-arms, such legends as “A Merry Christmas to

all!” “Long life to our worthy Captain!” “The ‘Skilamalinks’ take the

right of the line!” and so forth. Adjacent plantations are harried

of Christmas trees, holly, and mistletoe, and each room becomes an

evergreen bower. Christmas Eve is the period of busy labour, skill and

triumph on the part of the pudding-compounder, whose satellites pick

raisins of their stones, chop the lemon-peel, and heroically refrain

from taking surreptitious sips of the brandy destined to invigorate

the pudding. Volunteers are ready with their clean towels to serve as

pudding-cloths, and then a procession marches to the cookhouse, where

the puddings are consigned to the copper over which the conscientious

compounder holds his long vigil. It is a pleasant time when on

Christmas Day the bountiful fare is spread on the barrack-room table,

and when the captain goes round the rooms, and says a few genial words

to the men standing at attention while they listen. Then the oldest

soldier, nudged by his mates, takes one pace to his front, halts,

comes to preternaturally rigid attention, and shoots out the words,

“Captain Jolliffe, sir”--then stammers painfully for the space of about

a minute, and finally blurts out--“wish to thank you, sir--most liberal

dinner, stout, sir--drink your health, sir--proud of our captain,

sir--wish you and yours Merry Christmas and many of ’em!” “Same to

you, men,” replies the captain--genially tastes the stout which the

cheekiest man tenders him in a stoneware soup basin, and with, mayhap,

the words “Be merry but be wise” clanks out of the room, followed by a

cheer.

The inmates of the “Gentlemen’s Room,” it was always understood,

preferred not to be beholden to their captain for their Christmas

dinner. They were not indeed bloated plutocrats, but most of them had

their pittance of army pay supplemented by remittances from home, some

stated, some occasional; and some little expenditure was made in modest

amenities. They luxuriated, for instance, in tablecloths, and in cups

and saucers in lieu of the rough stoneware basins supplied to the other

barrack-rooms by the contractor for the mess-table refuse. But although

the gentlemen chose to be independent in regard to the Christmas

dinner, they were glad to accept in the spirit in which it was tendered

the dozen of wine which Captain Jolliffe sent over from the officers’

mess with his compliments and the good wishes of the season. We had

dined, and had formed a wide circle round the cheerful fire as we sat

over the captain’s wine, whose array of bottles was marshalled on the

table which we encircled--we were drinking the Château Margaux out of

teacups, I remember--when all at once there was a timid little knock

at the door. “Come in!” cried Corporal Hayward; the door opened, and

there entered into the barrack-room a handsome white-haired lady,

with scared, wistful eyes, and a worn face the expression of which

had for me something vaguely familiar. She was in a state of manifest

agitation, and for the moment, as she stood catching her breath as if

to keep down the sobs that were rising in her throat, she was unable

to utter articulate sounds.

We all rose to our feet, opening our circle. With high-bred courtesy

and genuine concern, Corporal Hayward hastened to her side, and led

her to the chair which he had vacated--the only one in the room. Then

in a measure she regained her composure, and asked, still rather

flutteringly--

“Is this what is called ‘The Gentlemen’s Room?’”

“The fellows call it so,” replied Hayward, “but we make no pretensions.”

“The corporal of the guard sent me here,” said the lady, “as the

likeliest place----” and then she burst into tears and broke down.

“Likeliest place for what, madam?” inquired Hayward, with sympathy and

concern in his accents.

“I--I am searching for my lost son,” she answered through her tears,

“for the only son of his mother, and she a widow.”

“Pray tell me his name,” said Hayward.

“Josceline L’Estrange,” replied the lady more firmly, “twenty-three

years of age, tall, slight, with light wavy hair, and blue eyes. My

boy! my boy!” and the sobs came again thick and fast.

“There is no man of that name among us, or indeed in the regiment. But

men do not always enlist in their own names. Look around you--but, no,

I am sure your son cannot be one of us, else long before now he would

have been on his knees before you!”

The lady scanned face after face in vain. Hayward undertook that she

might be present at muster parade on the following morning, so that she

might have the opportunity of seeing every man in the regiment. This

gentleness, and the concern of all of us, seemed to soothe her; she sat

quiet and silent with folded hands. Jack Dalrymple--I saw him the other

day on the box of his drag at the parade of the Coaching Club--boiled

some water in a pannikin and made the lady a cup of tea. As she sipped

it, she began to talk--to tell us the story of her lost son.

He had been for two years in India, a subaltern in one of the Company’s

native cavalry regiments. She had not heard from him for several

months when, in the late autumn of ’53, she read in an Anglo-Indian

newspaper that he had resigned his commission. Greatly distressed,

she wrote out to one of his brother-officers begging for tidings of

him. The reply came that he had got into a scrape in which there was

nothing dishonourable, but which had ruined him financially, that he

had persisted in throwing up his commission and returning to England,

intending, so his comrade stated, to enlist in one of the Queen’s

light cavalry regiments in time to take part in the war with Russia

which he had assured himself was impending. Before those tidings

reached England, the light cavalry brigade had already sailed for

the East; but the poor mother had gone to London and devoted herself

to inquiries among the recruiting sergeants in Charles Street,

Westminster. One of the fraternity had professed to recognise the son

by the description given by the mother, and from the circumstance

that the former had told him he had been an officer in the Company’s

native cavalry; but since the old sergeant had forgotten the name of

the intending recruit and did not recollect in what regiment he had

enlisted, the quest had run to ground. After the return of the brigade

to England on the termination of the Crimean War, the mother had been

searching without result among the regiments of it quartered in the

South-country stations, and it was finally, on the advice of a Lancer

major, who had recently exchanged from the “Skilamalinks,” that she

should visit Captain Jolliffe’s troop in that regiment, since in it

there was an exceptional number of gentlemen rankers, that she had come

to Sheffield. And now, she piteously said, her last hope seemed dead;

she would search no further, but go home and die, the light of her life

gone out.

Hayward, tender and anxious as he was, did not dare to speak words to

her that might inspire her with false hope. But it had been growing

upon me, as she told her simple mournful story, that I had the power

to do more than inspire her with hope--to give her, in very truth, the

sweet joy of its realisation. Stronger and more strong had grown my

conviction, as I listened to her, that my chum was none other than her

lost son. Everything of his life that he had confided to me--and to me

alone--tallied closely with the story related by the white-haired lady

sitting in Hayward’s windsor-chair. Soon after dinner he had become

silent and abstracted, and presently he had risen and left us. But I

knew perfectly well where to find my poor brooding comrade--up in the

stall alongside that vicious old chestnut jade which had carried him

through Russian cannon-fire and Cossack spears on the sad, glorious day

of Balaclava.

I had only to descend the staircase and go a little way to the left,

to reach the door of the stable in which was old “Termagant’s” stall.

Before I threw open the door, indeed before I reached it, I heard an

unwonted din of hoofs clattering on the cobblestones, of vicious kicks

against bales and pillar-posts, of scared snortings and squealing.

The usually quiet troop horses I found infected with a wild delirium

of mingled fury and panic, as the sweat poured down their flanks, and

as they snuffed a strange fresh odour which pervaded the stable. I

called my chum; there was no answer. No; but in the farthest stall I

found him--found him down among the infernal hoofs of that vicious

old hell-jade, the chestnut of the Balaclava Charge. She had trodden

him almost into pulp. The odour which was maddening the other horses

was the smell of his blood. She was kneeling on his chest with her

forelegs. She was off the short jib, and was tearing pieces off his

face and skull with her cursed long yellow fangs.

The sight whirled me into a reckless fury. I dashed at her head, caught

her hard by the nose, half stunned her with swinging blows from the

horse-log that sent her bloody tusks down her throat as she came at me,

forced her back into the gangway, and fastened her up in a spare stall.

Then, dodging her final vicious lash out, I ran to where my comrade

lay. No one could have recognised him; hardly in the crushed, torn, and

bleeding mass could there be discerned aught of human being. Yet he was

not quite dead. I felt the last beats of his heart, and it seemed to me

that he tried in vain to speak ere his shattered head fell back over my

knee. I laid him quietly down, ran under the window of our room, and

called for Hayward.

He came down. We went into the stable together where my comrade’s

remains lay, and I told him I was sure that the dead man was the old

lady’s son. He went across the barrack-yard to Captain Jolliffe’s

quarters, and told him of the double tragedy of this Christmas

afternoon. His wife put her bonnet on, went with her husband to the

“Gentlemen’s Room,” and carried the white-haired lady with her to her

own quarters, her guest for the night. Four of us took a table-slab

off its trestles, and on it carried the mangled corpse to the

little hospital in the corner of the barrack-yard, Captain Jolliffe

accompanying us. There was no need to send in a hurry for the civilian

doctor who had medical charge of the detachment. We gently cut the

clothing off the wrecked form, and straightened the mangled limbs.

Then my assurance became doubly sure. On the crushed chest, yet itself

intact, hung by a ribbon round the neck a locket containing a miniature

of the white-haired lady who had come to the “Gentlemen’s Room” in

search of her son. It was her likeness to him that from the first

had made her face seem familiar to me, although I did not grasp the

resemblance until she was telling her story.

The woful task fell to Mrs. Jolliffe of breaking to the poor mother

the grievous tidings that she had found her son only to lose him for

ever in the grave. But God in His mercy averted the blow. The Captain’s

wife began the duty devolved on her by showing to the mother, without

a word, the locket and the miniature. The poor woman devoured it with

eager eyes, made a futile clutch at the trinket she recognised: her

arms fell, she heaved one quick, sudden sigh, and fell back dead in

her arm-chair. We knew afterwards she had been suffering from advanced

heart disease.

Friends came to carry home to the Wiltshire village the dead mother

and son. Captain Jolliffe went to be present at the funeral of the

gentleman private of his troop, who had been a good soldier in war-time

and peace-time; and he took Hayward and myself with him that we might

lay our comrade’s head in the grave. There was no Dead March in _Saul_

to which to keep the measured time as the little procession wended its

way under the gaunt elm-trees to the rural churchyard, nor did any

firing-party ring out the triple volley over the soldier’s corpse; but

there lay on his coffin the sabre whose edge his country’s enemies had

felt, and from under the busbies of hussar-comrades tears dropped on

his coffin as it lay in the open grave.

JELLYPOD; ALIAS THE MULETEER

I need not say that neither of these was the name by which he appeared

in the Army List. The Muleteer was not his original by-name, although

there may be a good many people who never knew him by another. When I

remember him first--that was about thirty years ago--he was familiarly

known in the cavalry regiment he had then recently joined, as Jellypod.

I knew more of him as Jellypod than I did of him after he came to be

known by the other name; but have you never noticed how completely

a later by-name supersedes an earlier? I think of him habitually as

the Muleteer, and had even to tax my memory to recollect the earlier

Jellypod appellation.

He came to the Potterers from a militia regiment. Nowadays the militia

is a chartered and approved vestibule to the regular army: and it is

quite the thing for a youngster to go straight from the Outlandshire

Rurals into the Grenadier Guards or the Blues. But it was a different

matter thirty years ago, when the aspiring militiaman had to purchase,

and when it was regarded as a mild form of impertinence on his part if

he did not creep humbly into some unpretentious high-low regiment.

But this man had actually bought into cavalry, and what made his

_outrecuidance_ the more marked was that he had come from a London

militia regiment. No doubt times are changed, and the salt of the earth

do their mimic soldiery in the corps which now swaggers as the 10th

battalion of the Royal Fusiliers or the 21st battalion of the Rifle

Brigade. But thirty years ago the metropolitan and suburban militias

were not held in lofty esteem. In a county militia regiment you might

lay your account with finding a considerable sprinkling of younger sons

of the territorial families, and probably the major would be a man

who had served in the regulars, and had gone in for the local corps

when he married and retired to settle down on his patrimonial estate.

But the London regiments had not this stamp of officerhood. As like

as not the Colonel Commandant would be a soap-boiler engaged in the

active duties of his odoriferous profession. You would find no doubt

ex-regulars holding commissions, but they were rather of the copper

captain variety, who bound their militia commissions as phylacteries on

their foreheads in evidence that their claim to the title of officer

and gentleman was unimpaired by the little cloud under which they had

retired from more active service. A militia commission has always been

more or less of a useful item of stock-in-trade to a man living by his

wits; and gentlemen of this type were sandwiched freely in the old days

in the London regiments between the dashing scions of aldermen and the

_jeunesse dorée_ of the Stock Exchange.

Jellypod was a good sort of fellow in his way, but he did not hit

it off with the Potterers. For one thing he was a married man with

two children. Now in the matter of matrimony among the officers,

the Potterers might have belonged to the army of the late lamented

Cetewayo. Old Growler the colonel--he had been chief ever since the

Crimea, and it was currently believed that he had sworn to live to a

hundred and to die in the command of the Potterers, resolutely refusing

promotion--old Colonel Growler had laid down the rule that no officer

should marry and remain in the regiment who was not at least half-way

up among the captains. A junior captain might wed, although frowned

upon, on giving his pledge to send in his papers within the year; but

lo! here was a cornet joining, not only with a wife, but with a wife

who was a foreigner, and there was the additional aggravation of brats.

Then Jellypod, subsequently the Muleteer, had a modest confidence in

himself. Among his burglars and pickpockets he had learnt foot drill

thoroughly, and the first time he turned out to recruits’ drill in the

barrack square, had affably set the “regimental” right in regard to a

word of command. He had studied Jomini, had detected the superficiality

of Hamley’s _Operations of War_, and had visited scientifically

the battlefields of 1859 in Northern Italy. He had not been in the

Potterers a week before he had tendered every officer a printed copy

of an (undelivered) lecture before the United Service Institution on

the utility of cavalry as a support to infantry. Before a fortnight

was over he had confided to the adjutant, who--of course I mean the

fine old ranker adjutant--was always very friendly and confidential

with newly joined officers, that he regarded the regimental system of

the Potterers as reprehensibly slack; and that he thought every one

under the rank of field-officer should invariably attend morning and

evening stables. One fine day after luncheon he followed the chief

into the anteroom and asked him whether he would have any objections

to a project he (Jellypod) had conceived, that he should give a course

of evening lectures in the garrison library to the non-commissioned

officers of the regiment on the German cavalry method of working

by “fours.” Old Growler stared at him grimly from under his shaggy

eyebrows for the space of about a minute, deliberately expectorated

into the grate, then rose, and, without a word, stalked out of the

room. Jellypod did not win much favour from the fat old quarter-master

when he suggested to that worthy that the regimental meat should be

cast every morning, until the contractor realised that the second class

beef he was in the practice of sending in would no longer be accepted.

With all the goodwill in the world, Jellypod did not stand well in

the eyes of the men of the troop to which he was posted as cornet.

He began badly. As is usual when a new officer’s furniture arrives,

a squad of men under a corporal were detailed to unload the Jellypod

furniture from the vans in which it had come down from town. The work

done--you may be sure the fellows had some chaff among themselves about

the cradle, which presented to them a strange anomaly in being part of

a cornet’s goods and chattels--the oldest soldier, as the custom is,

formed up to Jellypod, and, saluting, intimated the anxiety of himself

and his comrades to drink that officer’s health. Jellypod wasn’t a bit

mean, but he regarded this attempt to “pike” him as an impertinence,

and ordered the man about his business, threatening to report him.

He did report him to the corporal, who told him bluntly he thought

the “kick” quite natural--the work being outside the men’s regular

duty, and it being an invariable custom to reward a fatigue-party on

this kind of service with the price of a drink round. In fact the

honest corporal as good as hinted that he himself felt rather dry. But

Jellypod stood on the principle of the thing, and refused to contribute

toward the consumption of intoxicating fluids; he himself was a

teetotaler. It was a high sense of principle, again, which impelled him

to refuse to fall in with the immemorial practice of paying his footing

the first time he entered the riding-school. He would have stood out

even against the fee to the riding-master, taking the ground that among

the duties for which he drew his pay was the instruction in equitation

of the officer-recruit as well as of the soldier-recruit; but old

Voyage had taken his grievance to the colonel, who curtly ordered

Jellypod not to let him hear any more “of this d--d nonsense.” But he

stood out against the _dustoor_ to the underlings of the riding-school.

Then the grim old rough-riding sergeant swore a grizzly oath, and took

the corporal and the rough-riders to witness that if Mr. Jellypod did

not rue his meanness before he was dismissed riding-drill, then his

name was not old Tom Bridoon. And in truth it was a bad morning’s work

for Jellypod when he declined to fork out that sovereign as he trod the

tan for the first time; for it came to pass that he and that same tan

became and remained exceptionally intimate.

The universal wonder was why Jellypod should have come into cavalry.

He was a fine-looking florid man of some seven-and-twenty, with a full

round face, encircled by long chestnut whiskers. He was straight and

square-shouldered, but had already begun to run into flesh, displaying

a not inconsiderable protuberance in front, whence his by-name; and

in point of fact exhibiting the reverse of attenuation when taken in

reverse. With his round fleshy thighs, he looked just the sort of man

to have a washball style of seat in any position, and bound to endure

much in the effort to obtain the correct cavalry seat of the period,

then much longer and less easy to acquire than now.

The Potterers hunted to a man; they would have hunted every day of

the week, including Sunday, if their studs had run to it, and if there

had been a sufficiency of attainable meets. The chief was the keenest

of any; the prime article of his simple faith was that so long as

unfortunately there was no fighting to be done, the chief end of the

cavalryman was to gallop after hounds. So, the day Jellypod came to the

regiment, the chief, never dreaming that there was any need to ask him

whether he hunted, simply put the question, “How many hunters are you

bringing; how many days a week do you care to hunt?” You might have

knocked him down with a feather--he was stricken absolutely dumb, when

Jellypod in the most matter-of-fact way replied:

“I am bringing no hunters, sir. I don’t think hunting is an amusement

I should care about. The fact is, I really don’t know how to ride.

I don’t believe I was ever on the outside of a horse in my life. Of

course I must learn now that I am in a cavalry regiment; and I daresay

I shall find no difficulty in purchasing a steady, docile charger.”

When he joined he had bought the first charger of the officer whose

retirement created the vacancy which made room for him, a perfectly

broken thoroughbred old chestnut, cunning in riding-school drill,

knowing every command as if it had studied the book of the _manège_.

This was a great pull for Jellypod; if only he could have kept in the

saddle, the gallant old horse would have kept him right. But with

“stirrups up” he couldn’t keep in the saddle had his life depended on

doing so. At a walk he was all right; but as soon as the word “Trot!”

was given, he was all over the place. If he hung on by his eyelids for

a round or two, old Bridoon, the non-payment of footing rankling in

his mind, would touch up the old chestnut with the long whip; and then

Jellypod would shut his eyes and gently roll off the saddle on to the

tan. The man, however, had both pluck and perseverance. He never did

get his seat without stirrups, but when these were allowed to the ride,

he did better; trusting to them and to the reins to an unjustifiable

extent, and rolling about, as old Bridoon used to say, “like an apple

in a bucket”--only the expression was mostly a good deal coarser; but

coming to grief altogether with much greater rarity. To the last he

was the most abject duffer at “heads and posts,” and it was well that

the old chestnut carried a good head, else every time he and his rider

went over the bar, the latter would have shot bodily over the former’s

ears. Altogether, Jellypod had a good six months in the school before

he was dismissed riding-drill, and then it was only because, as the

riding-master said, he could not be bothered with him any longer.

Jellypod had developed into considerable of a martinet even before

he ceased to be a recruit and blossomed forth as a “duty-soldier.”

There was not an officer in the regiment who had so keen an eye for

specks of rust in that awkward cranny at the back of a big bit, as it

hung with specious resplendency between the burnished stirrup-irons.

Trouble was no object to Jellypod in his quest after evidences of the

dragoon’s perfunctoriness. He was the first officer in the British

cavalry--ex-rankers in a bad temper excepted--to unfasten a buckle

in order to ascertain whether that recondite crevice at the root of

the tongue was free from rust. The men of his troop rejoiced to see

him cured of the practice of searching for scurf in the tails of

horses shown out to be passed as clean, by a kick on the knee which he

received from Tom Maguire’s vicious chestnut mare. With all this bustle

of thoroughness, Jellypod had no intention of posing as a tartar; he

was simply full of exuberant zeal to do his duty to the extremest

tittle. But he got himself, all the same, heartily disliked and a good

deal despised. You see he was in such a hurry to be critical that he

had not always acquainted himself with the right names of things. The

whole stable burst into a roar of involuntary laughter once, when he

spoke of a crupper as a “breeching”; and he “mulled it” severely on

another occasion when he spoke of a horse’s “left foot.”

He was such a glutton for work that he was always ready to take “the

belt” for another officer; I have known him orderly officer for a week

on end, and he performed the duties of the “orderly” function in the

most thorough manner. He would “take the guard” twice in the course

of a night, and never omitted to make the round of the sentries with

the corporal. So full of zeal was he that when living for a while in

barracks during the absence of his wife at the seaside, he began the

reprehensible practice of sneaking stealthily round the posts in order

to detect any sentry who might be indulging in a few winks. He found it

advisable, however, speedily to desist from this species of enterprise,

because of an unpleasant experience he met with. Approaching a sentry,

he had bidden him “give up his orders.” Now the orders to sentries are

that they are to give up their orders to nobody unless accompanied by

the non-commissioned officer of the guard; and the sentry refused.

Jellypod, bent on testing the soldier’s knowledge of and fidelity to

his orders, announced himself an officer and repeated his demand. The

soldier recognised him, and saw his way to make reprisals on this man

who pried by day into the tongues of buckles, and by night went on the

prowl to trip up sentries.

“Here,” exclaimed the sentry, “I don’t care who you are; officer or

no officer, you have no business comin’ molestin’ me on my post, an’

tryin’ to make me commit myself by givin’ up my orders. Into the

sentry-box with you, or I’ll fell you with my carbine. Jump lively, or

I’ll brain you!”

Jellypod was not a hero, and it was clear to him that the man was

in earnest and his monkey up. Severely crestfallen, he got into the

sentry-box, and then begged of the sentry to summon the sergeant of the

guard.

“See you d--d first,” said the soldier; “you ain’t ‘fire,’ so I’ve no

call to give ‘immediate alarm.’ You’ll stop there and cool till the

relief comes round, and that will be in about an hour and a half.”

There was no help for it, Jellypod had to dree his weird. When the

sergeant came with the relief, he wanted the sentry made a prisoner of

for insubordination and threatening violence to his superior officer;

but the sergeant refused, saying he considered the man had acted within

his duty. He put the occurrence into his report; and next forenoon

Jellypod was sent for to the orderly room, and had the opportunity of

realising with what emphasis and fertility of invective old Growler

could administer a wigging. He never skirmished around any more among

the night sentries, and for at least a week desisted from screwing

his eyeglass into the crevices of big bits and turning buckles inside

out. The chief was always down on him, but worse than ever after this

episode. Two days after it, out at squadron drill, he told him he

rode like a cross between a tailor and a sack, and sent him back to

riding-school till further orders.

The truth was that the chief was most anxious to see the back of

Jellypod, and the aspiration was shared in by every officer in the

regiment. He was not detested; it was recognised that there was nothing

of the actual cad about him; but the feeling was intense that he

was the wrong man in the wrong place as an officer in the easy old

confraternal Potterers, who did not believe in new-fangled notions, and

who, as regarded most of their professional ways, had moved very little

since they charged in the Union Brigade at Waterloo. Colonel Growler

was a just man, and under no temptation would he resort to tyranny, or

allow his officers to indulge in hazing; but he was not backward in

administering strong hints to Jellypod that he was not in his proper

sphere as a cornet in the Potterers. As soon as that subaltern was

dismissed from riding-school, it became imperative that he should

provide himself with a second charger--indeed he ought to have done so

earlier. Beast after beast was sent him on approval, any of which he

thought quite good enough, and it is true that any of them was good

enough for the price which was Jellypod’s figure. But the right vests

in the colonel of a cavalry regiment to pass or reject horses intended

for officers’ chargers; and Growler ruthlessly cast candidate after

candidate for the position of Jellypod’s second charger. At last he

was told he must get a proper second charger, and no more nonsense;

Jellypod piteously urged that it was the colonel who was standing in

the way of his possessing that requisite animal.

While matters stood thus, the Potterers got the route. I should have

said they had been in Newbridge for a couple of years, and now they

were ordered to Birmingham, Coventry, and Weedon. Jellypod’s troop was

in the detachment assigned to Weedon under the command of the major.

Jellypod, whose first charger was lame, went by train into Dublin,

where the detachment spent the night before embarkation. Next morning

he appeared in complete marching order, on the back of a big underbred

young horse, as soft as butter, for it was just off the grass, and

with quarters as round--well, as Jellypod’s own. The beast fretted

itself into a lather on the march down to the North Wall, where, to the

dismay of Jellypod, Colonel Growler was very much in evidence to see

the detachment duly off. The chief no sooner caught sight of Jellypod’s

mount than he denounced it as a cross between a cow and a camel, and

cast it on the spot, so Jellypod crossed St. George’s Channel a cavalry

officer on the line of march without a horse to his name.

He was the only subaltern with his troop, and it was thought imperative

by the major and his captain that he should go on the road. The only

resource was to dismount one of the men, and put Jellypod on the

troop-horse. There was a good deal of malice in the selection of the

quadruped. Throughout the regiment “F. 23” had a malign reputation

for unapproachable roughness. She was satirically known as “the

Bonesetter,” and was understood to have dislocated every articulation

in the framework of one recruit, and jerked the teeth out of the head

of another. This was the mount which on the Liverpool jetty was given

to Jellypod, to carry him for nine long marches till Weedon should be

reached.

“F. 23” was a pleasant horse at a walk, and not at all a bad-looking

beast in the summer time, when her coat was glossy. Jellypod clearly

rather fancied himself as he paced up Compton Street under the eyes of

the shop-girls. As soon as the town was cleared the trumpet sounded

“Trot!” and his self-complacency rapidly disappeared. Apart from her

roughness, “F. 23” was a hot old jade, and stiffly plunged and bucked

as she fought against the officer’s heavy hands tugging and jerking at

the curb as he rolled and floundered all over the saddle, while the

perspiration streamed from under his helmet. One need not dwell on the

agonies of that march: suffice it to say that when Cornet Jellypod

woodenly dismounted in front of the Grosvenor Hotel in the ancient city

of Chester, the world has seldom contained a more saddle-sick man. As

soon as saddles were removed, information came from the stable that the

day’s work had given “F. 23” a sore back, and that it was impossible

that she could be ridden during the rest of the march.

Jellypod felt very like intimating that it was impossible that he could

ride during the rest of the march. But he was of a resolute spirit, and

first arnica and afterwards cunningly moistened pipeclay judiciously

applied had improved matters by next morning. A second trooper was

dismounted, upon whose horse Jellypod performed the second day’s march

to Market Drayton. The paces of this beast were suave and easy compared

with those of the “Bonesetter,” but Jellypod rolled about so in the

saddle in the effort to favour his chafes, that when the day’s march

was over mount No. 2 was also reported to have a sore back. It was

then that his captain, previously only grumpy, permitted himself the

use of the strongest language in addressing the unfortunate Jellypod.

This captain was known in the regiment by the pleasing appellation

of “Hell-fire Jack,” on account of the fervour of his objurgations

when the spirit moved him. On this occasion the spirit moved him very

much indeed, and rendered his remarks wholly unquotable. Suffice it

to say that he swore Jellypod should have no further opportunity of

bedevilling troop horses; but should be compelled to tramp on foot the

rest of the way to Weedon, leading the two beasts which he had used up

in as many days. This was a _brutum fulmen_; no doubt the captain would

have been glad to carry out his threat; but the major pointed out that

it would not do. So Jellypod was permitted to finish the journey by

train, and his abrasions were all but whole by the time the detachment

rode up the slope by the military prison, and defiled through the fine

old gateway of wrought-iron that leads into the Weedon barrack-yard.

A few months later the Potterers quitted the midland stations, and were

concentrated in the lines at the Queen’s Hotel end of Aldershot North

Camp. A very brief experience of the Long Valley sufficed for Jellypod.

He had not nerve enough for a troop leader in a charge over its broken

and dust-smothered surface. One day he pulled his horse back on to him

in a half-hearted attempt to jump one of the little cuts which the

rain-storms wash out in the friable black dust, and as he lay prone in

the V-shaped trough of it, a couple of squadrons rode over him. Next

day he opened negotiations for an exchange to India, and presently he

was gazetted to one of the ex-Company’s hussar regiments.

Jellypod appeared to thrive in India. He had got his lieutenancy

before his exchange, and some two or three years later an opportune

snap of cholera made a captain of him. But his great chance came when

Sir Robert Napier set himself to organise that Abyssinian expedition

which brought him his fairly earned peerage. Jellypod--I ought to say

here that I believe the familiar old Potterer nickname did not follow

him to India--had the luck to get a special service billet. It did

not promise much glory, since its function was the command of the

mule transport train of one of the divisions, but he was thankful for

minor mercies and accepted it with avidity. Now as a beast of burden

the mule has its idiosyncrasies and peculiarities which, it is averred

with considerable show of authority, no white man has ever fully

comprehended. If this be indeed so, our friend was the exception that

proves the rule. He seemed to have a natural affinity with mules, and

could do anything with them he pleased. No Alabama nigger ever had a

closer _rapprochement_ with the mule than had this gallant officer; and

it was the universal recognition of this accomplishment that earned

for him the _sobriquet_ of “the Muleteer,” by which hereafter I shall

denominate him.

He was zeal itself. Staveley somewhat roughly sat on his project of

giving evening lectures on the sandy beach of Annesley Bay to the

Smytches, Rock Scorpions, Cypriotes, Syrians, Fellaheen, and other

miscellaneous scum of the Levant who were serving as mule-drivers, on

the expediency of the construction of a common language to be used in

addressing the mules in their charge. I have reason to believe that

the story was a “shave,” that he sent in a memorial to Sir Robert

Napier, suggesting that a number of mules of both sexes should be

left behind in the Abyssinian villages, with intent that a stock of

transport animals should be thus propagated. But he certainly was a

most zealous and active transport officer. It is reported of him that

on one day he personally flogged upwards of three hundred mules up the

steep slope on the landward side of Zula. Had there been any fighting

in the Abyssinian expedition--it is really the case, I believe, that

one man was killed--he of course would have been out of it in the

rear among the baggage. But he was no greater distance off the final

amusement than the south side of the Bashilo; he was mentioned in

despatches, as is the modern fashion in regard to every one above the

rank of lance-corporal; the Director of Transport strongly recommended

him for “extent and value of assistance,” and the Muleteer looked

forward with a modest confidence to a brevet majority, and thought

it not unlikely that he would get the C.B. as well. The Muleteer had

the happy fortune to live, not in the bad old days, but in the good

new days. In the bad old days, the only service that assured to a man

a brevet--if he came out alive--was to lead a forlorn hope. Then,

an officer might own a carcase as full of holes as a cullender, and

never have the impertinence to dream of a brevet. The Napier brothers,

for instance, got pretty well shot to pieces in the Peninsular war.

Charles was a major at Vimiera in 1808; he was still a major after

Fuentes de Oñoro in 1811, never having missed a battle, and having

been wounded six times. George got his captaincy in 1804; he was all

through the Peninsular fighting, from Corunna to Toulouse, in which

latter battle, fought in 1814, he was but a substantive major, having

in the interval lost an arm and been wounded otherwise repeatedly.

Henry Havelock soldiered twenty-nine years before he obtained the rank

of a field-officer. The officer of these brighter days lives under a

régime the virtual head of which was a full major-general in twenty

years after he got his first commission. Nowadays, every staff officer

who has been within sound of a skirmish, the wind blowing his way, gets

his brevet as a matter of course. There is a fortunate young gentleman

in the service to-day (he is in “the ring,” of course) who has three

medals for as many campaigns, the C.B., the Khedive’s Octopus, and the

Osmanlie, who has been the recipient of two steps in rank by brevet,

and who has never seen a shot fired in anger.

Well, the Muleteer was earning his Abyssinian laurels a few years

before “the ring” became the pride and ornament of the British army,

else, supposing him to have been of the elect, he no doubt would

have got the C.B. As it was, he got a brevet majority, and when the

expedition returned to India, he said farewell to regimental duty and

got a billet on the staff; and such was his good fortune, that for

some ten years he continued to hold staff appointments with perfect

satisfaction to himself, and with no perceptible detriment to the

interests of the service. Being on the Madras side, he gradually fell

into the easy-going fashion of the “benighted Presidency”; no doubt

his zeal had not departed from him, but it had fallen latent. His

portliness had increased with years and ease, and it was only once in

a blue moon that he was seen in the saddle. A second brevet had come

his way in some inexplicable fashion, and he was now for some time

past a lieutenant-colonel. But his substantive rank still remained

that of captain, and as his original Indian regiment had gone home and

he had exchanged into its successor, so as to keep on in his staff

billet, he was regimentally a very junior captain. But this gave him

no disquietude, since nothing was further from his intention than to

revert to regimental duty.

I don’t quite know how it happened, but in negotiating a second

exchange so as to keep his staff berth, he somehow missed stays;

found himself all at once on half-pay, and no longer in staff employ.

The story was that he was manœuvred out of the brigade-majorship, or

whatever it was he held, by an intrigue at Presidency headquarters,

where the post he had been occupying was wanted for somebody else.

Anyhow, the poor Muleteer had no alternative but to return to England.

He came back very disconsolately, and tried in vain for some staff

employment. He would have left the service altogether, if he could have

found anything to do worth his while in civilian life, but nothing

offered. He thought himself too poor to scratch along on half-pay, and

made interest for reinstatement to full pay and duty. His substantive

rank being still that of captain merely, he could of course aspire

to no higher regimental position; and one fine day he was gazetted

to a troop in the old familiar Potterers. Of course he came in as

junior captain. Certainly as a junior captain he was a good deal of

an anachronism, for he was a grandfather, he weighed sixteen stone,

there was a deep tinge of gray now in the chestnut whiskers, and he was

senior in the army to the commanding officer of the regiment. But now

in the Potterers, he met with a good deal of consideration. Most of the

old hands who remembered him in his cockolorum days were now out of the

regiment. Old Growler was by this time a lieutenant-general; the major

of his early days had gone into brewing; the adjutant was drilling a

yeomanry corps; and the quarter-master had retired on his plunder.

The regular drill season was over, and the Potterers had come from

Brighton to Aldershot, exchanging with a regiment that had borne

the heat and burden of the summer in flying columns and Long Valley

field-days. So it seemed that the Muleteer had at all events a quiet

winter in front of him, before the season should come round when he

should have to encounter the chances of the Long Valley, the pitfalls

of the Fox Hills, and the grips and fissures of the Devil’s Jumps. But

it happened that early in October a continental cavalry officer of

distinction visited England, and orders came down from Pall Mall for a

field-day of the Aldershot cavalry brigade in honour of the stranger.

The general commanding the brigade was away on leave, shooting grouse

in Scotland. The three regiments paraded, and lo! the junior captain

of the Potterers, senior as he was in army rank to any other officer on

the ground, quitted his subsidiary position of squadron leader in the

Potterers, rode out to the front, and assumed command of the brigade.

It must quite frankly be allowed that he made a deuce of a mess of it.

The Duke addressed him in those bland phrases and mild tones which are

so characteristic of the head of the British army when things do not go

smoothly. The Muleteer, for his part, lost his temper as well as his

head, and pitched vehemently into his own regiment, denouncing it for

all sorts of faults and shortcomings. The lieutenant-colonel commanding

it bore his expletives with a grim submissive silence, biding his

time. At length, the Duke and the Muleteer both equally hoarse, the

distinguished stranger fluent in encomia while an amused smile played

over his features, the field-day came to an end. The Muleteer ceased

from his temporary pride of place as acting brigadier-general, and

reverted to his position as junior captain of the Potterers; and that

honest old corps stolidly returned to barracks. No sooner had the men

dismounted than “officers’ call” was sounded. The officers, still with

the grime of the Long Valley on their faces, crowded into the orderly

room, where they found the chief already seated in his chair, with that

look in his face which it wore when he was not amiable. He directed the

Muleteer to come to the front, and thus addressed him:--

“When in command of the brigade to-day, you used, sir, a considerable

variety of forcible expressions in the denunciation of the regiment

which I have the honour to command. To some extent, I am prepared to

admit the force of your strictures, although it might be the opinion

of an impartial critic that the fault did not wholly lie with the

regiment. The squadron of which your own troop, sir, was a part, was

the chief sinner in slackness and blundering. You will, sir, till

further orders, take that squadron out into the Long Valley for drill

every morning, from nine to eleven. And, sir, I observed to-day that

your seat on horseback was excessively bad, and that when your charger

knocked about a bit, you were all over the place. You will, therefore,

until further orders, go to riding-school every morning, from seven to

eight, along with the junior class of recruits. That is all I wished to

say. Good-morning, gentlemen.”

The same afternoon the Muleteer sent in his papers, and next morning he

went away on leave, pending his retirement from the service. I believe

he is now living in the Poictiers district, engaged in the occupation

of breeding mules.

THE DOUBLE COUP DE GRÂCE

In an earlier article I have tried to describe the “Old Sergeant” of

my native parish. In a neighbouring glen which formed another parish

of our local presbytery, there dwelt during my boyhood another veteran

of the grand old type, that stout ex-warrior, Sergeant Davie Russell.

I lived a good deal from time to time with the minister’s family of

the parish in which the sergeant dwelt, and to the elderhood of which

it was his pride to belong; and the manse boys of Glenvorlich used

often to take me with them to visit the still stalwart veteran in

his comfortable cottage under the shadow of the great mountain with

the twin wens on its summit. The Sabbath evening was the time when

he was best pleased to see us; and for the sake of the interesting

stories which were sure to follow, we were content to endure a

cross-examination in the toughest problems of the Shorter Catechism,

and listen to a dissertation on the faulty tactics of Amasa, the

captain of the host of Absalom, who, the sergeant contended, would not

have suffered so severe a defeat if he had posted his troops out in

the open to encounter the onslaught of Joab instead of taking up a

position in the heart of the wood of Ephraim. On Sundays Sergeant Davie

Russell always wore his pensioner’s blue coat with the red facings, the

Waterloo Medal hanging by the faded crimson ribbon on its left breast,

and the empty sleeve tacked to the right lapel of it. It was in the

memorable battle which ended Napoleon’s career that he had lost his

right arm, and ever since he had enjoyed his sergeant’s pension, with

a trifle extra for his wound. Forty years of peace-time had no whit

dulled his recollection of the old fighting days, and we boys hung on

the old soldier’s lips as he told us stories of his battles. Wellington

was his hero. “His soul was as a sword, to leap at his accustomed

leader’s word”; to finish the quotation, “he knew no other lord.”

He used to talk to us of the young general’s calm face at Assaye, when

he ordered forward the seventy-fourth regiment--the sergeant’s old

corps--through the hurricane of Mahratta cannon fire to retrieve the

mischief of the pickets’ reckless advance; and how, when the Mahratta

batteries had been captured with a rush, the keen tulwars of the

swarthy horsemen were slashing into the disordered ranks, until in the

nick of time the eagle-eyed chief sped Maxwell’s light dragoons to the

relief. Then he would speak of Wellington on the Busaco ridge; how,

just as Loison’s supple Frenchmen had climbed the steep and rugged

slope, and were re-forming on the edge of the upland, he gave the word

to the Scottish regiment, which advanced at the double, halted, and

poured in a volley, and then, bringing the bayonets down to the charge,

literally pitchforked the Frenchmen headlong down the abrupt declivity.

I think we used to like best to hear the sergeant tell of the desperate

fighting in the storming of Peninsular fortresses besieged and taken

by Wellington; of “the deadly breach in Badajos’s walls,” when the

stormers leaped down into the ditch and struggled up the steep face of

the battered masonry, only to find themselves confronted by the grim

tiers of sword-blades projecting from massive beams, behind which stood

drawn up the staunch defenders, sweeping the ascent with their musketry

fire; of the fierce storm of Ciudad Rodrigo, where George Napier lay

on the slope of the breach, struck down by the wound that shattered

his arm, and still as he lay, waving his sword with his sound arm, and

cheering on those whom his fall had for the moment caused to falter;

of that strange quarter of an hour on the breach of Saint Sebastian,

when the stormers, beaten back by the fire and steel of the serried

defenders, lay down by order on the face of the breach, while Graham’s

artillery played over them on the French masses defending the crown

of it, the aim so fine that one of the leading men of the prostrate

stormers, rashly raising his arm, had his hand carried away by a

cannon-ball.

Waterloo, too, was a theme on which we used to incite the old sergeant

to enlarge; and I delight to remember as it were yesterday how the

veteran’s cheek would flush as he told of Wellington slowly riding

along the line before the battle began, amid the cheering of the

troops as he passed, cool and calm, as had been ever his wont in the

old Peninsular days, with the high-souled confidence of success on the

face of the man who had never known what it was to lose a battle. Then

he would go on to tell of the advance of the massive French column up

the slope on the left of La Haye Sainte, its broad front fair against

Picton’s weak division; how that warlike chief sat on his charger in

front of the Cameron Highlanders, to which regiment the sergeant then

belonged, and vehemently damned as wretched cowards the Dutch-Belgian

runaways, who fled through the firm British line; how, when he saw that

the right moment had come, he shouted, “A volley, and then charge!”

and how, at the word, the volley sped, and the Highlanders, springing

through and over the ragged hedge, struck the head of the French mass

with the cold steel. It was in the hand-to-hand fight that followed,

the sergeant would recount with a jerk and twitch of his stump, that he

lost his arm and gained his wound-pension; and as two comrades helped

him to the rear when the French were routed, he saw Picton lying dead

with a bullet-hole in his forehead.

Sergeant Russell’s family consisted of twin sons, who, when I knew

them, were already grown men. From childhood both had ardently looked

forward to follow in their father’s footsteps, and when in 1846 the

country was ringing with the news of the victories of the first Sikh

war--when “Moodkee,” “Ferozeshah,” and “Sobraon” were in every one’s

mouth--the brothers, then of fit age to take service, had been frantic

to accept the Queen’s shilling and take a share in the stirring doings.

But they were entreated of their father to stay at home with him while

he lived, for he was an old man and could not long survive. Filial

affection constraining the lads, they reluctantly consented, and betook

themselves to civilian avocations. John Russell, the elder twin, a

taciturn, resolute man of strong character, became a stone mason;

Aleck, the younger brother, of a lighter and less stable nature, took

to the trade of a carpenter. Both were men of blameless life, and the

mothers of the parish held up their mutual love to the admiration and

imitation of their offspring.

But a shadow was to come between the brothers. They both fell in love,

and, as ill fortune would have it, they both fell in love with the

same girl. I remember her well, a pretty, airy creature, the daughter

of the petty local shopkeeper up in the throat of the glen. In her

reckless waywardness she played the brothers off against each other,

and a bitter jealousy supplanted the old loyal affection. They did not

quarrel outright, and both still lived under their father’s roof; but

the elder brother glowered sullenly at the younger, and the younger

would shoot galling jibes at his silent senior. The old sergeant

noticed the alienation, and took it so to heart that he fell ill,

and in a few days a long straggling procession came winding down the

brae to the little graveyard by the burnside, and the old soldier of

the Peninsula and Waterloo was lowered into his quiet grave under the

willow trees.

The brothers walked home together, drawn together again by their loss.

That same evening a long silence was broken abruptly by the elder

brother.

“See here, Aleck, it can never mair be wi’ you an’ me as it used to be.

If ye win that lassie, I s’all hae murder in my heart against you; if

I win her, ye’ll nourish against me the hate o’ hell. Suppose we agree

tae lay aside thoughts o’ her, heave awa’ thae trowels an’ plummets an’

planes an’ augers, an’ gae to the wars as the auld man did afore us.

That’s the trade for us, lad; Brown Bess an’ the bayonet afore gimlets

an’ gavels!”

The brothers shook hands on the compact, and resolved to ’list without

delay. They were stirring times, those early months of 1849, when

news was coming home of the outbreak of the second Sikh war, and we

were reading of the glorious death of Cureton, “the fair-haired boy

of the Peninsula”; of young Herbert Edwardes’ ready prowess--a junior

lieutenant, yet in command of an army with which he had won victories

and was beleaguering Mooltan; of William Havelock’s wild gallop to

his death across the Ramnuggur sands, and of stout old Thackwell’s

stiff combat at Sadoolapore. The old sergeant had not been buried a

week when his sons were tramping over the hills to Aberdeen, where

was the nearest recruiting station, and presently we heard that both

had enlisted in the same regiment, a corps which was in sore need of

recruits, for it had suffered terrible losses in the desperate struggle

of Chillianwallah. That news would have been the last tidings of the

brothers that ever reached the highland glen, but for one letter from

John to the minister of the parish, written about the end of 1850. He

was doing well in the regiment, being already a full corporal; but now

that there was peace and idleness, Aleck had grown restless and had

volunteered into another regiment, since when he had not heard of him.

No word more came of, or from, either of the brothers, and as the years

passed they fell out of memory.

Many years later I paid my first visit to India. The seven years of

peace, after Chillianwallah and Goojerat and the annexation of the

Punjaub, had been followed by the ghastly period of the great Mutiny,

and now the blood of the Mutiny had been long dry. On the maidan of

Cawnpore one could scarce discern the traces of the poor earthworks

that had constituted Wheeler’s intrenchment, and Marochetti’s marble

angel spread pitying wings over the well which had been filled to its

top with our slaughtered ladies and their children. The shot-wrecked

Residency of Lucknow stood, and still stands, in the condition the

relieved garrison left it, a monument of that garrison’s heroic

constancy; but otherwise the stains of battle had been wiped from the

beautiful capital of Oude, and gardens bloomed where the dead had lain

thick. The subalterns of Chillianwallah and Goojerat were general

officers now--those whom the climate and the Mutiny had spared--and the

talk in the clubs and at the mess-tables was no longer of old Gough and

his “could steel,” and of the “Flying General” chasing the fugitives of

Goojerat into the Khyber Pass, but of Clyde and Hugh Rose and William

Peel and John Nicholson.

In the course of my travels I was the guest for a week of a general

officer who was kind enough to recount to me many reminiscences of his

long period of soldiering in India. One of those narratives had for

me a special pathetic interest, and perhaps the emotion may be in a

measure shared in by the reader who shall have already accompanied me

thus far. I wrote down the story the same night it was told me, when

the old soldier’s words were fresh in my memory.

“In the early ‘fifties,” said the general, “our European troops

serving in India were not in good case. In those days they were

constantly quartered in the plains, the barracks were dismal,

pestilential, thatched sheds, there were none of the comforts the

soldier now enjoys, and in the dismal ennui his only resources were

his canteen and the bazaar. The revulsion from the stir and variety

of marching and fighting, superinduced widespread discontent, and

in many instances depression intensified into actual despair. Quite

an epidemic of suicide set in, and was but partially cured by Sir

Charles Napier’s very Irish expedient of sentencing a man to be shot

who had unsuccessfully attempted to take his own life. At this time

transportation to West Australia was the usual punishment in the army

for the military crime of grave insubordination. So low had sunk the

morale of too many of the rank and file, and so ardent was the desire

for change of any kind, no matter what or where, that men deliberately

laid themselves out to earn the punishment of transportation. This

was not a difficult task. The soldier had only to make a blow at his

superior officer--and all above him from a lance-corporal to the

colonel were his superior officers--or even to throw a cap or a glove

at him, to have himself charged with the offence of mutinous conduct.

The _pro forma_ court-martial sat; the soldier pleaded guilty; the

sentence of transportation was duly ‘approved and confirmed,’ and

presently the man was blithely on his voyage to join a chain gang at

Perth or Freemantle.

“This state of things was too injurious to the service to be allowed

a long continuance. The Commander-in-Chief promulgated a trenchant

order, denouncing in strong terms the utter subversion of discipline

that seemed impending, and sternly intimating that death, and not

transportation any more, should in future be the unfailing penalty for

the crime of using or offering violence to a superior officer. The

order was read aloud at the head of every regiment in India, but its

purport did not seriously impress the troops. The men were fain to

regard it in the light of what the Germans call a stroke on the water,

and they did not believe that it would be actually put in force. They

did not know the nature of Sir Charles Napier.

“It was in my own regiment, then quartered in Meerut, that the first

offence was committed after the promulgation of the order. A young

private named Creed, who had joined us in India from another regiment,

one morning casually met on the parade-ground a young officer on the

staff of the General, and without a word threw his cap in the face of

the aide-de-camp. He was made a prisoner, and when brought before the

colonel, frankly owned that he had no ill-feeling against the officer,

whom, indeed, he did not know that he had ever seen before, and his

simple explanation of his conduct was that he had acted on ‘a sudden

impulse.’ It was proved, however, that the night before the assault he

had been heard to say in the canteen that he meant to ‘qualify for West

Australia’ within the next twenty-four hours. The case was reported

to the Commander-in-Chief, who directed that the prisoner should be

tried by a general court-martial, the attention of which he called

to his recent orders. The sentence of the court was ‘death,’ which

his Excellency approved and confirmed. It was read to the prisoner by

the colonel, in front of the regiment, and he was informed that the

sentence would be carried into execution on the morning of the next day

but one.

“The night before the morning fixed for the execution there reported

himself to me as having joined, a non-commissioned officer whose

arrival I had been expecting for some days. Wishing to remain in India

he had volunteered to us from a regiment which had been quartered at

Agra, and which had been ordered to return to England. He was scarcely

a prepossessing-looking man, but looked every inch a good soldier, and

his face indicated self-command and dauntless resolution. Standing

composedly at attention, he handed me the documents connected with his

transfer and a private note from the adjutant of the regiment he had

quitted. It ran thus--

“‘Sergeant Russell will hand you this note. We lose him with

great regret; he will do you credit. I never have known a better

non-commissioned officer. Duty to its last tittle is the man’s

watchword and what he lives for. I verily believe were he detailed to

the duty of shooting his own brother, he would perform the service

without a word of remonstrance. I own that I grudge him to you.’

“I told the newcomer that his late adjutant had given him a high

character, and that I was glad to have in the regiment a man so well

recommended. He saluted silently; I detailed him to a company and told

him he might go. But as he was leaving the orderly room a thought

struck me and I recalled him. I knew how strong throughout the regiment

was the sentiment in favour of the poor fellow who was waiting his

doom; and it occurred to me that this new sergeant, who in the nature

of things could not be a warm sharer in this sentiment, was a fitting

man to detail to the command of the firing party. I briefly explained

to him the circumstances, and then told him to what duty I purposed

assigning him. ‘Very well, sir,’ was his calm remark; ‘it is an

unpleasant duty, certainly, but I can understand the reason why you put

it on me.’ Then, telling him to apply to the regimental sergeant-major

for details, I let him go.

“I need not ask you whether you have ever seen a military execution;

it is the most solemn and fortunately the rarest of all our military

spectacles. It was not yet daylight when all the troops of the

garrison, both European and native, were on march to the great

parade-ground. The regiments, as they arrived, wheeled into position,

the whole forming three sides of a vast square, the dressed ranks

facing inwards. The dead silence was presently broken by the roll of

the drum, announcing the approach of the procession escorting the

doomed man, and a moment later the head of it rounded the flank of

one of the faces of the great hollow square. In effect the yet living

soldier was marching in his own funeral procession, his step keeping

time to the swell and cadence of his own dirge. At the head of the

sombre cortège was borne the empty coffin of the man whose sands

of life were running out; there followed in slow march, with arms

reversed, the execution party of twelve privates and a corporal, under

the command of Sergeant Russell; and then a full military band, from

whose instruments there pealed and wailed alternately the Dead March in

_Saul_. There was a little interval of space, and then, alone save for

the Presbyterian chaplain walking beside him in his Geneva gown, and

praying in low, earnest accents, marched with firm step the condemned

man, his face calm, but whiter than the white cap on his head. Close

behind marched, with fixed bayonets, a corporal and a file of men of

the quarter-guard. Thus was constituted what, save for the central

figure of it, who still lived and moved and had his being, and for the

empty coffin, was in every attribute a funeral procession.

“The parade came to the ‘shoulder’ as the little column, wheeling to

its right after clearing the flank by which it had entered the square,

began its slow, solemn progress along the front of the left face. I

felt the throbbing strains of the Dead March becoming actual torture

to me long before the procession, moving in its measured march along

the successive faces, had reached the front of the centre, where stood

the regiment to which the prisoner and myself belonged. ‘Steady, men!’

shouted the colonel hoarsely, as he felt rather than heard or saw the

involuntary shiver that ran along the ranks as the firm, pale face

slowly passed. With an upward glance at the chief, the poor fellow

straightened himself and set his shoulders more square, as if he took

his officer’s word of command to include him also. His chum broke into

noisy weeping, and a young officer swooned, but the doomed man strode

steadily on, without the quiver of a muscle of his set face.

“At length the long, cruel progress was completed, and the head of the

procession drew off to the centre of the unoccupied fourth face of the

square; the coffin-bearers laid down their burden there and retired,

and Sergeant Russell drew up his firing party into two ranks fronting

toward the coffin, at a distance of about thirty paces. The band ceased

its sombre music and wheeled aside. The prisoner, accompanied still

by the clergyman, marched steadily up to his coffin, on which the two

knelt down.

“The clergyman’s ministrations were almost immediately interrupted. At

a signal from the general the judge-advocate rode out from the staff,

and, moving forward to the flank of the firing party, read in sonorous

tones the warrant for the condemned soldier’s execution. Universal

admiration and compassion were stirred by the soldierly bearing of

the man as he listened to the official authorisation of his doom. As

the judge-advocate approached he had risen from the kneeling position,

doffed his cap, and sprung smartly to ‘attention,’ retaining that

attitude until the end, when he saluted respectfully and knelt down

again as the minister rejoined him. There was a short interval of

prayer; then the judge-advocate beckoned to the chaplain to retire,

and the soldier remained alone, kneeling on his coffin-lid there, face

to face with imminent death in the midst of the strained and painful

silence.

“Marching at the head of the procession, the members of the firing

party had no opportunity of seeing their unfortunate comrade until he

had reached his coffin and was kneeling in front of where Sergeant

Russell had drawn up the party of which he had the command. I should

tell you that the sergeant of an execution party carries a loaded

pistol, with which it is his stern duty to fulfil the accomplishment of

the sentence if the volley of his command shall not have been promptly

fatal. The corporal of the party told me afterward that after it had

taken position Sergeant Russell spent some time in examining their

muskets, and that the prisoner had for some little time been kneeling

on his coffin before the sergeant looked at him. As he gazed he

suddenly started, became deadly pale, muttered more than once, ‘My God,

my God,’ and was for several minutes visibly perturbed; but later,

although still ghastly pale and having a strange ‘raised’ expression,

he pulled himself together and was alert in his duty. What I myself

saw and heard was, that after the parson had withdrawn, and Sergeant

Russell approached the prisoner to fulfil the duty of blindfolding and

pinioning him, the latter gave a great start and, throwing up his arms,

uttered a loud exclamation.

“The feeling in the regiment, as I have told you, was exceedingly

bitter against the sentence, and there happened just what I had

apprehended. In the dead silence Sergeant Russell’s deliberate order,

‘Make ready!’ ‘Present!’ ‘Fire!’ rang out like the knell of fate. The

volley sped; the light smoke drifted aside; and lo! the prisoner still

knelt scatheless on his coffin.

“There was a brief pause, and then Sergeant Russell, with his face

bleached to a ghastly pallor, but set and resolute, his step firm,

strode up to the kneeling blindfolded man, pistol in hand, and--did his

duty. But he did not return to the party he commanded. No, he remained

standing over the prostrate figure, and was deliberately reloading the

pistol.

“‘What the devil is the man doing?’ cried the general testily.

“‘Probably, sir,’ answered the assistant adjutant-general, ‘he has not

fully accomplished his duty. He seems a man of exceptional nerve!’

“‘Well,’ said the general, ‘I wish he’d be sharp about it!’

“Sergeant Russell did not detain the chief unreasonably long. Having

reloaded it, he put the pistol to his temple, drew trigger, and fell

dead across his brother’s body.

* * * * *

“For that they were brothers,” continued the general after a pause,

“the papers found in their effects proved conclusively. The younger

one, Alexander, had joined us in a false name. By the way, they were

countrymen of your own--natives of Glenvorlich in Banffshire.”

BILL BERESFORD AND HIS VICTORIA CROSS

Some fifteen years ago the prevailing opinion regarding the brothers

Beresford--Lord Charles and Lord William--probably was that they were

both more or less crazy. Their father, the fourth Marquis of Waterford,

was a clergyman. It is not alleged that this circumstance contributed

to intensify the impression; and in point of fact the clerical marquis

was a sedate well-ordered divine, who was a dean, and no doubt might

have been a bishop had he aspired to that dignity. But their uncle,

the third Lord Waterford, had earned by sedulous exertion the popular

appellation of “the mad marquis.” He rode his horse over toll-gates

by lantern light, distinguished himself in miscellaneous pugilistic

encounters, made and won the wildest wagers, and finally broke his

neck in the hunting-field. It was supposed that the spirit of this

ancestor had revived in his madcap nephews. Lord Charles--far better

known as “Charlie”--was a midshipman who appeared to live for larks.

Lord William--whom all his world knew as “Bill”--was a lieutenant in

a lancer regiment who in the hunting-field and in steeplechase riding

had broken pretty well every bone in his body, and some of them

several times over. Men who knew the brothers well realised that behind

their madcap daring and their wild recklessness lay a capacity for

earnest work when the opportunity should offer. It should be said that

their eccentricities were never sullied by taint of anything gross or

dishonourable; it lay in no man’s mouth to say that a Beresford ever

did a coarse, a shabby, or an ungenerous thing.

People had grown to comprehend that Charles Beresford was something

other than a merry-andrew, before that critical moment of the

bombardment of Alexandria, when he laid his little _Condor_ right

under the guns of a hostile battery, and not less by skill than by

daring contributed materially to the successful issue. Since then he

has served as a minister of the Crown, and when until lately he spoke

from his place in Parliament, he was listened to as a leading practical

authority on naval reforms. William has three medals for as many

campaigns; has won the Victoria Cross by the deed of splendid valour I

am about to narrate; was the sole and most efficient staff officer to a

brigade composed of uniquely heterogeneous elements out of which good

work could be got only by a rare combination of tact, firmness, and

veritable leadership; and is now fulfilling adequately the important

duties of Military Secretary to the Viceroy of India. Under these

circumstances people have now for some time left off regarding the

brothers Beresford as crazy.

Lord Charles I only know; Bill--I won’t call him Lord William any

more--has been my comrade _per mare et terras_ for more years than

either he or I care to reckon. I met him first on a night march in

the autumn manœuvres on Salisbury Plain in August 1872. He was then a

“galloper” to the general commanding the cavalry brigade. General and

brigade had lost their way in the darkness, and Bill got the order

to go and find it. He was riding a violent cross-grained mare, which

resented being forced to leave the other horses. I gave him a lead for

a little way. As I turned, his mare reared straight on end; I knew it,

dark as it was, because her fore-foot touched my shoulder. Then there

was a thud on the short thick grass carpeting the chalk of the great

plain. The brute had “come over” on Bill. There was a groan, but it

was from the mare as she fell heavily, not from her rider. He was out

from under her somehow before she began to struggle, was in the saddle

as she scrambled to her feet, gave her the spur, and forced the cowed

brute at a gallop out into the darkness.

Bill and I went up the gruesome Khyber Pass together, in November

1878, with the little army which gallant one-armed old Sir Sam Browne

led to the invasion of Afghanistan. Across the narrowest gut of that

gloomy defile, perched high on its isolated rock, stands the fortress

of Ali Musjid, held against us by a strong Afghan garrison. Ali Musjid

was the impediment which had to be subdued before we could penetrate

farther into the bowels of the Afghan land. Two long broken ridges

reach up to the base of the Ali Musjid rock, separated from each other

by the valley down the centre of which flows, or rather rushes, the

Khyber stream. At the head of one brigade Sir Sam himself moved on

the fortress along the rugged right-hand ridge; the other brigade,

commanded by General Appleyard, had its route along the left-hand

upland. Rather late in the day, when the force was fully committed

to this movement, it became apparent that because of the intervening

ravine, quick inter-communication with Appleyard was rendered

difficult. The Afghans in the fort were no fools; they had recognised

the existence of the interval between the two brigades; and they did

their level best to keep the force bisected by pouring a steady stream

of artillery and musketry down the valley.

Sir Sam wanted to send a message to Appleyard. Beresford, who was

then an aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, and had got a month’s

leave from his duties in that capacity to take a hand in what fighting

might occur, was a sort of “odd man” on Sir Sam’s staff. He never

was oppressed with shyness, and when Sir Sam spoke of his wish to

communicate with the left brigade, he put in his word. “I’m an idle

man, sir; won’t you send me across to General Appleyard to tell him

what you want him to do?”

“Very well, Beresford,” replied Sir Sam; “I want you to get over as

quickly as may be; but you’d better make a bit of a detour to the rear

before you cross the valley. By crossing below the bend you’ll avoid

most of the fire that is sweeping the direct way across.”

“All right, sir,” said Bill, with a wink of the eye on the chief’s off

side that seemed to say, “I think I see myself detouring.”

He took his sword-belt in a couple of holes and started. To begin

with, he had to clamber into the valley down the face of an all but

perpendicular precipice, on the projections of which the Afghan shells

were striking with malign freedom. Looking down from the upper edge

I watched him complete the descent, and then start on the dangerous

journey across the valley. No doubt he was making good speed; but it

looked to me, anxious as I was, as if he were sauntering. Now and then

he was hidden altogether by the smoke and dust of an exploding shell.

Cool hand he was, to be sure! When he reached the hither bank of the

Khyber stream, he deliberately sat himself down on a stone, and unlaced

his boots, took them and his stockings off, and waded the stream

barefoot. Having crossed, he sat down and replaced these articles of

attire--how abominably particular he seemed, sitting right in the

fair-way of that belch of fire, about the correct lacing of his ankle

boots! Finally he lit a cigarette, resumed his tramp across the rest

of the valley, and clambering up the rocks bounding its farther side,

disappeared among Appleyard’s red-coats. That officer was already

committed to an attack, so Bill remained with his force and took part

in the effort in which Birch and Swettenham went down.

When Sir Sam Browne was halted in Jellalabad, and there was no chance

of any further fighting that winter, Bill went back to Simla to his

duties about the Viceroy. Presently I, too, tired of the inaction in

the Khyber, and travelling down country to Calcutta, and voyaging

across the Bay of Bengal to Rangoon, went up the Irrawaddy River

into native Burmah, bound for Mandalay, the capital of King Theebaw.

While “worshipping the Golden Feet” there, and investigating the

eccentricities of the monarch who not long after lost his throne, a

telegram came to me from London, ordering me with all speed to South

Africa, where the Zulu war had broken out and where the massacre of

Isandlwana had just occurred. Hard on it came a message from Bill,

telling he too was off to Zululand, and proposing we should travel down

there together. I wired him back a _rendezvous_ at Aden, the port at

the mouth of the Red Sea whence once a month a steamer starts on the

voyage along the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar; from which

place there is connection with Port Durban in Natal by another steamer.

Down the Irrawaddy, across the Bay of Bengal, athwart Hindustan to

Kurrachee at the mouth of the Indus I hurried; at Kurrachee caught the

steamer for Aden, and at Aden there was Bill, impatiently grilling

in that extinct volcano-crater till the Zanzibar packet should start.

We dodged into every little obscure Portuguese-negro port along

that coast--Quillimane, Mozambique, Magadoxa, Melinda, Lourenço

Marquez--stagnant, fever-stricken, half barbarous places where, as

it seemed, nobody was either quite black or quite white. We reached

Port Durban about the middle of April 1879, to find its roadstead

crowded with the transports that had brought the reinforcements out

from England, and its hotels crammed with officers of all ranks and

all branches of the services. General “Fred” Marshall, an old friend

of Beresford and myself, commanded the regular cavalry brigade, and

Bill hoped for a berth on his staff. But a better billet fell to him.

Far up in the Transvaal Sir Evelyn Wood’s little brigade had just

gained a brilliant victory over some 20,000 Zulus, who had made a

desperate attack on its position. Colonel Redvers Buller commanded

Wood’s irregular volunteer cavalry, and in the recent fight his staff

officer, Major Ronald Campbell, had been killed. It was a peculiar and

difficult post, and Campbell was a man whom it was not easy to succeed.

The assignment rested mainly with Marshall, and on the night of our

arrival, he, knowing Beresford better than most men then did, named him

for the post.

Full of elation;--Bill because of being chosen for a duty that assured

him responsibility and plenty of fighting; I because my chum had so

fallen on his feet,--we returned to our hotel. As we sat a while in

the public room before retiring, there entered a couple of men far from

sober. At first they were civil, and told us that one was the second

officer, the other the ship’s surgeon, of a transport in the roadstead.

Presently the sailor-man’s mood changed, and he became grossly

insulting to Beresford; who for a while treated him good-humouredly. At

last the fellow said he believed Bill was a coward. Then Bill quietly

rose, and simply requested the nautical person to “come outside.” I did

not half like the business, for the sailor was a big slab-sided fellow;

whereas Bill is one of the light weights, and it was not pleasant

to think of his carrying a black eye to his new appointment. But

intervention did not seem possible; and it remained for the doctor and

myself to “see fair.” In front of the hotel was a garden studded with

rose-bushes. At it they went hammer and tongs; Bill fending off the

big sailor’s “ugly rush” with skill and coolness--he had not been at

Eton for nothing. In the third round the sailor was down, his head in a

rose-bush, and Bill sitting thereon--the head, not the bush. The sailor

did not want any more; every one shook hands round, and perhaps there

was a drink of conciliation.

Bill next day went off up country to his billet; and not long after I

joined Wood’s force up at Kambula. I found Bill too busy to do more

than give me a hurried hand-shake. He was Buller’s only staff-officer,

and the force Buller commanded, about a thousand strong, was the

strangest congeries imaginable. It consisted of broken gentlemen,

of runagate sailors, of fugitives from justice, of the scum of the

South African towns, of stolid Africanders, of Boers whom the Zulus

had driven from their farms. Almost every European nationality was

represented; there were a few Americans, some good, some bad; a

Greaser; a Chilian; several Australians; and a couple of Canadian

voyageurs from somewhere in the Arctic regions. There were Frenchmen

who could not speak a word of English, and Channel Islanders whose

_patois_ neither Englishmen nor Frenchmen could fully understand. One

and all were volunteers, recruited for the campaign at the pay of five

shillings a day. What added to the complication was that the force

comprised a dozen or more sub-commands, each originally, and still to

some extent a separate and distinct unit. There were “Baker’s Horse,”

and “D’Arcy’s Horse,” and “Beddington’s Horse,” and “Ferreira’s Horse,”

and so on; each body asserting a certain distinctive independence.

Beresford had to arrange all details, keep the duty rosters, inspect

the daily parades and the reconnaissance detachments, accompany the

latter, lead them if there was any fighting, restrain the rash,

hearten the funkers, and be in everything Buller’s right-hand man. The

volunteer officers, some zealous, some sluggish, some cantankerous,

were, as regarded any knowledge of duty, for the most part quite

useless. In effect the force, which in numerical strength reckoned

as a brigade, was “run” by those two men--Redvers Buller and Bill

Beresford. Buller was a silent, saturnine, bloodthirsty man, as

resolute a fighter as ever drew breath--a born leader of men--who

ruled his heterogeneous command with a rod of iron. Beresford, to the

full as keen a fighter and as firm in compelling obedience, was of a

different temperament. He was cheery; with his ready Irish wit he had a

vein of genial yet jibing badinage that kept queer-tempered fellows in

good humour while it pricked them into obedience. In fine he disclosed

the rare gift of managing men--of evoking without either friction

or fuss the best that was in them. And, strangest wonder of all

wonders, the fellow whom all men had regarded as the most harum-scarum

of mortals--the most “through-other,” to use a curious Scotch

expression--was found possessed of a real genius for order and system.

I admired him excessively in his novel development, but must confess

that, being selfish, I did not enjoy it. For he was very busy and I was

rather idle, and I grumbled at the deprivation of the brightening of my

life that had been contributed by the humour and gaiety of his leisure

time.

The campaign, on which almost at its outset had fallen the shadow of

the poor Prince Imperial’s hapless fate, drawled sluggishly along,

till at length as, on the 1st of June, the column wound down into the

valley from the bluff of Etonganeni, there lay stretched out beyond

the silver sparkle of the river among the trees, the broad plain on

whose bosom lay the royal Kraal of Ulundi, encircled by its satellites.

Over the green face of the great flat there flitted what, seen through

the heat-haze, seemed dark shadows, but which the field-glass revealed

as the ïmpis of Cetewayo practising their manœuvres. There are times

when the keenest fighting man is not sorry that between his enemy and

himself there lies a distance of ten miles. Whether in the spirit or

only in the stupid deed, those Zulus were quixotic in the chivalry of

their manner of fighting. At Isandlwana only had they been _rusés_.

At Kambula, at Ginghilovo, they had marched straight up into the eye

of our fire; at Ulundi they held their hands while we scrambled in

dislocation through the broken ground that was the vestibule to the

plain; waited with calm patience till our square was methodically

formed and locked up; then, after the short hesitation that seemed

to ask that question, “Are you quite ready now, gentlemen?” they

came at us with surpassing valiantness and a noble ardour, as over

the fire-swept plain sped the whirlwind of their converging attack.

There were cynics in our force who smiled grimly and quoted Bosquet’s

historical sneer, as they watched the evolutions of the ïmpis in the

hazy distance. Magnificent in their swift precision those evolutions

certainly were; but it was not war that the Zulu braves should be

wheeling and massing and deploying away there on the plain, instead

of taking us at a disadvantage as the long baggage-cumbered column

painfully toiled through the dense bush that filled the valley for

which we had forsaken the bare upland of the veldt.

Cetewayo was hesitating, to meet the proverbial fate of the hesitator.

He sent in the sword of the poor Prince Imperial; and later came from

him a drove of cattle, the live spoil of Isandlwana. But he would not

definitely consent to the terms offered him; yet he refrained from

absolutely refusing them. When the laager was formed on the pleasant

slope stretching up from the rippling Umvaloosi, two days were accorded

him in which to make up his mind. Meantime our attitude was that of

vigilant quiescence. The laager was roughly entrenched; the guns

were got into position; the outposts were strengthened; and arms and

ammunition were carefully inspected. During the advance the commands

of Newdigate and Wood had marched apart; now for the first time they

were united, or at least disjoined only by a subdivision of the laager,

and there was much visiting to and fro; for it was comparative leisure

time for all save Buller’s irregulars, who from beginning to end of

the campaign may be said to have been on the chronic scout. Some of

us went bathing in the Umvaloosi, but had to “lave that”--a pun is

not intended--because of a dropping fire from Zulus concealed in the

crannies of a rocky hillock or kopjie, just across the river from the

camp. Not alone for the bathers was this fire a nuisance; a part of

the laager was within range of the Martini-Henrys got at Isandlwana,

which the Zulus on the kopjie were using; and one or two casualties

occurred.

We had good information as to Cetewayo’s strength, thanks to the brave

Dutch trader who was his prisoner, and whom he had utilised to write

the communications he sent to Lord Chelmsford; at the foot of the last

letter the honest fellow, disregarding the risk, had written--“Use

caution, he has 20,000 men here.” But it was desirable, in view of

the contingency of Cetewayo proving stubborn, to gain some detailed

knowledge of the ground in our front, over which the final advance

would have to be made. So on the morning of 3d July, orders were issued

that Buller at mid-day should take out his irregulars across the river,

and make a reconnaissance of as much of the plain beyond as the Zulus

might see fit to permit. He was not to bring on an engagement, since

Cetewayo’s “close-time” was not yet up; he was to disregard straggling

opposition, but was at once to retire in the face of serious resistance.

These droll irregulars never took much pains about parading. Neither

smartness nor uniformity was a desideratum. The fellows dressed how

they liked, or rather, perhaps, how they could: their only weapon,

besides the revolver, a Martini-Henry rifle, each man carried as

seemed unto him best, providing that he carried it somehow, somewhere

about himself or his pony. The only uniform accoutrement was the

bandoleer in which the cartridges were carried. When they got ready,

they mounted; when he found around him a reasonable number of mounted

men, the leader of the corps started; his fellows followed in files,

and the men who were late overtook the detachment at a canter. No man

skulked; the majority were keen enough for fighting, and the funkers,

if there were any, had to pretend to be as zealous as their comrades.

Buller and Beresford were always in the saddle early, waiting for the

firstlings of the muster. Buller’s favourite mount was a fiddle-headed,

brindled, flat-sided, ewe-necked cob named Punch. He was perhaps the

very ugliest horse of his day and generation in all South Africa,

but he was also among the most valuable. Although not very fast, his

endurance was wonderful; he made nothing of a hundred miles at a

stretch, with an occasional “off-saddle” and a roll as the only relief;

but it was neither his endurance nor his ugliness that constituted his

special value. He was “salted” to the third degree of saltness; he

was a veritable “mark mason” among “salted” horses. Now salt-horse in

the South African sense has no affinity with the salt-horse at which

sailors grumble. The “salted horse” of the veldt is an animal which

is proof against the pestilence known as “horse-sickness.” He rarely

survives the attack; after one attack he is still liable to another,

but less liable; he may have three attacks, and if he yet lives, he

is of the loftiest aristocracy of “saltness,” and proof for all time

against horse-sickness. If that were the only ill that horse-flesh is

heir to, he would be immortal. Beresford had lost one horse by a Zulu

bullet, another by horse-sickness; but cavalry-man and steeplechase

rider as he was, he was not the man to be badly mounted. He rode a

smart chestnut, with the Irish Birdcatcher white ticks on his withers

and flanks. The leader of the irregulars and his staff-officer sat on

their horses in front of Evelyn Wood’s tent, waiting for their fellows

to come on the ground. Wood, standing in his tent-door, chatted to the

laconic Buller, while Beresford and “the boy”--young Lysons, Wood’s

A.D.C., was “the boy”--gossiped a little apart. Presently Baker came

along at the head of his assortment of miscreants; Ferreira leading his

particular bandits, was visible in the offing, and Buller, alongside

of Baker, headed the procession of horsemen down toward the river,

Beresford temporarily remaining to see the turnout complete and close

up the command. Before Buller was at the waterside, he had galloped up

to the head of the column, for it was his place, as ever, to lead the

advance; Buller bringing on the main body behind the scouts.

The arrangements were simple; and there was no delay down by the

Umvaloosi bank, where the accelerated fire from the Zulus in the kopjie

over against them whistled over the heads of the horsemen; over whom

too screamed the shells from the guns in front of the laager that were

being thrown in among the crags where the Zulus lurked. The spray of

the Umvaloosi dashed from the horse-hoofs of the irregulars, as they

forded the river on the right of the kopjie, and then bending to the

left round it, took it in reverse. The Zulus who had been holding it

had not cared much for the shell fire, ensconced among the rocks as

they were, but were quick to notice the risk they ran of being cut off

by the movement of the horsemen, and made a bolt of it. Beresford’s

fellows galloped hard to intercept them, Bill well in front, sending

his chestnut along as if he were “finishing” in front of the stand

at Sandown. The Zulu ïnduna, bringing up the rear of his fleeing

detachment, turned on the lone man who had so outridden his followers.

A big man, even for a Zulu, the ring round his head proved him a

veteran. The muscles rippled on his glistening black shoulders as he

compacted himself behind his huge flecked shield of cowhide, marking

his distance for the thrust of the gleaming assegai held at arm’s

length over the great swart head of him. Bill steadied his horse a

trifle, just as he was wont to do before the take off for a big fence;

within striking distance he made him swerve a bit to the left--he had

been heading straight for the Zulu, as if he meant to ride him down.

The spear flashed out like the head of a cobra as it strikes; the sabre

carried at “point one” clashed with it, and seemed to curl round it;

the spear-head was struck aside; the horseman delivered “point two”

with all the vigour of his arm, his strong seat, and the impetus of his

galloping horse; and lo! in the twinkling of an eye, the sabre’s point

was through the shield, and half its length buried in the Zulu’s broad

chest. The brave ïnduna was a dead man before he dropped; the sword

drawing out of his heart as he fell backward. His assegai stands now in

the corner of Bill’s mother’s drawing-room.

Beresford’s Zulu was the only man slain with the “white arm” in

hand-to-hand combat during the day, but of the fugitives whom the dead

ïnduna had commanded, several fell under the fire of the fellows who

followed that chief’s slayer. The surviving Zulus ran into the nearest

military kraal, Delyango. Out of it the irregulars rattled them,

as well as the few Zulus who had been garrisoning it. A detachment

had been left behind--a fortunate precaution taken by Buller--to

cover the retreat by holding the kopjie in the rear; and then the

force--Beresford and his scouts still leading, the main body spread

out on rather a broad front--galloped on through the long grass across

the open, bending rather leftward in the direction of the Nodwengo,

the next military kraal in the direction of Ulundi. In front of the

horsemen there kept retiring at a pace regulated by theirs, about two

hundred Zulus, all who were then visible anywhere on the face of the

plain. These shunned Nodwengo, leaving it on their right, and heading

straight for Ulundi. The irregulars drew rein long enough for a patrol

to ride into Nodwengo and report it empty. Then the horses having got

their wind, the rapid advance recommenced. It really seemed a straight

run in for Buller and Beresford as they set their horses’ heads for

Ulundi and galloped on. The idea had occurred to many in the force that

Cetewayo must have abandoned his capital and withdrawn his army into

the hill country close behind Ulundi.

Those irregular horsemen had no very keen sense of discipline, and in

a gallop, a forward gallop especially, were rather prone to get out

of hand. Buller’s hardest task was to restrain this impulse, and it

was well that day that he was exerting himself all he knew to curb

the ardour of his fellows. Beresford’s advance-detachment, scouts as

they were, were of course straggled out rather casually over the whole

front. Everything seemed prosperous. No enemy showed anywhere save the

two hundred fugitive Zulus, falling back ahead of our fellows at the

long easy run which takes the Zulu over the ground with surprising

speed and which he can keep up hour after hour without a symptom of

distress.

Their flight was a calculated snare; those fugitives were simply a wily

decoy. Suddenly from out a deep, sharply-cut water-course crossing

the plain, and invisible at two hundred yards’ distance, sprang up a

long line of Zulus, some two thousand strong, confronting at once and

flanking the horsemen. Simultaneously the whole plain around them

flashed up into vivid life. Hordes of Zulus had been lying hidden in

the long grass. Buller’s alert eye had caught the impending danger, and

his voice had rung out the command “Retire” ere yet the bullets of the

sudden Zulu volley whistled through and over his command. Three men

went down smitten by the fire. Two were killed on the spot and never

stirred; we found their bodies next day shockingly mangled. The third

man’s horse slipped up in the abrupt turn, and his rider for the moment

lay stunned. But Beresford, riding away behind his retreating party,

looked back at this latter man, and saw him move up into a sitting

posture.

He who would succour in such a crisis must not only be a brave man, but

also a prompt man, quick to decide and as quick to act. The issue of

life or death hangs at such a time on the gain or waste of a moment.

The Zulus, darting out from the water-course, were perilously close to

the poor fellow; but Beresford, used on the racecourse to measuring

distance with the eye, thought he might just do it, if he were smart

and lucky. Galloping back to the wounded man, he dismounted, and

ordered him to get on his pony. The wounded man, dazed as he was, even

in his extremity was not less full of self-abnegation than was the

man who was risking his own life in the effort to save his. He bade

Beresford remount and go; why, he said in his simple manly logic--why

should two die when death was inevitable but to one? Then it was that

the quaint resourceful humour of his race supplied Beresford with

the weapon that prevailed over the wounded man’s unselfishness. The

recording angel perhaps did not record the oath that buttressed his

threatening mien when he swore with clenched fist that he would punch

the wounded man’s head if he did not allow his life to be saved. This

droll argument prevailed. Bill partly lifted, partly hustled the man

into his saddle, then scrambled up somehow in front of him, and set

the good little beast agoing after the other horsemen. He only just

did it; another moment’s delay and both must have been assegaied. As

it was, the swift-footed Zulus chased them up the slope, and the least

mistake made by the pony must have been fatal. Indeed, as Beresford

was the first gratefully to admit, there was a critical moment when

their escape would have been impossible, but for the cool courage of

Sergeant O’Toole, who rode back to the rescue, shot down Zulu after

Zulu with his revolver as they tried to close in on the rather helpless

pair, and then aided Beresford in keeping the wounded man in the saddle

until the safety of the laager was attained. There was danger right up

till then; for the hordes of Zulus obstinately hung on the flanks and

rear of Buller’s command, and the irregulars had over and over again

to shoot men down at close quarters with the revolver; more than once

the fighting was hand-to-hand and they had to club their rifles. If

the Zulus had kept to their own weapon, the assegai, the loss among

Buller’s men would have been very severe; but they had extensively

armed themselves with rifles that had fallen into their hands at

Isandlwana, with the proper handling of which they were unfamiliar.

They pursued right up to their own bank of the Umvaloosi, and blazed

away at our fellows long after the river was between them and us. Of

course, cumbered with a wounded and fainting man occupying his saddle

while he perched on the pommel, Beresford was unable to do anything

toward self-protection, and over and over again on the return ride, he

and the man behind him were in desperate strait, and but for O’Toole

and other comrades must have gone down. When they alighted in the

laager you could not have told whether it was rescuer or rescued who

was the wounded man, so smeared was Beresford with borrowed blood. It

was one of Ireland’s good days; if at home she is the “distressful

country,” wherever bold deeds are to be done and military honour to

be gained, no nation carries the head higher out of the dust. If

originally Norman, the Waterford family have been Irish now for six

centuries, and Bill Beresford is an Irishman in heart and blood.

Sergeant Fitzmaurice, the wounded man who displayed a self-abnegation

so fine, was an Irishman also; and Sergeant O’Toole--well, I think one

runs no risk in the assumption that an individual who bears that name,

in spite of all temptation, remains an Irishman. So, in this brilliant

little episode the Green Isle had it all to herself.

It will ever be one of the pleasantest memories of my life, that the

good fortune was mine to call the attention of Sir Evelyn Wood to Bill

Beresford’s conduct on this occasion. By next mail his recommendation

for the Victoria Cross went home to England; and when he and I reached

Plymouth Sound at the close of our voyage, the Prince of Wales, who was

then in the Sound with Lord Charles Beresford, was the first to send

aboard the _Dublin Castle_ the news that Her Majesty had been pleased

to honour the recommendation. Lord William was commanded to Windsor

to receive the reward “for Valour” from the hands of his Sovereign.

But there is something more to be told. Honest as valiant, he had

already declared that he could not in honour receive any recognition

of the service it had been his good fortune to perform, unless that

recognition were shared in by Sergeant O’Toole, who he persisted in

maintaining deserved infinitely greater credit than any that might

attach to him. Queen Victoria can appreciate not less than soldierly

valour, soldierly honesty, generosity, and modesty; and so it came

about that the next _Gazette_ after Lord William Beresford’s visit to

Windsor contained the announcement that the proudest reward a soldier

of our Empire can aspire to had been conferred on Sergeant Edmund

O’Toole, of Baker’s Horse.

LA BELLE HÉLÈNE OF ALEXINATZ

A SKETCH OF THE SERVIAN WAR-TIME

I

It has been the fashion among soldiers to sneer at the fighting in the

Turco-Servian campaign of 1876. I am ready to own that the strategy was

a little mixed, and that the tactics were of the most rough-and-ready

kind; but if ever a military writer cares to analyse its events crowded

into the time between the beginning of July and the end of October, he

will not fail to recognise that it was no bad work for the raw militia

of a principality with a gross population of barely a million and a

half, to make a stubborn stand against the forces of such an empire

as Turkey, even in that empire’s decadence. No State could have had a

more vulnerable frontier line. From the confluence of the Drina with

the Save on the west, round her border to the Danube at Widdin, Servia

on three sides was, so to speak, embedded in Turkish territory. The

fierce Bosnians threatened her on the west; Albania marched with her

on the south; on her east loomed Abdul Kerim Pasha from his base at

Nisch, and Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, was a standing menace

on the Widdin side of the Timok river. Struck at on four different

points, Servia was, nevertheless, able to hold her foes at bay till

that October afternoon when, determining for once to lay aside Fabian

tactics, Abdul Kerim’s Turks pushed home their attack on the lines of

Djunis, and turned the fire of the captured batteries on Tchernaieff’s

camp at Deligrad. It should be remembered that Servia began the contest

with a single brigade of regular soldiers, which perished as a force in

the earlier encounters; that she maintained the struggle with militia

levies and untrained volunteers; that until the Russian volunteers came

to her aid, she had not a dozen officers who had any save the most

rudimentary knowledge of the profession of arms; and that the sum total

of her public revenue from all sources scarcely exceeded half a million

sterling.

II

From the point of view of the war correspondent, the campaign, at

least on the Servian side, fairly bristled with adventure and with

opportunities for enterprise. There were few days on which a man,

keen for that species of pleasure, could not, somehow or other, find

a fight in which to enjoy himself. If he stood well with the military

authorities--and the easiest way to do this was to manifest a serene

indifference to the possible consequences of hostile fire--he was

impeded by no restrictions in regard to his outgoings and incomings. He

would be told of an impending fight in time to be present at it; and,

fighting or no fighting, he was always welcome to what fare might be

the portion of a staff that certainly did not hanker after luxuries. If

he were content to rough it cheerily, and was always ready to “show a

good front” with the first line of an attack, and the rear of a retreat

(which latter was occasionally extremely hurried), he was treated

_en bon camarade_ by every one, from the general to the subaltern.

When Tchernaieff himself was eating that curious composition known as

_paprikash_, and drinking the dreadful plum brandy which its makers

call _zlibovitz_, the correspondent could live without beef-steaks, nor

count it a grievance that there was no champagne to be had.

The easiest way into Servia for an invading force was down the valley

of the Morava, a fine river, which, flowing close to the Turkish camp

at Nisch, entered the principality a few miles south-east of the town

of Alexinatz. Athwart its valley, some seventeen miles lower down than

Alexinatz, stretched the lines of the entrenched camp at Deligrad,

where, according to the original Servian plan, the great stand against

the invading Turk was to be made. But as that person manifested little

activity, and in fact, so far from invading, himself submitted to be

invaded, time had served to devise and execute an advanced defensive

line in front of Alexinatz. The position had the radical fault that

it could be turned with ease, when there would ensue the danger that

its defenders might be cut off from a retreat on Deligrad; but it

had natural features of great strength against an enemy who might

prefer a direct assault to a turning movement. South and east a great

upland formed a continuous curtain to the quaint little town. Round

the western bluff of this height flowed the gentle Morava, on the

other side of which stretched a wide fertile valley, partly wooded,

partly cultivated. It was this valley, prolonged as it was both to

the north and south, that constituted the weakness of the Alexinatz

position; nor was the hasty line of entrenchments drawn athwart it,

or the earth-work covering the bridge of boats across the Morava, any

adequate counterbalance to this weakness. As for the upland curtain,

by the beginning of August that naturally strong position had been

artificially strengthened by a continuous defensive line, studded by

near a score of redoubts armed with twenty-four and twelve-pounders,

emplacements intervening for the guns of the field artillery batteries.

General Tchernaieff was himself in command, with some 13,000 Servian

militia of the first levy, and a considerable number of Russian

volunteers, both officers and men.

III

The days in Alexinatz were by no means dull. None of its population had

as yet fled; and for the stranger who had acquired some Servian, there

was even a little society. There were two hotels in the place--the

“Crown,” where most of us correspondents lived, because the people

there did not insist on more than two persons occupying the same

bedroom; and the “King of Greece,” whither we used to betake ourselves

to drink our coffee, since the _fille de comptoir_ was a pretty Servian

girl, whom the _Figaro_ correspondent had christened “La Belle Hélène.”

Poor Hélène! before the armistice she had died of typhus fever in that

rottenest of holes, Paratchin; but in her heyday at Alexinatz she was

an extremely cheery young person, full of not wholly artless coquetry,

and prone to stimulate rancorous jealousies among the idle suppliants

for her smiles.

Villiers and myself took but few opportunities to bask in Hélène’s

smiles. One while we were away on the foreposts, actually inside the

Turkish territory, and where from the hill-top on which, with a handful

of reckless desperadoes like himself, Captain Protopopoff, a Russian

soldier of fortune whom I had already known in the Carlist war, kept

watch and ward, we could see the spires of Nisch itself, with the

Turkish camps lying under the Sutar Planina and the fort-crowned Mount

Goritza. Then we were off, through Fort Banja and Kjusevatz--where

we found the gallant Horvatovitz in the very thick of a brisk fight

with the Turks--to Saitschar on the eastern frontier, just in time

to be driven out of that place along with Colonel Leschanin and its

Servian defenders at the hands of Osman Pasha, abandoning momentarily

that curious inactivity of his on the green heights on the other

side of the Timok. It was a horrible nightmare, that night march

from out the evacuated Saitschar. Cannon roaring, flames lighting up

the valley, gusts of thick smoke driven athwart the hill faces, the

heaven’s lightning flashing in competition with the lightning of man;

a narrow steep road crammed with fugitives fleeing from the wrath

behind them; women clamouring wildly that the Turk was close behind

them; children shrieking or sobbing; animals--oxen, sheep, goats,

swine, and poultry--huddled in an inextricable entanglement in the road

of retreat. Two months later, when the Servians made an unsuccessful

attempt to retake Saitschar from Osman Pasha, Villiers and I were to

listen again to the angry shriek of his shells, and the cruel bicker of

his musketry fire.

IV

It was not till Saturday, August 19, that Alexinatz heard that species

of music. On that day a Turkish column dashed into the Morava valley

and fell upon the Servian advance-positions. There was some hard

fighting, but the Servians for that day at least held their own, and

prevented the Turks from getting farther forward than the village of

Supovatz. But on the Sunday, the latter, reinforced from Nisch, renewed

the offensive in force and with vigour. The Servians, who had also

been reinforced, made a sturdy fight of it out in front of Tessica.

From that village, where I had spent the night, I had early sent word

back to the surgeons of the St. Thomas’s Hospital ambulance, who had

pushed up to the front at Alexinatz, that they would find plenty of

employment about Tessica; and about noon had ridden back to meet

them. Near the bridge-head I encountered them, Mackellar in command,

with Sandwith, Hare, and poor Attwood in the waggon with him; and,

turning, went forward with them to what seemed a suitable spot for a

_Verband-platz_, at a cross-road where the wounded had already gathered

pretty numerously. As they tumbled out, pulled off their tunics,

rolled up their sleeves, and went to work, I took the precaution to

turn their waggon round, with the horses’ heads in the direction of

Alexinatz, since the road was too narrow for quick and easy turning, if

anything should occur to crowd it. But it was more from routine than

from any serious apprehension that I did this; for the Servians seemed

prospering fairly well in the long, hot struggle with their Turkish

assailants.

After a rapid scurry to the front, I had returned to the

_Verband-platz_, and was giving assistance there, when all at once I

chanced to look up. I had become engrossed with the dressing business,

and had been neglecting to watch the fighting. To my amazement, I could

see no Servians out to the front. There were soldiers there, but they

were blue-jacketed Turks, darting forward and firing at intervals. A

straggling fire was discernible behind us, so that, in fact, we were

between two fires. The Servians had melted away all of a sudden, and

were in sudden, panic-stricken retreat. Our attention awakened, we

could hear the scurry of the fugitives along the road flanking the

field in which we were at work. Not a moment was to be lost, for

already we could hear the shouts of the Turks; the wounded, unable to

walk, were bundled into the waggon, from which the driver had fled

without warning us; the surgeons scrambled up somehow; and I, hitching

my saddle horse behind, took the reins, because I knew the roads and

also how to drive. Our waggon was the rear-guard of all the force that

had been holding the Tessica front. The Turks made a dash to intercept

us; but the little horses could gallop, and it was a time to let them

out. Presently we overtook the wreck of the stampede, and bored our way

into the chaos. Provision waggons, cannon, tumbrils, and waggon-loads

of wounded men were hurrying in pell-mell confusion among galloping

cavalry-men and running foot-soldiers. The rout lasted till within two

miles of the bridge-head, and there was a time when I thought the Turks

would enter Alexinatz with the Servian fugitives. But a fresh front

had quickly formed by troops rapidly drawn from out the Alexinatz

defensive line; the officers exerted themselves vigorously to arrest

the stampede, and the Turks did not seem to care to profit by their

good fortune.

V

The isolated combat of this Sabbath was but the prelude to four days’

as stubborn fighting as I have ever witnessed. The Turks seemed to have

made up their minds to carry Alexinatz at any cost; but apparently

failed to recognise at how little cost the position might be made

untenable for the Servians by a wide turning movement down the valley

on the left bank of the Morava. They had hardened their hearts for

the desperate effort of winning by sheer direct fighting a position

of extraordinary strength when so assailed. The Monday opened with

a fierce cannonade from the Turkish batteries directed against the

Servian troops holding the broken _terrain_ in front of the entrenched

position, and this artillery preparation was followed in the afternoon

by a series of furious infantry attacks. With flaming volleys the Turks

swept forwards over the hedges and through the copses, with a confident

steadfastness that boded ill for the militiamen waiting waveringly to

confront them. As the Turks came on, I watched the Servian line give a

kind of shudder; then it broke, the men huddling together into groups,

as if they had thought of forming rallying squares, firing the while

wildly. They rallied again on the edge of a wood, but the Turkish

cannon had followed fast in the track of the Turkish fighting line, and

opened fire on the Servians just in the act of attempted re-formation.

As they broke and ran, courting the cover of the woods, the Turks

followed them up steadily, slowly, inexorably! By nightfall the Turkish

skirmishers were holding the wooded bottom of the valley, out of which

rose the long bare slope that constituted a natural glacis to the line

of Servian entrenchments drawn across the crest of the upland-curtain

which covered the town of Alexinatz. That entrenched line carried, the

Bashi-Bazouks would be in the streets of Alexinatz half an hour later.

There was no lull in the fighting on the following day, although

the Turks held their hand for the time from the effort to storm the

entrenched position. They fought their way on the left bank of the

Morava, closer in towards the bridge-head, and got so forward with

their artillery as to be able to throw shells into the town itself.

On the Alexinatz side of the river they concerned themselves with

driving in the Servians from their advanced positions round towards the

south-eastern flank of the entrenched face, fighting hard for every

step of ground which they were able to gain.

Of the detached incidents of this day I have no record. I wrote as I

rode, making short notes as events occurred, and tearing the leaves out

of my note-book and sending them into the town for despatch by the

post to my colleague at Belgrade, who telegraphed from the Austrian

side at Semlin everything that reached him from the front. But no post

went out that night, nor would it have carried my leaflets if it had,

since the officer who undertook to deliver my letter at the post-office

was killed by a shell when crossing an exposed point in his way into

the town. My memory of the day is a blurred confusion of continual

musketry fire, of short stands ever to lapse into sullen retirements,

of wounded men who had to be abandoned to the cruel fate that awaited

them from the ruthless Turks, of burning thirst, of blistering heat, of

that sense of depression which reverses always give to the spectator,

alien though he may be. Villiers, worn with fatigue and exposure,

had gone back into the town with the English surgeons, who, with the

gallant and energetic Baron Mundy for their coadjutor, had been toiling

all day long in a hollow until the Turkish shells began to fall thick

and fast among the wounded whose condition they were striving to

ameliorate.

VI

After nightfall I followed them; but not to eat or to rest. For nobody

in Alexanitz that night was there either food or rest. Poor little

Hélène was sobbing in a corner over a young Servian sergeant who had

been brought in sore wounded, and who, she told us with streaming eyes,

was her sweetheart. The townsfolk, spite that shells were dropping

in their streets and firing their houses, were loth to quit the place

to which were linked all their associations and all their interests.

The night was one long horror: cannon roaring through the fire-flecked

darkness, shells whistling through the air and crashing into the

houses, the rumbling of the waggons carrying in the wounded, the

groaning of the poor creatures torn by bullet or shattered by shell.

We spent the whole of it in the hospital, for the claims of common

humanity had converted Villiers and myself into nurses, and in company

with a most resolute, tender, and composed Russian lady, we did our

best to help the surgeons. It was a dread experience, even to one who

had seen much war.

The hospital and its vicinity were littered with broken and mangled

human beings. Through the long terrible night, Baron Mundy, Mr.

Mackellar, and their young comrades toiled on unremittingly,

amputating, extracting, probing, bandaging. No sooner was a batch of

wounded attended to and cases affording a chance of life disposed of,

than fresh cargoes were in waiting, now from the other side of the

river, now from the other scene of action in front of the entrenchments

on the heights. Several hundreds of cases were hurriedly seen to during

the night by the English ambulance surgeons alone; but the proportion

of wounded brought in was but small compared with the numbers of poor

wretches left to the ruthlessness of the Turks during the sudden

retreats of the Servian soldiery. The Russian ambulance was doing its

work of humanity as assiduously as were our own countrymen, and a few

Servian surgeons were behaving with courage and assiduity, in marked

contrast to too many who were good for nothing in any sense. Although

daylight was certain to bring an exacerbation of the long struggle,

there was surely no human being in Alexinatz that night who was not

glad when the young rays of the morning sun came glinting through the

lurid pall of smoke that overhung the town.

To this fearful night succeeded a bloody day. The Turks had been

massing all night behind cover, around the fringes of the bare slopes

in front of the entrenchment line, and, after a preliminary artillery

duel, their gallant infantry darted forward to attempt the storm of

their strong position. It was a bold undertaking, fought out with

stubborn valour, for the effort was renewed over and over again.

There was little variety in the method of the Turkish assaults. Let a

sketch of one which I find in my note-book serve for a description of

them all. The short jotting was made while I watched. “The Turks, in

loose order, jump out of the lateral hollow and come on at the double,

under cover of a shower of shells. The Servian guns open with shrapnel,

and a Gatling mitrailleuse rains bullets on the charging Turks. At

five hundred yards the Servian infantry behind the breastworks open

fire. The Turk reply, and still keep pressing forward, falling fast

as they come. They make a rush, headed by a gallant leader. A hundred

yards more, and the forwardest of them are on the lip of the ditch. The

leader rolls into it, shot, and his voice rings no more above the din

of the strife. His followers waver, stagger, then turn and run. The

assault has been repulsed.”

These efforts lasted till sundown, when the slopes leading up to the

entrenched line were strewn with Turkish dead. In the early evening,

Tchernaieff, rightly believing that the Turks were discouraged, took

the offensive, and attacked them on both banks of the Morava. There was

desperate fighting all night; but when morning dawned it was apparent

that the Turks were slowly and sullenly falling back from every point.

Tchernaieff, striking them hard as they went, sent them “reeling up the

valley” till they had recrossed their own frontier. No longer for a

time did the people of Alexinatz hear the cannon thunder, or start at

the near rattle of the musketry fire.

VII

The same afternoon I started for Belgrade, eager to regain

communications with my newspaper. Political complications had arisen

there, the interest of which detained me in the Servian capital--with

the less reluctance that all seemed quiet for the time in the upper

Morava valley. Villiers I had left in Alexinatz, with the tryst that

I was to rejoin him there as soon as circumstances would permit; and I

was sure that were there signs of trouble in the air, I should promptly

hear from him by telegraph. At length I was free to quit Belgrade,

and started on my return journey to Alexinatz early in the morning of

Friday, Sept. 2, travelling right through. As I was nearing Tchupria

in the small hours of the following morning, a carriage dashed past

me, travelling at great speed. Tchupria I found, although it was three

o’clock, already awake and agitated. On every lip were the words,

“Alexinatz has fallen!” “How have you heard?” I asked of the landlady

of the inn. “It was told us by the English lords who drove through

about half an hour ago. They were almost the last to escape from the

place!”

Here was news indeed! Who were the English lords? What had happened to

Villiers? How had it fared with our courageous comrades, the English

surgeons? I pressed on, to the chorus of “Alexinatz is fallen,” through

Paratschin, and on to Raschan, a village only a few miles short of

Deligrad. As I drew rein at Raschan, there caught my eye the figure of

a man slumbering on the broad shelf outside the window of a butcher’s

shop. It was Mackellar. As he rubbed his eye, he told me the news

in scraps. On the previous day the Turks had come sweeping into the

Morava valley, on the opposite bank from Alexinatz, had driven the

Servians in on their bridge-head, and had actually touched the river

between Alexinatz and Deligrad. He and his mates had been in the field

all day, had got cut off from Alexinatz, and had swum the river and

got to Raschan here somehow, after an uncommonly unpleasant night.

Mackellar knew nothing as to the fate of Alexinatz, but feared that

at the best it was surrounded. On an adjoining slab, Mr. (now Sir

William) MacCormac was reposing, and in a house close by were the other

surgeons. Mr. MacCormac could tell more of Alexinatz than Mackellar had

been able to do. He had been there with Colonel Loyd-Lindsay in the

interests of the British Red Cross Society, and had been in the field

among the wounded until nightfall. After dark the Turkish musketry

fire had drawn closer and closer in on the place; the news spread that

the bridge had been carried, and then there came the clamour that the

Turks were actually fighting their way into the town. It had seemed

wise to get away from the place when as yet there was the possibility

of leaving it; and Colonel Lindsay and he had therefore started with a

couple of companions. Colonel Lindsay had pressed on to Belgrade--it

was his carriage I had passed near Tchupria: he (Mr. MacCormac) had

halted in Raschan to ascertain the fate of the other surgeons, and in

the hope that there might be opportunities for him to be of service in

organising assistance to the wounded.

All this was interesting enough; but there were two matters as to

which I could learn nothing specifically--what had befallen Alexinatz,

and how Villiers and my servant were faring in all this turmoil and

confusion. Villiers had been left by MacCormac finishing his dinner

in the hotel; Colonel Lindsay had offered to take him out, but he had

declined the offer somewhat curtly, and gone on with his dinner. When

I heard this, my anxiety for the young man was sensibly alleviated. I

knew Villiers to be cool without being rash, and I drew the inference

that he had not regarded the plight of Alexinatz as quite so desperate

as it had appeared to the “English lords.” So I pursued my way to

Deligrad, where I found the troops holding that position, on the alert,

but in no state of unwonted excitement. And on the roadside at Deligrad

I found my servant guarding a waggon which contained the collective

baggage of Villiers, the surgeons, and myself. Andreas had been sent

out of Alexinatz by Villiers about midnight with the baggage, as a

precautionary measure; when Andreas had left Villiers, that composed

young man was going to bed. Up till then Alexinatz had not fallen into

the hands of the Turks. The fighting had died out; but Tchernaieff had

given orders that all the civilian inhabitants were to evacuate the

place at daylight.

Andreas made me some coffee--it was still early morning--and then I

started forward on the Alexinatz road. Presently I met the long column

of civilian inhabitants, who had quitted the place by the General’s

order. It was at once a mournful and a laughable procession. Here a

weeping woman, with two children on her back, was trying to drive a

little flock of miscellaneous live stock--goats, a cow, three pigs, and

about a dozen geese; there a man was wheeling his bed-ridden wife in a

wheelbarrow.

A long convoy of piled-up waggons crawled along the dusty road. From

the apex of one of these poor “Belle Hélène” hailed me sadly; her

sergeant was dead, and she had no future worth caring for. The current

of Alexinatz emigration lasted for several miles; and close on its

rear came tramping a long column of Servian soldiers, at the head of

which rode General Tchernaieff and his staff. Neither scare nor hurry

was apparent; no flankers lined the peaceful-seeming march; no roar of

cannon or rattle of musketry broke the monotone of the tramp of feet

and hum of voices. What did it all mean? Well, one problem was solved;

there was Villiers, with a cigarette between his lips, as he strode

along on foot chatting with Tchernaieff’s aide-de-camp. The sententious

young man seemed rather bewildered by the eager warmth of my greeting.

Why this quite uncalled-for emotion? I had made the tryst with him that

we should rendezvous in Alexinatz. Well, for his part, he had been

loth to break troth, and had only come away when he saw no prospect of

procuring food. No single civilian was left in all Alexinatz; you could

not even buy a piece of bread; and he respectfully submitted that,

with all imaginable anxiety to keep faith, he could not see his way to

living on air.

As he talked, Tchernaieff pulled on one side and informed me of the

military situation. The Turks had meddled no more with Alexinatz since

their previous discomfiture. Their new scheme was to mask it, and press

past it northward down the left bank of the Morava. This had involved

driving in what force he had been maintaining in the valley on the

left bank; and it was their doing of this that had brought about the

battle of the previous day. It was necessary for him, with part of

the troops that had been holding Alexinatz, to retire on Deligrad,

there and thereabouts to oppose the new line of the Turkish advance;

but he had left to garrison the Alexinatz lines General Popovitz with

5000 men. Alexinatz had not fallen, nor although its situation was

obviously precarious--hence the evacuation of the civilian population

he had thought himself bound to enforce--was there any prospect of its

immediate abandonment.

VIII

And so the General rode on. It seemed to me that the best way to give

evidence that the story of the fall of Alexinatz was untrue was to go

there, and despatch telegrams from the place, of whose fall assured

tidings had been disseminated far and wide. So Villiers and I took

the road by which he had travelled, and plodded our way into empty

Alexinatz. It presented an aspect of strange weird loneliness. Not

even the cats had been left behind. Popovitz was living in a shed away

at the bridge-head, and his soldiers were disposed along the line of

the entrenched position in the reverse slope of the upland curtain. No

creature was in all that place, whose normal population was close on

10,000 souls. All the doors had been left open. We strolled into the

“Crown,” to find the kitchen hearth cold, and what had been our bedroom

stripped stark of furniture. Then we went down to the “Greek King,”

and gazed on the deserted counter at which “La Belle Hélène” had been

wont to preside. On a trestle in a corner of the hospital, where the

surgeons had been slaving a fortnight previously, there lay a dead man,

her sweetheart. He had died, no doubt, during the night in the midst

of the bustle of evacuation, and the heedless Servian orderlies had

not troubled to see to the poor fellow’s interment. We were idle, we

two, so we carried him out into the garden, and hid him in a shallow

grave under the blossoming standard roses. This done, we tramped along

the silent streets out to where, at the bridge-head, honest Popovitz

had his rough quarters. As we went, Villiers told me the story of the

previous day.

The fighting had been very hard, and there had been a time when he had

believed the Turks were bent on crossing the Morava, and taking the

place in reverse, on the side where it was unprotected. But even had

they persevered in this intention, he had realised that there would

still remain open the line of retreat out to the east in the direction

of Banja, and that it would be quite time for him to go when he saw the

troops commencing their evacuation. As the evening drew in, it had been

clear to him that the Turks were gaining no ground. He had previously

listened to a good deal of heavy firing around Alexinatz, and had

learnt to form an estimate of its distance, so when the clamour arose

that the bridge had been taken, and when scared breathless men--who

ought to have kept their heads better--had panted out that the Turks

were “at the bottom of the street,” he had gone out and listened, and

had made up his mind that the firing was as yet a good two miles away

at the least. And then he had come in and gone on with his dinner, as

became a sensible man, and when he had been pressed to come away with

the departing people of his nationality, had been unable to recognise

the urgent necessity of the hurried retreat.

Popovitz was very civil, and allowed me to despatch a telegram; but

could not ask us to luncheon, for the very good reason that he had no

luncheon for himself. So we left him, and returned into the silent

town. Up at the head of the main street there was, we bethought

ourselves, a pretty cottage inhabited by an old Tâtar, who, in the days

when the quickest route between Western Europe and Constantinople was

through Belgrade, Alexinatz, Nisch, Sophia, and Adrianople, used to

accompany the King’s messengers, who had to ride without a halt, save

to change from one horse to another, that long rough journey. He was an

interesting man, this old Tâtar, with his tales in a broken composite

of many languages, of the long winter gallops through the snow-wreaths

with Heneage or Johnson, when the wolves would chase the emissary

of Britannic majesty, and the Albanian robbers would strive to make

prize of him. We had been wont to sit with him in his garden-bower,

and listen to his polyglot yarns of the old rough days when he, now

bent and shrivelled, thought nothing of riding 800 miles at a stretch.

We bethought ourselves now of the old fellow’s cottage, as likely to

furnish the most comfortable quarters; and since there was more of the

Turk than the Serv in the old Tâtar, it was possible that he might not

have cared to clear out with the other inhabitants. We found him at

home, sitting quietly in his own leafy porch under the great hanging

bunches of grapes; he was too old, he said, to go travelling now, and

had resolved to stay and take his chance. Stay he did later, when

Popovitz went and left Alexinatz to him and the Turks; and badly enough

did he fare at the hands of the latter. The Bashi-Bazouks promptly

killed the poor old fellow.

Well, he was as kind to us as his means permitted of. He had neither

meat nor wine, but he made us coffee, and gave us bread and grapes,

and he gave us sleeping-quarters as well; but when I remember

the insect-horrors of that night, I shudder still. Next morning,

recognising that empty Alexinatz was extremely stupid, and that

probably there would be some fighting soon away in the Krusevatz

direction, we paid our farewell respects to Popovitz, took leave of the

friendly old Tâtar--the “last man” of Alexinatz, and started back to

Deligrad on as hot a walk as ever I remember. We had to make a detour

to avoid a handful of Circassians who had crossed the Morava on a

foray, and found great amusement at a wayside tavern in the boasting

of some Servian militia, who claimed that they had done doughty battle

with the Tcherkesses, and driven them back across the river. When I

ventured to point out that the barrels of their pieces were clean, they

lost their tempers, and threatened to shoot us--a menace which we could

afford to smile at, since the old muskets had lost their locks. We

never went back to Alexinatz again, but stout Popovitz held the place

till the Servian strength was shattered on the heights of Djunis in the

end of October; and he then evacuated it only by order of Tchernaieff.

Had he been left there one day more, it would have remained with the

Servians under the terms of the armistice; but before that came into

effect the Turks had occupied Alexinatz, and it was Fazli Pasha’s

headquarters during the following winter. When the peace was signed,

and its people came back to what had been their homes, they found the

place a wreck. The Turks had made firewood of everything that would

burn.

AN OUTPOST ADVENTURE

The war correspondent who accompanied the Russian Army which crossed

the Danube in the summer of 1877, and who had the good fortune to be a

welcome person, found his path of duty made exceedingly easy for him.

And whether he was a welcome person or not depended almost entirely on

himself. His newspaper might be held in obloquy, but the authorities

ignored the hostility of the paper with something that closely

resembled magnanimity, and the correspondent was not held responsible

for the tone of his journal, but only for the matter in it which he

himself contributed. It is rather a mild way of putting it to say that

the _Standard_, for instance, was not friendly to Russia throughout

the period in question; but Mr. Boyle, its representative, was quite

frankly accepted, and has testified to the courtesy and comradeship

of the Russian officers. He had to go, and everybody ought to rejoice

that this fate befell him, because it was the occasion of his brilliant

and amusing book, _The Diary of an Expelled Correspondent_; the

_teterrima causa_ assigned was a passage in one of his letters. The

_Daily Telegraph_ could not have struck the reader as being more

bitter against the Russians than was its contemporary of Shoe Lane; but

the gentleman designated to represent it when he presented himself at

Kischeneff was refused his legitimation. This, however, was for reasons

purely personal to the candidate, against whom there was some ill-will

in the Russian headquarters, and not, as I understood, because of the

tone of the journal by which he was accredited.

His distinguishing badge once strapped round his upper arm--he had

repudiated with a shriek of horror the dreadful brass plate such

as street-corner messengers now wear that was first served out to

him--the well-seen correspondent stood, or moved, chartered to do

pretty much anything he pleased. It may seem a paradox; but the

Russians are simply the most democratic people in Europe, and for

a Russian to be _borné_ would be a contradiction in terms. Every

officer was the correspondent’s comrade. Prince Schahofskoy, the

ill-conditioned general who made such a mess of the July Plevna attack,

was the only exception I ever knew. If the samovar was in service,

the officer shared his tea with the correspondent; in the middle of

a battle, if the officer had a couple of sandwiches he would offer

one of them to the correspondent. From the highest to the lowest, in

regard to military information, the Russians were incredibly frank;

the correspondent never required to ask questions as to situation,

dispositions, or intentions--information in regard to those matters

was volunteered to him. The only secret they ever had--and I must own

they kept it well--was in regard to the point at which the crossing

of the Danube was to be made. Skobeleff “had not the faintest idea,”

although a couple of hours previously he had been reconnoitring the

approaches. Prince Tzeretleff “really had not the remotest conception.”

Still, even in regard to the crossing of the Danube, the friendly

Russians were not inexorable. I could not be told the locality of

the crossing, but I should be escorted betimes to the headquarters

of the general commanding the division which was to take the lead in

the operations. It was rather an amusing experience. The guide sent

to escort me was in the uniform of a private soldier--a tall handsome

man, riding a fine gray horse. He spoke English fluently and without

a trace of accent. As we rode along together and talked, the tone of

this private soldier’s conversation bewildered me. He knew his Europe

as if it had been his native parish. He had what Americans call “the

inside track” in regard to English affairs, social, political, and

financial. He spoke of country-houses of which he had been the guest,

and commented on the merits of a piece of statuary in the drawing-room

at Sandringham. At last I asked his name. He was of one of Russia’s

oldest princely families, and belonged to the diplomatic corps, but

when the war began had volunteered for military service, and, not

being qualified to be an officer, had fallen into line as a private

soldier. As we rode along I asked him where we were bound for, not

imagining that a destination to which we were actually travelling

could be any longer a secret. But he looked upon it still in this

light, no doubt in accordance with his instructions, and of course I

had no more to say for the time being. By and by we reached a point

whence radiated four cross-roads. It became obvious to me that my

guide was himself at fault. I took no heed while he led me first

along one road a little way, then along another, each time returning

puzzled to the cross-roads. At last he had to confess, “It seems to

me that I’ve lost my way.” “Sorry I cannot be of any service,” was my

remark, “since I do not know where it is you want to go to. I have

been all over this region and know where each of these roads leads.”

My prince-private-soldier-diplomatist burst into a laugh, and then

mentioned our destination. “Then this way,” said I, “about an hour’s

ride.”

After the crossing of the Danube in the last days of June the Russian

army spread out into the adjacent Bulgarian country like a fan.

Krüdener went west to subdue Nicopolis, and later to come to grief at

Plevna. Gourko rode away over the Balkans, through the Hankioj Pass,

on that adventurous expedition which sanguine people expected to end

at Adrianople. The Twelfth Corps forged away slowly in the easterly

direction, toward the Danubian fortress of Rustchuk, the keypoint of

the Turkish quadrilateral in Bulgaria, and its advance I accompanied

over the low rolling country, towards the Jantra, and later athwart

the more broken terrain between the Jantra and the Lom. It was a sort

of holiday stroll for Driesen’s cavalry division, which leisurely

pioneered the way for the force that later came to be known as “the

Army of the Cesarewitch.” We were received with offerings of corn,

oil, and wine by the Conscript Fathers of Biela, and tarried in that

pleasant _rus in urbe_ for a couple of days. Then after a while we

dawdled on, past the copses of Monastir and the grain-clad slopes of

Obertenik, until well on into July we pitched camp on a long swell

falling down to the Danube at Pirgos, with Rustchuk away in front of

us, some ten miles off. We were far enough forward, pending the coming

up of supports; so we threw out pickets to the front and flanks, and

made ourselves as comfortable as might be in the bright sunshine

tempered by cool breezes blowing down from the Balkans.

Baron Driesen was an active man, and made work for himself. He was

always leading reconnaissances into the country along and across the

Lom, in the course of which he had the occasional amusement of a

skirmish. I used to accompany him on those expeditions, just to keep

myself and my horses in exercise; they were quite unimportant from my

professional point of view, and a dozen of them would not have been

worth the cost of a five-line telegram. My comrade Villiers preferred

to go sketching in the glens with dear old General Arnoldi, one of

the brigade commanders, the simplest, quaintest, most lovable of old

gentlemen, and I should think the worst cavalry brigade commander to

be found even in the Russian Army. The other brigade chief, Staël von

Holstein, read and wrote all day in the shade under the wide fly of

his pretty striped tent, coming over to us in the evening to smoke a

cigarette, drink a tumbler of tea, and relieve our _ennui_ with his

pleasant gossip about men, women, and things.

It was not my affair, but I confess I did not greatly relish the

position we occupied. The division, with its batteries of horse

artillery, was out here all by itself, with no infantry within several

miles, both its flanks bare, overlapped by the Turks on its right, its

left utterly in the air, and its line of retreat by no means safe. But

while the Russians treated those conditions with a fine indifference,

the Turks did not display any enterprise. A few weeks later they woke

up, it is true; and then the Russians had to fall back out of the

unsafe angle, with considerable losses, and not without confusion; but

by that time I was elsewhere, and in watching the abortive efforts to

drive Osman Pasha out of Plevna had ceased to feel a vivid interest in

the fortunes of the Army of the Lom.

I must go a little more into detail as to the position of Driesen’s

cavalry division in those July days of 1877, and as to the country in

its vicinity, because I wish to describe a risky little experience

that happened to me then, to follow the narrative of which this

minuteness is requisite.

I have already mentioned that our camp was on a long swell running

inland at about right angles from the Danube. Before us, as we looked

out from the front of the camp in the direction of Rustchuk, there

ran parallel to our position a long valley--deep, but with smooth

bottom and sides--on which were fields of grain that had been cut

and set up into stooks. Over against us, on the farther side of this

valley, rose a ridge very similar in formation to our own, but having

its crest clothed with woods, and on its slope facing us were clumps

of trees interspersed among the corn-fields. The valley between the

two ridges was for the time neutral ground. The Turks held the wooded

ridge confronting us, and our fore-post line ran along in our front

about half-way down the slope of our ridge as it trended down into the

intervening valley.

One bright warm afternoon our friends the enemy brought forward a

couple of batteries of field-guns, and from a position in front of the

wood which crested their ridge opened fire against our camp. The range

was a long one, but the Turks had Krupp guns, and their shells came

lobbing across the valley and occasionally pitched among the tents. The

Russians, who have a great propensity to lazy idleness when the weather

is warm, apparently could not be bothered to reply to this fire for

quite a while; but at length, about four o’clock, I saw their gunners

busy among the field-guns that were ranged in position along the front

of the camp.

Just then I met Baron Driesen, who told me that he had remained quiet

thus long because of a little scheme he had adopted to surprise and

perhaps to cut off the Turkish guns opposite us there. Some two hours

earlier, when he first noticed the guns being brought up into position,

he had sent off Holstein with the light cavalry regiment of his

brigade--the “Gray Hussars” we used to call them, from the colour of

their horses--away to our right, with orders, if practicable, to cross

the valley higher up out of sight of the Turks, and, getting on to the

slope of their ridge, work northward through the clumps of trees, till,

if they had the luck to get so far, within charging distance of the

left flank of the Turkish batteries, when the Russian troopers were to

do their best to capture the guns.

I am an old cavalry-man, and was naturally always eager to be with the

mounted arm on any duty assigned to it; and I rather made a grievance

of it to the Baron that he had not let me know of the despatch of

Holstein and his Grays, that I might have gone along with them. Driesen

was the best-tempered man in the world. “Why,” said he, “standing here,

you’ve got the whole panorama under your eye, and if they have the luck

to get up and do anything you can see their work a great deal better,

and, what is more, a great deal more safely, than if you were over

there with them, blinded by dust and smoke.” But, nevertheless, I was

only half-content.

The Russian guns opened presently, and then there was an hour or two

of reprisal at long bowls, and nothing else. The Russians lost a horse

or two, and one unfortunate fellow was cut in two back in the camp,

but the futile powder-burning was getting very tedious. All at once,

however, I noticed some horsemen showing little glimpses of themselves

out of a long clump of trees a few hundred yards below, and on the left

of the Turkish batteries.

“Look, Baron!” cried I, “there are Holstein’s cavalry fellows, sure

enough. They’ve worked round beautifully--quite artistically--and now

they are gathering in that clump, getting ready for their dash at the

guns!”

Driesen was not an enthusiastic man, and he rather drawled in his

speech. “You may be right,” he said, “but I, for my part, have a shrewd

suspicion these horsemen are Turkish Tcherkesses, prowling about there

just to cover that left flank of the batteries which I gave Holstein as

his objective.”

“Why,” I exclaimed, “look at the gray horses. There can be no mistake!”

“_Mon Dieu!_” retorted the Baron, “can’t a Turkish Tcherkess ride a

gray horse as well as a Russian Hussar?”

“Well,” said I--for Driesen’s apathy made me the more stubborn in my

own opinion--“I’m positive they are our fellows; and I am going across

the valley to watch closely how they make their rush.”

“Don’t be a fool!” said the Baron genially. “Even if they are our

fellows, you are much better here; and if you cross, and they are not,

why then----” and he shrugged his broad shoulders.

But I was obstinate; Driesen was sufficiently conversant with our

language to quote the proverb about “a wilful man”; and so away I rode

to the front out beyond the Russian guns, down the slope, and through

the outpost line, crouching behind the corn-stooks about half-way down.

I cantered briskly across the bottom of the valley, which I found to be

a deeper trough than I had imagined; and then at a slower pace began to

ascend the slope of the Turkish ridge, heading for the clump of trees

about which I had seen the horsemen.

I had got nearly half-way up. I could hear the shrill scream of the

shells speeding from ridge to ridge high over my head, as I plodded on

upward, leaning well forward over my saddle, with a grip of my horse’s

mane in one hand. Just as I entered a corn-field, crack, crack, whizz,

whizz, came a couple of bullets close by me from behind a corn-stook

just in front of me. I halted involuntarily dazed with surprise,

and took a hurried survey of the situation. It was not difficult to

comprehend it at a glance. Moving in an easy careless way I had ridden

right up against the Turkish outpost line, which, just as was the

Russian line on the opposite side of the valley, was drawn athwart the

slope behind the cut grain. So close was I that I could actually see

the Paynim rascals grinning at my attitude of scare.

Shot followed shot, and each one served to quicken my realisation of

the fact that it was extremely injudicious to remain there longer than

was quite convenient. So I wheeled sharply in my tracks and galloped

headlong down the steep slope, stretched along my horse’s neck. I did

not wait to exchange any civilities of leave-taking with the humorous

gentlemen squatting behind the corn-stooks.

In a twinkling, long before I had reached the bottom, the Russian

outpost line had opened fire on the Turkish outliers who were

persecuting me, and this friendly act drew off from me the attention

of the latter. Quite a general, although desultory, musketry skirmish

ensued, the bullets of both sides whistling over my head, down in the

bottom of the valley as I was by this time. But though I had ceased to

be a target I did not feel in the least comfortable. I could not get

home among the Russians while they kept up this abominable shooting

of theirs--that was too clear--unless I was prepared to take an equal

risk to that from which I had just been mercifully preserved. If you

are shot it makes no perceptible difference to you whether it is friend

or foe who performs the deed. The Turkish side, again, was renewing

its inhospitable demonstrations; and it was not at all nice to remain

quiescent down in the bottom of the valley, since every now and then

a malignant Turk, disregarding his natural enemies the Russians over

against him up there, would take a shot by way of variety at the

inoffensive neutral prowling down below in the middle distance.

In my perplexity I resolved to follow up the trough of the valley till

I should reach a section of the Russian front where quietude might be

reigning, and where, therefore, I would have the chance to get back

inside the friendly lines and out of my embarrassing predicament.

But as I moved along I carried strife and the fire along with me.

The Russians, out in front of whom I had originally ridden down into

the valley, had known at least that I had come from their camp, and

had let me alone as being a friend. But as I moved out of their ken

I found myself the pariah of both sides, the Ishmaelite against whom

was every man’s hand. Neither side had any good feeling toward me, and

both took occasional shots at me, which came a great deal too near

to be pleasant. Then, having fired at me, nothing would content them

but that they should set about firing at each other, and so I was

like a fox with a firebrand tied to its tail, spreading conflagration

whithersoever I went. By and by I came on a bend in the valley, and

this gave me hope; but as I moved along I thought I should never get to

where the two hostile outpost lines ceased to confront each other. And

then all of a sudden the valley began to disappear altogether and merge

into the uplands, a change in the ground which bade fair to deprive me

of what little cover the valley had been affording.

Suddenly, from an adjacent clump on the Turkish side of the shallowing

valley, three horsemen came dashing down on me at a gallop. The

alternatives were so clear that he who ran might read, and I was moving

at a walk. Either the Turks would make a prisoner of me (if, indeed,

they did not kill me on the spot), or I must, if I would make an effort

to escape this fate, take my chance of the Russian fire as I galloped

for the shelter of the Russian outpost line.

“Of two evils choose the less,” says the wise proverb. I had made up

my mind, much more quickly than I can write the words down, to ride in

upon the Russians; and so I gave my horse the spur and fled from my

Turkish pursuers. It was pretty clear that the Russians had no sort

of comprehension of the situation, but they judged that the simplest

course, pending an explanation, was to try to kill somebody; so they

opened fire with zeal.

For me it was like charging a square. I actually all but rode over a

man who was confronting me kneeling, with his (presumably empty) rifle

held like a pike; and when I was pulled up abruptly inside the Russian

straggling line by a strong jerk on my horse’s bit that threw him back

on his haunches, I found myself surrounded by the _chevaux de frise_

of bayonet-points projecting from rifles held by angry, vociferating,

and unintelligible persons of Sclavonic extraction.

I never knew very much practicable Russian, and at that time three

words were the sum of my acquaintance with that euphonious tongue. None

of the three was at all applicable to the conditions of the moment,

but I emitted them all in succession, making the best of my scanty

stock-in-trade. They availed me nothing. Neither the officer nor any of

his men knew a word of English, French, or German. In vain I looked for

the Polish Jew who forms an occasional item in most Russian regiments,

and who has always a smattering of abominable low German. Failing to

make my captors understand anything concerning me, I was dismounted

with considerable vigour, and promptly taken prisoner, one armed man on

either side of me, and a third in a strategic position in the rear. As

for my Turkish pursuers, two of them had turned when within a few yards

of the Russian post; the third left his horse dead on the ground and

himself limped back wounded.

For the only time save one, while I was with the Russian Army, did I

now produce my formal “pass”--my captors refused to give any heed to

the badge on my arm, and probably had no conception what it meant. Now

the “pass” consisted of a photograph of the correspondent, with a dab

of red wax on his chest, on which was impressed the headquarter seal,

while on the back were written certain cabalistic figures, which, I

had been given to understand, instructed all and sundry to whom “these

presents” might come to recognise the bearer and assist him by all

means in their power. It happened that I had removed my beard since the

photograph was taken which constituted my authentication; my captors

failed to recognise any resemblance between my shaven countenance and

the hairy face of the photograph, and there was thus an added element

of suspicion. At length it was resolved to send me up to the camp, to

be dealt with there by superior authority.

A sergeant and two men shortly marched me off in the direction of the

headquarters, while a third led my horse. It was a long tramp, and I

was not allowed to choose my own pace. At length, on the plateau before

the camp, the divisional flag was seen. The artillery firing was over,

and Baron Driesen and his staff were standing behind the still hot guns.

My appearance was greeted with a simultaneous roar of laughter, in

which I tried to join, I confess rather ruefully.

“Well,” said Drieson drily, “can you believe now that Turkish

Tcherkesses can ride gray horses as well as can Russian Hussars?”

But as we walked back together to drink tea in his tent, there was

genuine feeling in the quiet heartiness with which he congratulated me

on my escape from this outpost adventure.

THE DIVINE FIGURE FROM THE NORTH

The Romanoffs have always been a soldierly race. Peter the Great did

a good deal of miscellaneous fighting in Finland and elsewhere, and

commanded at the battle of Pultowa. Alexander I. marched across Europe

to participate on French soil in the desperate fighting of Napoleon’s

most brilliant campaign in the early months of 1814. Nicolas, lad

as he was in years, was already a veteran in war when Mortier and

Marmont threw up the sponge on the heights of Montmartre, and the

Imperial father and son rode along the Champs Elysées at the head of

the triumphal entry into Paris of the allied armies. Alexander II.

crossed the Danube in 1877, with the march of invasion of Turkey, that

ended only at the gates of Constantinople. Peter commanded in fact as

well as in name; he was perhaps a better shipwright than a general.

Alexander I. was at least the nominal head of the Russian contingent

in the great composite host of which Schwarzenberg was actually the

Commander-in-Chief. But, in a strict military sense, Alexander II.

had no definite position of any kind in the field. Head of the

armies of Russia as he was, in virtue of his position as Czar, he was

nevertheless not the Commander-in-Chief, even nominally, of the great

hosts which his behest had drawn from the enthusiastic masses of his

devoted subjects. That onerous duty and dignity he had assigned to his

brother, the Grand Duke Nicolas. The Emperor, in a military sense, made

the campaign simply as an august spectator, for whom as monarch and

as Russian the operations presented an engrossing interest, and whose

presence in the field further inspired the nation with added fervour.

Solomon’s adage that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom

does not apply to war. “Councils of war never fight” has passed into a

proverb; if the proverb did not hold as regards the Russo-Turkish war,

it must be owned that the battles directed by the councils were not

always judicious. The American historian of that war, commenting on

the lack of unity in the command of the Russo-Roumanian armies which

attempted unsuccessfully to carry Osman’s lines around Plevna, in

September 1877, thus alludes to the military effects of the Emperor’s

presence: “Finally, the Emperor was present, with the Minister of

War and a large staff. The Emperor came merely as a spectator, to

encourage his troops by his presence, and in the hope of witnessing

their victory. But the Emperor of Russia is regarded by every Russian

soldier, from the highest to the lowest grade, with a feeling which

it is difficult to explain in other countries; _at all_ times his will

is law, and his wish a command, and it is not possible for him to be

a mere spectator. He took no part, however, in the command, although

every report and order was instantly communicated to him, until after

the assault of the 11th and 12th of September.”

Alexander’s life on campaign was a life of extreme simplicity, of great

seclusion, always of deep concern, and at times of intense anguish. He

was not strictly in the field until he had crossed the Danube; but, for

more than a fortnight before doing so, he lived a sort of campaign life

in a little country-house a few rods to the westward of the miserable

Roumanian village of Simnitza, overhanging the bed of the great

river. He himself had accommodation here under a roof, but most of

his numerous _entourage_ dwelt in tents among the trees of the little

park, and in the adjoining paddocks. He sat at meals with the suite

in a great marquee on the lawn; but the repasts served there partook

rather too much of the Duke Humphrey sort of fare to accord with the

tastes of the dainty aristocrats who, in their various capacities, or

in no capacity at all, were in attendance on their sovereign; and they

were lavish patrons, occasionally neglecting to pay their bills, of

the temporary restaurant which Brofft, the Bucharest hotel-keeper, had

set up close to the gate of the boyard’s château in which the Emperor

quartered. Under the canvas roof of the hostelry where Müller, Herr

Brofft’s head man, served dubious champagne at twelve roubles a bottle,

members of the Imperial family and the nobles and generals of the

suite made very merry, no matter how things were going on the farther

side of the river. But the Emperor himself was scarcely seen outside

the gates of his own habitation, save to visit the hospitals in which

lay the wounded of the crossing, or to drive to a point commanding

some long stretch of the great river and the undulating Bulgarian

region beyond its swift brown current. He always travelled on wheels.

I do not remember to have seen him oftener than twice on horseback

during the whole campaign. The Russians, indeed, are not an equestrian

people--that is, they are not addicted to riding because of a love

for the saddle. A Russian, if he has the choice, will always sooner

drive than ride; and even on campaign it was nothing uncommon to see a

general at the head of his division on the march, snugly ensconced in a

comfortable carriage.

The day after Dragomiroff had carried the passage of the Danube

opposite Simnitza, the Czar crossed the river for the purpose of

visiting Sistova, the Bulgarian town on the Turkish side, and of

thanking in person the gallant division which had so valiantly fought

its way across the great river, and carried the heights on the other

side. There was no formal review; the troops were already too widely

dispersed for that. Yolchine’s brigade, the one which had crossed

first, had got under arms as the Emperor came up from the river’s

brink; and Generals Dragomiroff and Yolchine stood in front of it,

along with the young General Skobeleff, who had shown brilliant valour

and all his rare gift of leadership in the action of the previous day.

The troops replied to the Emperor’s greeting in accents which were

eloquent of an emotion of absolute adoration; the simple private men

gazed on their Czar with entranced eyes of childlike love and awe.

His aspect on that day, when as yet anxiety and ill-health had not

broken him down, was singularly imposing. It was Charles Brackenbury

who applied to him the term which I have placed at the head of this

article; but he did not invent it. It was the exact translation of the

phrase in which the Bulgarians of Sistova hailed the potentate who on

that afternoon, when first his foot touched their soil, shone before

their eyes as the more than mortal being who was to be their Saviour,

their Redeemer from the rule of the heathen. At that moment they

would have worshipped him. They cooled in their adoration presently,

and before the campaign was over there were among them those who

openly said that since they were seemingly to be a subject race, they

preferred to be subject to the Turk rather than to the Russian.

The glamour of the hour stirred to idealisation the stolid,

self-centred Bulgarians; but the most indifferent spectator could not

but realise the nobility of Alexander’s presence, as he returned the

greeting of his victorious soldiers. A man not far off sixty, he then

looked exceptionally young for his age; the long dark moustache showed

hardly a streak of gray, and the majestic figure was as straight as a

pine. He looked a very king of men, as with soldierly gait he strode

up to Dragomiroff, shook him cordially by the hand, and arrested his

attempt at obeisance by clasping him in a hearty embrace. Tough old

Yolchine was similarly honoured, but the Czar turned away from young

Skobeleff with a frown, for that brilliant officer had returned from

Central Asia under a cloud of baseless accusation, and the opportunity

for vindication had not yet been permitted.

Gourko dashed across the Balkans on that promising but abortive raid

of his, and the advance-guard of the “Army of the Lom,” to the command

of which the Czarewitch was appointed, pushed slowly eastward till

it came within sight of the earthworks which the Turks were throwing

up as an outer circle of defence to the fortress of Rustchuk. The

Emperor and his suite had meantime crossed the Danube, and, following

in the track of the eastward advance, had taken up quarters in a great

farmyard near the village of Pavlo, a position fairly central for

receiving intelligence from both lines of advance, and also within

easy reach of the bridge across the river at Simnitza. Some ten days

later the Imperial headquarters moved farther eastward, into the little

town of Biela, in the direct rear of the Czarewitch’s command. At

Biela the headquarters were for several weeks in the enclosed yard of

a dismantled Turkish house, which the Bulgarians had quitted when its

occupants fled. A high wattled fence surrounded this yard, in which

grew a few willow-trees that afforded some shade. The bureaux were in

the battered Turkish house. The Emperor lived in two officer’s tents,

communicating with each other by a canvas-screened alley, up in a

corner of the yard under the willow-trees. In the centre of the yard

was the large dining marquee in which the Emperor joined at meals the

officers of his suite, and such of the foreign military attachés as

were not in the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief. He was wont to

breakfast alone in his own tent, where he worked all the morning with

Milutin the Minister of War, Ignatieff the Diplomatist, Adlerberg the

Chamberlain of the Palace and the Emperor’s foster-brother, and other

high officials who solicited interviews. It must be remembered that

from his camp far away in Bulgaria, the Emperor was administering the

affairs of a huge empire whose capital was many hundred miles distant.

At noon luncheon was served in the great marquee, and all the suite

were wont to gather in the yard for conversation a short time in

advance. The Emperor came out from his own private tent, shaking hands

with the nearest members of the suite, greeting always the foreign

attachés, as he passed into the marquee. His seat was in the centre

of the right-hand side of the table, usually with General Suwaroff on

one side of him and General Milutin on the other, the foreign attachés

sitting opposite. The greatest simplicity prevailed in the fare served

at the Imperial table; three courses were the rule at dinner, and

champagne was given only on exceptional occasions. When the time for

coffee came, the Emperor gave the signal for smoking, and immediately

the marquee was filled with a cloud of cigarette smoke. He was wont to

talk freely at table, directing most of his conversation to the foreign

officers opposite to him, and occasionally, especially when addressing

Colonel Wellesley, the British representative, his tone was that of

grave badinage.

No elaborate precautions were to outward seeming taken for

the Emperor’s safety, living here as he was in the midst of a

curiously-mixed population of wretched Bulgarians and prowling

Turks--for all the Turks had not fled from Biela. His only escort

consisted of a handful of the Cossacks of the Imperial guard on duty

at the entrance of the yard in which he lived. He drove out every

day, attended by an escort of a dozen of these; and he would make

the round on foot of the hospitals in the environs of the little

town, accompanied by a single companion, a Cossack following a little

distance behind. He spent many an hour in talking with the poor ailing

fellows in the wretched hospitals, to whom his kindly presence did

more good than all the efforts of the surgeons. Once during a drive

his eye fell upon a miserable company of Turkish fugitives, among whom

were many women and children, lurking in a wood. He at once alighted

and went among them, and by assurances of protection he succeeded in

prevailing on them to return to their homes in Biela, where he had

them supplied with rations until they were able to do something for

themselves.

After the disaster met with by Krüdener and Shahofskoy in front of

Plevna on the 30th of July, and Gourko’s enforced retirement to the

northern side of the Balkans, the Imperial headquarters were moved

westward to a village called Gorni Studen, about equidistant from

Plevna, Sistova, and Tirnova. Biela had become poisonous by reason

of an utter disregard of all sanitary precautions, and the Emperor

had been ailing from low fever, rheumatism, and asthma, the last

his chronic ailment. At Gorni Studen he abandoned tent-life, and

only occasionally came to the general table in the mess marquee. A

dismantled Turkish house was fitted up for him after a fashion, and his

bedroom was a tiny chamber with mud walls and a mud floor. It was in

the balcony of this house where I had an interview with him in August,

when I had ridden in from the Shipka with the unexpected good news that

Radetski was holding his own stoutly in the St. Nicholas position among

the Shipka rocks, against the fierce assaults of Mehemet Ali’s Turks.

I had a difficulty in recognising him, so changed was he from the

early days at Simnitza. He had shrunken visibly, he stooped, his head

had gone down between his shoulders, and his voice was broken and

tremulous. He was gaunt, worn, and haggard, his nervous system seemed

quite shattered. There was a hunted expression in his eye, and he

gasped for breath in the spasms of the asthma that afflicted him. I

left him with the vivid apprehension that he was not to break the spell

that was said to condemn every Romanoff to the grave before the age of

sixty.

The spell of course was nonsense, yet it is the fact that Czar

Alexander’s father, and the four male Romanoffs of the generation

preceding Nicolas, the sons of the mentally affected Emperor Paul, died

before the attainment of this age, and of disease affecting the brain.

Alexander I., who was Napoleon’s enemy, his friend, and then again

his bitter and successful enemy, died at the age of forty-eight in a

deep, brooding melancholy, which Metternich described as a “weariness

of life.” His elder brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, had the good

sense to know that his mental condition rendered him unfit to rule.

If he had been a private person, he would probably have spent most of

his life in an asylum. He died in his fifty-second year of congestion

of the brain. The Grand Duke Michael ended his life by falling from

his horse in a fit at the age of forty-eight, and had shown before his

death so much morbid irritability that his physician did not hesitate

to treat him as insane. If the Western Powers had temporised for a

year with the imperious Nicolas, his death would have occurred, and

there would have been no Crimean War. And it is the fact that the

professional assurance had been communicated to the English Government

so early as 1853, that Nicolas had at most only two years to live; he

died four months before the two years were up. A well-known English

physician, Dr. A. B. Granville, had detected in Nicolas the symptoms

of the hereditary disease of his family, from which he predicted his

death within the term mentioned. He communicated his prognosis to Lord

Palmerston, as a strong argument for the maintenance of a temporising

policy until death should have delivered Russia and Europe from a Czar

whose mental balance was disturbed. The authenticity of this letter,

which was published in the _Times_ in 1855, was vouched for to Count

Vitzthum on the day of its publication by Lord Palmerston himself,

who added that the English Government could be guided only by facts,

and could not allow their policy to be influenced by the opinion of a

physician. Alexander outlived the fated period by three years, and then

it was by a violent death that he perished; but his younger brother,

the late Grand Duke Nicolas, died recently before completing his

sixtieth year.

As epilepsy is the domestic curse of the Hapsburgs, so hypochondria

is the family malady of the Romanoffs. Alexander was a prey to it in

the Gorni Studen hovel. But it had not full sway over him. There was

something wonderfully pathetic in the eagerness with which he grasped

at the expressed belief of an unprofessional neutral like myself, in

the face of the apprehensions to the contrary of all about him, that

Radetski would be able to make good the tenure of his position on the

top of the Shipka.

The Czar was present in the field during the six days’ struggle around

Plevna, in the September of the war. The sappers had constructed for

him on a little eminence, out of the usual line of hostile fire, a

sort of look-out place from which was visible a great sweep of the

scene of action. Behind it was a marquee in which was a long table

continually spread with food and wine, where the suite supported nature

jovially while men were dying hard by in their thousands. As for the

Czar himself, after the first two days he neither ate nor drank.

Anxiety visibly devoured him. He could not be restrained from leaving

the observatory and going around among the gunners. I watched him on

the little balcony of the look-out place, late on the afternoon of the

fifth day of the struggle--it was his fête-day, save the mark!--as

he stood there in the sullen autumn weather, gazing out with haggard

straining eyes at the efforts to storm the great Grivitza redoubt.

Assault after assault had been delivered; assault after assault had

failed; now the final desperate struggle was being made, the forlorn

hope of the day. The Turkish fire crushed down his Russians as they

battled their way up the slope, slippery already with Roumanian blood:

the pale face on the balcony quivered, and the tall figure winced and

cowered. As he stood there bearing his cross in solitary anguish, he

was a spectacle of majestic misery that could never be forgotten.

After Plevna had fallen in December, the Emperor returned to St.

Petersburg, there to be greeted with a reception the like of which

for pure enthusiasm I have never witnessed. From the railway station

he drove straight to the Kasan Cathedral, in accordance with the

custom which prescribes to Russian Emperors that in setting out for or

returning from any enterprise, they shall kiss the glittering image of

the Holy Virgin of Kasan which the Cathedral enshrines. Its interior

was a wonderful spectacle. People had spent the night sleeping on

the marble floor, that they might be sure of a place in the morning.

There had been no respect of persons in the admissions. The mujik in

his skins stood next the soldier-noble whose bosom glittered with

decorations. The peasant woman and the princess knelt together at the

same shrine. At the tinkle of a bell the great doors were thrown wide

open and on the surge of cold air was borne a great throbbing volume of

sounds, the roar of the cheering of vast multitudes, the booming of

artillery, the clash of the pealing joy-bells. In stately procession

the Emperor reached the altar, bent his head, and his lips touched

the sacred image. When he turned to leave the building, the wildest

confusion of enthusiasm laid hold of the throng. His people closed

in about the Czar till he had no power to move. The great struggle

was but to touch him, and the chaos of policemen, officers, shrieking

women, and enthusiastic peasants swayed and heaved to and fro; the

Emperor in the centre, pale, his lips trembling with emotion, just as

I had seen him when his troops were cheering him on the battlefield;

struggling for the bare possibility to stand or move forward, for

he was lifted by the pressure clean off his feet, and whirled about

helplessly. At length, extricated by a wedge of officers, he reached

his carriage, only to experience almost as wonderful an ovation

when he reached the raised portico of the Winter Palace. As for the

Czarevna, the lady who is now Empress of Russia, her experiences at

the Winter Palace were unique. As her carriage, following that of the

Emperor, approached the terrace, the populace utilised it as a point

whence to see and cheer the Emperor. Men scrambled on to the horses,

the box, the roof, the wheels; progress became utterly impossible. A

group of cadets and students, who lined the base of the terrace, were

equal to the occasion. They dragged open the carriage door by dint of

immense exertion: they lifted out the bright little lady, who clearly

was greatly enjoying the fun, and they passed her from hand to hand

above their heads, till the Emperor caught her, lifted her over the

balustrades, and set her down by his side on the terrace.

The fall of Plevna, and the welcome of his capital, had restored

the Czar to apparent health and spirits. I watched him as he moved

around the great salon of the Winter Palace, greeting his guests at

the home-coming reception. He strode the inlaid floor a very emperor,

upright of figure, proud of gait, arrayed in a brilliant uniform, and

covered with decorations. A glittering court and suite thronged about

the stately man with enthusiastically respectful homage; the dazzling

splendour of the Winter Palace formed the setting of the sumptuous

picture; and as I gazed on the magnificent scene, I could hardly

realise that the central figure of it, in the pomp of his Imperial

state, was of a verity the self-same man in whose presence I had stood

in the squalid Bulgarian hovel, the same worn, anxious, shabby, wistful

man who, with spasmodic utterance and the expression in his eyes as of

a hunted deer, had asked me breathless questions as to the episodes and

issue of the fighting.

In many respects the monarch whom the Nihilists slew was a grand man.

He was absolutely free from that corruption which is the blackest curse

of Russia, and whose taint is among the nearest relatives of the Great

White Czar. He had the purest aspirations to do his loyal duty toward

the huge empire over which he ruled, and never did he spare himself in

toilsome work. He took few pleasures; the melancholy of his position

made sombre his features, and darkened for him all the brightness of

life. For he had the bitterest consciousness of the abuses that were

alienating the subjects who had been wont in their hearts, as on their

lips, to couple the names of “God and the Czar.” He knew how the great

nation writhed and groaned; and he, absolute despot though he was,

writhed and groaned no less in the realisation of his impotency to

ameliorate the evils. For although he was honest and sincerely well

intentioned, there was a fatal weakness in the nature of Alexander II.

True, he began his reign with an assertion of masterfulness; but then,

unworthy favourites gained his ear; his family compassed him about;

the whole huge _vis inertiæ_ of immemorial rottenness and obstructive

officialism lay doggedly athwart the hard path of reform. Alexander’s

aspirations were powerless to pierce the dense, solid obstacle; and

the consciousness of his impotency, with the no less disquieting

consciousness that it behoved him to cleanse the Augean stable of the

State, embittered his whole later life.

A YARN OF THE “PRESIDENT” FRIGATE

Concerning the history of the subjoined curious narrative, the

original manuscript of which, written in now faded ink on the rough

dingy paper of sixty years ago, was placed in my hands in the course

of a recent visit to America, only a few words are necessary. The

narrative is addressed to “Mrs. Rodgers and sister,” and bears to have

been written at the request of the former lady, after its author’s

return from sea on the termination of his service as surgeon of the

_President_ frigate, the famous fighting cruiser of the American

Republic in the war with England of 1812-14. Commodore Rodgers, who

commanded the _President_ during the war, and who was the husband of

the lady for whom the account was written, gave to Dr. Turk’s narrative

his endorsement of its perfect accuracy. Of the authenticity of the

document there can be no possibility of doubt.

NARRATIVE

“Although the events now for the first time recorded occurred

ten years since, they are still fresh in my recollection, and

have made so strong an impression on my mind that time can never

obliterate them. They partake so much of the marvellous that I

would not dare to commit them to paper were there not so many

living witnesses to the truth of the facts narrated, some of them

of the greatest respectability, even sanctioned by Commodore

Rodgers. The story is considered by all who have heard it too

interesting to be lost; I therefore proceed to the task while those

are in existence who can confirm it. Living in an enlightened age

and country, when bigotry and superstition have nearly lost their

influence over the minds of men, particularly among the citizens

of this republic, where knowledge is so universally diffused, I

have often been deterred from relating circumstances so wonderful

as to stagger the belief of the most credulous. But facts are

stubborn things, and the weight of testimony in this case cannot

be resisted. Unable for want of time and room to enter so far

into particulars as I should wish, I will give, to the best of my

recollection, the most prominent and striking occurrences, in the

order in which they took place, without comment or embellishment.

“Some time in the latter part of December 1813, a man by the name

of William Kemble, aged about twenty-three (a seaman on board of

the U.S. Frigate _President_, commanded by Commodore John Rodgers,

on a cruise, then near the Western Islands), was brought to me from

one of the tops, in which he was stationed, having burst a vessel

in his lungs, being at the time in great danger of instant death,

the blood gushing with great violence from his mouth and nostrils.

With much difficulty I succeeded in stopping the discharge, and he

was put upon the use of remedies suited to his case. I visited him

often, and had the best of opportunity of becoming acquainted with

his temper, habits, and intellectual attainments; and under all

circumstances, during his illness, found his language and behaviour

such as stamped him the rough, profane, and illiterate sailor. It

is my belief, although I cannot positively assert it, that he could

not either read or write. It is certain that his conversation never

differed in the least from that of the most ignorant and abandoned

of his associates, constantly mixed with oaths and the lowest

vulgarity. Had he possessed talents, or learning, he must have

betrayed it to me during his long confinement.

“In the early part of January (1814), a vessel bore down upon us,

with every appearance of being an English frigate. All hands were

called to quarters, and after a short and animated address by the

Commodore to the crew, all prepared to do their duty. Before I

descended to the cockpit, well knowing Kemble’s spirit and how

anxious he would be to partake in the glory of the victory (defeat

never entered our thoughts), I thought it best to visit him. After

stating to him the peculiar situation he was in, and the great

danger he would be exposed to by the least emotion, I entreated him

and ordered him not to stir during the action, which he promised

to observe. We were soon obliged to fire. At the sound of the

first gun he could restrain himself no longer, but, regardless

of my admonitions and of his own danger, he rushed upon deck and

flew to his gun, laying hold to help run her out. A fresh and

tremendous discharge from his lungs was the consequence, and he was

brought down to me again in a most deplorable state. I apprehended

immediate death, but by the application of the proper remedies, I

succeeded once more in stopping the hæmorrhage, by which he was

reduced to a state of the most extreme debility. Being near the

equator, and suffering much from heat, his hammock was slung on

the gun deck between the ports, affording the best circulation of

air. He continued for some time free from hæmorrhage, but was under

the constant use of medicine, and was confined to a particular

diet. This made him fretful, and he would frequently charge my

mates with starving him, at the same time damning them in the true

sailor fashion. After some time, the crew being again called to

quarters at night, he was necessarily removed below to the sick

berth (commonly called bay). This was followed by another discharge

of blood from his lungs, which was renewed at intervals until his

death.

“On January 17, in the afternoon, Dr. Birchmore, my first mate,

came to me on deck, and reported Kemble to be dead. I directed him

to see that his messmates did what was usual on such occasions

preparatory to committing his remains to the deep. About two

hours after this, Dr. Birchmore again called on me. He said that

Kemble had come to life, and was holding forth to the sailors in

a strange way. I directly went down, where I witnessed one of the

most remarkable and unaccountable transactions that perhaps had

ever fallen to the lot of man to behold. Kemble had awakened as it

were from sleep, raised himself up, and called for his messmates

in particular, and those men who were not on duty, to attend to

his words. He told them he had experienced death, but was allowed

a short space of time to return and give them, as well as the

officers, some directions for their future conduct in life. In

this situation I found him, surrounded by the crew, all mute with

astonishment, and paying the most serious attention to every word

that escaped from his lips. The oldest men were in tears, not a

dry eye was to be seen or a whisper heard; all was as solemn and

as silent as the grave. His whole body was as cold as death could

make it. There was no pulsation perceptible at the wrists, the

temples, or the chest. His voice was clear and powerful, his eyes

uncommonly brilliant and animated. After a short and pertinent

address to the medical gentlemen, he told me in a peremptory manner

to bring Commodore Rodgers to him, as he had something to say to

him before he finally left us. The Commodore consented to go with

me, when a scene was presented, truly novel and indescribable,

and calculated to fill with awe the stoutest heart. The sick bay

(or berth) in which he lay is entirely set apart to the use of

those who are confined to their beds by illness. Supported by the

surgeons, surrounded by his weeping and astonished comrades, a

crowd of spectators looking through the lattice-work which enclosed

the room, a common japanned lamp throwing out a sickly light, and

a candle held opposite his face by an attendant, such was the

situation of things when our worthy Commander made his appearance;

and well does he remember the effect produced by so uncommon a

spectacle, especially when followed by the utterance of these words

from the mouth of one long supposed to have been dead: ‘Commodore

Rodgers, I have sent for you, sir; being commissioned by a higher

power to address you for a short time, and to deliver the message

entrusted to me when I was permitted to revisit the earth. Once I

trembled in your presence, and was eager to obey your commands;

but now I am your superior, being no longer an inhabitant of the

earth. I have seen the glories of the world of spirits. I am not

permitted to make known what I have beheld; indeed, were I not

forbidden, language would be inadequate to the task; ’tis enough

for you and the crew to know that I have been sent back to earth

to reanimate for a few hours my lifeless body, commissioned by God

to perform the work I am now engaged in.’ He then, in language so

chaste and appropriate as would not have disgraced the lips or the

pen of a divine, took a hasty view of the moral and religious

duties incumbent on the commander of a ship of war. He reviewed

the vices prevalent on ship-board, pointed out the relative duties

of officers and men, and concluded by urging the necessity of

reformation and repentance. He did not, as was feared by our brave

commander, attempt to prove the sinfulness of fighting and wars,

but, on the contrary, warmly recommended to the men the performance

of their duty to their country with courage and fidelity. His

speeches occupied about three-quarters of an hour, and if the

whole could have been taken down at the time, they would have made

a considerable pamphlet, which would no doubt have been in great

demand. Dr. Birchmore, now at Boston, heard all the addresses, I

only the last.

When he finished with the Commodore, his head dropped upon his

breast, his eyes closed, and he appeared to have passed through a

second death. No pulsation nor the least degree of warmth could

be perceived during the time that he was speaking. I ordered him

to be laid aside, and left him. I was soon sent for into the

cabin, where the Commodore required from me an explanation of the

case on rational and philosophical principles. This I endeavoured

to give. I but in part succeeded. It would swell this narrative

too much to repeat all I said in endeavouring to elucidate the

subject. At best it proved a lame attempt, for when asked how this

man, without education, reading, or mixing in other society than

that of common sailors, should acquire the command of the purest

language, properly arranged, and delivered clearly, distinctly,

with much animation and great effect?--to this question I gave

no reply, as it was, and ever will remain, inexplicable, without

admitting supernatural agency. The days of miracles are past, and

I know I shall be laughed at by many for dwelling on, or even

repeating, this story. But never, since I arrived at the years of

discretion, has anything taken a stronger hold upon my mind, and

that man must have been made of strange materials who could have

been an indifferent spectator. Was he divinely illuminated? was he

inspired? or was the whole the effect of natural causes? These are

questions which must have arisen in the minds of many, and which

must be left for the learned of two professions to answer.

“I retired to bed, deeply reflecting upon the past, unable to

sleep, when about nine o’clock P.M., many hours after Kemble had

been laid by, I was called out of bed to visit a man taken suddenly

ill in his hammock, hanging near Kemble’s apartment. It was an

hour when all but the watch on deck had turned in; general silence

reigned, and all the lights below put out, with the exception of a

single lamp in the sick apartment, where lay the remains of Kemble.

I had bled the sick man--he was relieved. I entered the sick-room

before I retired to replace something, and was turning round to

leave it, being alone, when suddenly I was almost petrified upon

beholding Kemble sitting up in his berth, with his eyes (which had

regained their former brilliancy and intelligence) fixed intently

upon mine. I became, for a moment, speechless and motionless.

Thinks I to myself, what have I done, or left undone, in this man’s

case, that should cause him thus to stare at me, at this late hour,

and I alone? I waited a long time in painful suspense, dreading

some horrid disclosure, when I was relieved by his commanding me

to fetch him some water. With what alacrity I obeyed can easily be

imagined. I gave him a tin mug containing water, which he put to

his mouth, drank off the contents, and returned to me; then laid

himself quietly down for the last time. His situation was precisely

the same in every respect as before described. The time was now

expired which, he had said, was given him to remain in the body.

The next day by noon, all hands attended as usual to hear the

funeral service read, and see his remains consigned to a watery

grave. It was an unusually solemn period. Seamen are naturally

superstitious, and on this occasion their minds had been wrought

upon in a singular manner. Decorum is always observed by sailors

at such times; but now they were all affected to tears, and when

the body was slid from the plank into the sea, every one rushed

instinctively to the ship’s side to take a last look. The usual

weights had been attached to the feet, yet, as if in compliance

with his comrades’ anxiety to see more of him, the body rose

perpendicularly from the water breast-high two or three times.

This incident added greatly to the astonishment already created in

the minds of the men. I beg leave to remark that it was not thought

proper to keep the body longer in the warm latitude we were in.

“I have now given a short and very imperfect sketch of the

important events attending the last illness and death of William

Kemble. It is submitted to the ladies in this state, begging they

will excuse haste and inaccuracy. The change produced upon the crew

was for a time very remarkable. It appeared as if they would never

smile or swear again. The effect wore off by degrees, except when

the subject was renewed.

W. TURK.”

Apart altogether from the weirdness of it, worthy Dr. Turk’s

simply-told story is full of interest, by reason of the side-light it

throws on the nautical character of his time. No maker of phrases is

the honest naval surgeon. A fight the good man curtly accepts as in

the day’s work; and as all “prepare to do their duty,” he “descends

into the cockpit” to do his, in the serene assurance of victory, since

“defeat never entered our thoughts,” and the mere reference thereto is

contemptuously relegated to a parenthesis. So matter-of-fact is he,

so doggedly does he stick to the topic he has in hand, that he has

not a word to spare to describe the fight, or to tell of its issue.

That is outside his task. He has stayed on deck, indeed, to hear the

Commodore’s “short and animated address,” and then his place is in the

cockpit, with his instruments out, his coat off, and his shirt-sleeves

turned up, waiting for what contributions the effort to attain the

“glory of the victory” may send down the ladder to him.

But as he goes he thinks of his patient. Quite an ordinary sea-dog,

this patient, clearly, in the surgeon’s estimation. “The rough,

profane, illiterate sailor” of the period--proved by his conversation

to be “ignorant and abandoned”; destitute utterly of talents and

learning. No word of approval for this waif from out the “tops” has the

laconic surgeon; yet, although seemingly because it was so commonplace

an attribute that he does not care to go out of his way to apply the

term, he has discerned in him the spirit of heroism. So he condemns

William Kemble to death, should he stir; and further, he bethinks

himself of the force of discipline, and so adds to his representations

as a surgeon his order as an officer. William Kemble, as well he might,

has promised obedience; but the “sound of the first gun” overcomes

at once the assurance of death and the bonds of discipline. Little

good can “the glory of the victory” work for this “rough, profane,

and illiterate sailor.” It is the fighting impulse in him, the ardour

of the fray, as Kinglake has it, that conquers death and discipline,

whistles down the wind “my admonitions and his own danger.” And so, by

and by, after he has survived to characteristically damn the surgeon’s

mates “in true sailor fashion” for starving him, William Kemble

removed to the “sick berth, commonly called bay,” finds that there is

no more fight left in him, and Dr. Birchmore comes on deck and reports

him dead.

The present writer considers himself specially fortunate in that

no commodore requires from him an explanation “on rational and

philosophical principles” of the question, which worthy Dr. Turk leaves

“for the learned of two professions to answer.” Certain theories

might be diffidently put forward, and Kemble, spite of Dr. Turk’s

adverse diagnosis, might have been a gentleman before his conversation

sank to the level of “that of the most ignorant and abandoned of his

associates,” while the dramatic instincts belonging to others of

his name may have kindled in him in the interval of a syncope that

simulated actual dissolution. Dr. Turk, with naïve frankness, confesses

that his effort to elucidate the subject was but “a lame attempt”; and

why need one who is not of the “learned of two professions” wantonly

risk a like judgment?

FIRE-DISCIPLINE

The compound word which I have taken as the title for this paper

is the non-technical expression for that conduct of the soldier

under the stress of actual battle which is expected from him as the

crowning result of assiduous moral and professional training. It is

fire-discipline that is the grand test of true soldierhood, not dapper

marching on the parade, not smartness in picking up dressing, not

ramrod-like setting up, polished buttons, and spotless accoutrements.

These all have their value, not, however, as results, but as

contributories; they are among the means that help to the all-important

end, that when the bullets are humming and the shells are crashing the

soldier shall be a composed, alert, disciplined unit of a mighty whole

whose purpose is victory. The soldier of the great Frederick’s era was

a machine. Moltke’s man is trained with this distinction between his

predecessor and himself, that he shall be a machine endowed with, and

expected to exercise, the faculty of intelligence. But his intelligence

must help toward, not interfere with, that discipline which must be to

him a second nature.

In certain criticisms that have appeared in our newspapers from time

to time on the German military manœuvres, severe strictures have

been pronounced on the freedom with which the soldiers were allowed,

and indeed occasionally forced, to expose themselves to the enemy’s

fire. There were allegations of resultant “annihilation” if the sham

foe had been a real one, and contrasts were instituted between the

German “recklessness” of cover and the carefulness with which in our

own drills the duty of availing himself of cover is impressed on the

British soldier. That a live man, whose life has been protected by his

carefulness of cover, is a more useful weapon of war than is a dead man

whose life has been sacrificed by his neglect of cover, would seem a

matter beyond controversy. And yet there are conditions in which a dead

soldier may be of incalculably greater value than a living soldier. The

Germans recognise the force of this apparent paradox. Our critics of

their manœuvres do not. The latter seem to regard a battle as an affair

the ruling principle of which is, that the participants should have for

their single aim the non-exposure to hostile fire of their more or less

valuable persons. The Germans, on the other hand, in their practical,

blunt way, have asked themselves, what is the business aim of a

battle--to save men’s skins, or to win it, and so have done with it?

and they have answered the question in every battle they have fought

since that terrible massacre of their Guards on the smooth glacis of

St. Privat, thus: This battle has got to be won. We will not squander

men’s lives needlessly as we did then, but we will not put its issue in

jeopardy by over-assiduous cover-seeking. Striking and dodging are not

easily compatible, and it is by hard striking that the battle is to be

finally won.

The ideal soldier--well, what is the need of describing him, seeing

that, because of fallen human nature, he is all but an impossibility?

But as the marauding “Yank” philosophically remarked to General

Sherman, “You can’t expect all the cardinal virtues, uncle, for

thirteen dollars a month!” No, but you can get a good many of the

simpler martial virtues for less money. There is not much subtlety

about the ordinary run of martial virtues. My own belief, founded on

some experience of divers nationalities in war-time, is that most men

are naturally cowards. I have the fullest belief in the force of the

colonel’s retort on his major. “Colonel,” said the major, in a hot

fire, “you are afraid; I see you tremble!” “Yes, sir,” replied the

colonel, “and if you were as afraid as I am, you would run away!” I

do think three out of four men would run away if they dared. There

are doubtless some men whom nature has constituted so obtuse as not

to know fear, and who therefore deserve no credit for their courage;

and there are others with nerves so strong as to crush down the rising

“funk.” The madness of blood does get into men’s heads, no doubt. I

have the firmest conviction that in cold blood the mass of us would

prefer the air quiet rather than whistling with bullets. Most men are

like the colonel of the dialogue--they display bravery because in

the presence of their comrades and of the danger they are too great

cowards to evince poltroonery. Thus the average man made a capital

soldier in the old shoulder-to-shoulder days. British yokels, British

jail-birds, German handicraftsmen, German bauers, French peasants,

and French artisans, were all pretty much alike made creditable

“cannon-fodder.” They would all march into fire and brave its sting,

each man’s right and left comrade reacting on him and his rear file

supporting at once and blocking him. Once in the fire the national

idiosyncrasies developed themselves. The “funk” zone, so to speak,

had been traversed, and the Briton marched on steadfastly, the German

advanced with resolute step, the Russian stood still doggedly, and

the Frenchman spurted into a run with a yell. When the blood began

to flow and the struck men went down, the passion of the battle

became the all-absorbing question. And so, whether by greater or less

steadfastness, by greater or less dash, the battle was won or lost.

Till the culminating-point, no man ever was thrown wholly upon his own

individuality, or ever lost the consciousness of public opinion as

represented by his comrades.

“Shoulder-to-shoulder” is long dead, and its influences have mostly

died with it, but in the present days of the “swarm attack” human

nature remains unchanged. The soldier of to-day has to wrestle with

or respond to his own individuality; public opinion no longer touches

him on each of his elbows. He is tried by a much higher test than

in the old close-formation days. And I know, because I have seen,

that he often fails in the higher _moral_ which his wider scope of

individuality exacts of him if he is to be efficient. Herein lies the

weak point of the loose order of fighting. Cover is enforced, and while

physical contact is lost, the moral touch is impaired. The officer

gives the forward signal, but the consequences of not obeying it do

not come home with so swift vividness to the reluctant individual man.

He is behind cover, having obeyed the imperative instructions of his

drill master. How dear is that cover! he thinks, and what a fiendish

air-torture that is into which he must uprear himself! So he lies

still, at least awhile, and his own particular wave goes on and leaves

him behind. He may join the next, or he may continue to lie still. It

is a great temptation; human nature is weak, and life is sweet.

I have seen six nations essay the attack in loose order, and there is

no doubt in my mind that the German soldier is the most conscientious

in carrying it out. His qualifications for it are unique. He was a man

of some character when he came to the army. In the home circle out

of which he stepped into the ranks he was no black sheep; he has a

local public opinion to live up to; his comrades around him are of his

neighbourhood, and will speak of him there either to his credit or

the reverse. He is a sober fellow, who knows nothing of dissipation;

his nerves have their tone unimpaired by any excesses; he has a man’s

education, yet something of the simplicity of a child; he glows

with a belief in the Fatherland; his military instruction has been

moral as well as mechanical. In fine, he is a soldier-citizen and a

citizen-soldier. But nevertheless he is human--very human indeed; and

his first experience of the advance in loose order under fire is a

severe strain upon him. He has never yet seen death plying his shafts

all around him. He still thrills with a shudder as he thinks of real

warm blood. He has not learned to be indifferent when he hears that

dull thud that tells where a bullet has found its billet.

The German military authorities understand their people, and they know

the process which men undergo in being inured to war. Therefore it is

that they do not enforce resort to “cover” with so much solicitude

as I have noticed our officers do. They know that in every company

there are men who will “lie” if allowed too great independence of

individual action; and “cover at all risks” impairs every link in the

chain of supervision. Again, they know that it is good for soldiers

to die a little occasionally. The dead, of course, are “out of it”;

but their death does not discourage, but hardens their comrades.

It seems brutal to write in this tone, but is not war all brutal?

And it is the solid truth. It may be written down as an axiom that

fire-discipline unaccompanied with casualties is weak. I remember

standing with a German general before Metz watching a skirmish. The

German battalion engaged happened to consist chiefly of young soldiers,

and they were not very steady. The old General shrugged his shoulders

and observed, “Dey vant to be a little shooted; dey vill do better

next time.” All young soldiers want to be a “little shooted”; and it

is only by exposing them somewhat, instead of coddling them for ever

behind cover, as if cover, not victory, were the aim of the day’s work,

that this experience can befall them. All soldiers are the better of

being “blooded”; they never attain purposeful coolness till they have

acquired a personal familiarity with blood and death.

After the experience of St. Privat, which stimulated the Germans

to the unprecedented feat of fundamentally altering their fighting

tactics in the very middle of a campaign, no man would be foolish

enough or homicidal enough to advocate a return to close-formation

in these days of swift-shooting firearms. As little would one argue

in favour of frequent war for the mere object of inuring soldiers to

fire-discipline. But the later tactics unquestionably tell against

the efficiency of young soldiers in their first experience of battle,

when contrasted with the old. Most of Wellington’s men at Waterloo

were green troops, yet they stood up manfully under the brunt of that

long terrible day, and after the long endurance there was heart

left in them for the final advance in line. They were thus steadfast

because such training as they possessed had habituated them to no

other prospect than the prospect, when they should be summoned to the

real business, of standing squarely up and looking in the face an

equally upstanding enemy. Now all our preliminary training is directed

to forbidding men standing up at all, and inculcating upon them,

with emphatic language, the paramount duty of dodging and sneaking.

They must be good men indeed whom a course of such tuition will not

demoralise. That it does demoralise, our recent military history goes

clearly to show. Our catastrophe at Isandlwana was due partly to the

error of employing loose formation against great masses of bold men,

whom a biting fire would deter no whit from advancing; but resulted in

the end, from the scared inability to redeem this error by a rapid,

purposeful resort to close-formation in square or squares. Once the

loose fringe of men dodging for cover was impinged on, all was over

save the massacre. The test of fire-discipline failed whenever the

strain on it became severe. The men had worked up to their skirmishing

lessons to the best of their ability; when masterful men brushed aside

the result of those lessons, there was no moral stamina to fall back

upon, no consuetude of resource to be as a second nature. A resolute

square formed round an ammunition-waggon might have made a defence

that would have lasted at least until Lord Chelmsford came back from

his straggling excursion; but no man who saw how the dead lay on that

ghastly field could persuade himself into the belief that there had

been any vigorous attempt at a rally. The only fragment of good that

came out of the Isandlwana catastrophe was the resolution, in any and

every subsequent encounter, to show the Zulus a solid front; and the

retrospect of Isandlwana infused a melancholy into the success of

Ulundi, where the most furious onslaughts recoiled from the firm face

of the British square.

The Majuba Hill affair was simply a worse copy of Isandlwana. There

was no methodised fire-discipline. It has been urged as the lesson

of Majuba Hill that the British soldier should have more careful

instruction in marksmanship. Probably enough, that would do him

good--it could not do him harm; but it was not because he was a bad

marksman that Majuba Hill was so discreditable a reverse. It was

because he is so much a creature of cover and of dodging that he went

all abroad when he saw a real live enemy standing up in front of him at

point-blank range. It may be contended that there were fire-seasoned

soldiers who participated in this unfortunate business. Yes; but

these, with no strong _moral_ to begin with, because of their early

training in assiduous “cover” tactics, had suffered in what _moral_

they might have possessed because of previous reverses. One regiment

was represented on that hill-top which had not participated in those

reverses, and was indeed fresh from successes in Afghanistan. But

Afghan fighting is not a very good school in which to acquire prompt,

serene self-command when, in old Havelock’s phrase, the colour of the

enemy’s moustaches is visible. It was but rarely that the Afghan did

not play the dodging game. He mostly does not care to look his enemy

full in the face, and he tries all he knows to prevent his enemy from

having the opportunity of looking him in the face. When the adventurous

Boer breasted the crest of the Majuba he and the British soldier

confronted each other at close quarters. It was no time for long-range

shooting, it was simply the time for fire-discipline of the readiest

practical order to make its effect felt. I imagine Briton and Boer

staring one at the other in a perturbed moment of mutual disquietude.

Who should the sooner pull himself together and take action on

returning presence of mind? The Boer had the better nerve; to use the

American expression, he was quicker on the draw. And then, for lack of

fire-discipline, for want of training to be cool, and to keep their

heads within close view of a hostile muzzle, the British went to pieces

in uncontrollable scare, and the sad issue was swift to be consummated.

The influence of the “get to cover” tactics has made itself apparent,

if we care to read between the lines, in numberless pettier instances

during our recent little wars. The indiscriminate bolt of a picket may

seem a small thing, and it will happen now and then in all armies,

but when it occurs frequently it is the surest evidence of a feeble

_moral_. It has happened too often of late in British armies, and I

trace its prevalence, which I do not regard as too strong a word, to

the lack of fire-discipline brought about by the “cover at any price”

training. A man of tufts and hillocks, and bushes and molehills, from

the day he is dismissed the manual exercise, a being who has never been

let realise in peace-time the possibility that in war-time he may find

himself uncovered in the face of an enemy; when that crisis impends

suddenly, or seems to do so, the young soldier shrinks and breaks. He

is unfamiliarised in advance with his obligation to die serenely at

his post. He does not make a bolt of it because he is a coward, or

rather a greater than average coward, but simply because his training

has not furnished him with a reserve of purposeful presence of mind.

Men who remember Ginghilovo, “Fort Funk,” and the nights on the white

Umvaloosi, cannot but own to the force of this reasoning. Several

experiences of the Eastern Soudan expeditions go to strengthen it; and

if the conduct of the desert column seems to weaken it, there is the

answer that the desert column consisted wholly of picked men.

Tel-el-Kebir furnished an incidental illustration of our shortcoming

in fire-discipline, which, as I contend, has its main cause in the

effects of too stringent urgency to cover. Lord Wolseley showed

that discernment which is one of his most valuable characteristics,

in refraining from submitting his soldiers to the strain of a

“swarm attack” up to the Egyptian position in fair daylight; and in

choosing instead, as a minor risk, a night advance, spite of all

its contingencies of hazard, with the hoped-for culmination of a

surprise at daybreak. The issue proved his wisdom; and a phase of

that combat, described with soldierly frankness by Sir Edward Hamley,

must have given the commanding general a thrill of relief that he

had conserved the spirit of his troops for the final dash, without

exposing them to a previous ordeal of fire. That dash, made while yet

the gloom of the dying night lay on the sand, General Hamley tells

us, was 150 yards long, and it cost the brigade that carried it out

200 casualties ere the Egyptian entrenchment was crowned. It was done

with the first impulse; no check was let stop the onward impetus of

the _élan_; fire-discipline was not called into exercise at all. The

whole of Hamley’s first line pressed on into the interior of the

enemy’s position. The second line followed, but Hamley, with a wise

prescience, “stopped the parts of it that were nearest to him as

they came up, wishing to keep a support in hand which should be more

readily available than such as the brigade in rear could supply.” It

was well he did this thing; but for his doing of it, the shadow of a

far other issue to Tel-el-Kebir lies athwart the following quotation.

“The light was increasing every moment; our own men had begun to shoot

immediately after entering the entrenched position, and aim could

now be taken. The fight was at its hottest, and how it might end was

still doubtful, for many of our advanced troops had recoiled even to

the edge of the entrenchment” (beyond which they had penetrated 200

or 300 yards into the interior); “but there I was able to stop them,

and reinforcing them with a small body I had kept in hand (who had

remained, I think, in the ditch) I sent in all together, and henceforth

they maintained their ground.” They recoiled, and they recoiled by

reason of their weakness in fire-discipline. It is a fair query--How

severe was the strain? As regards its duration, but a few moments’

fighting sufficed to bring about the recoil; that is made clear by the

circumstance that the supporting brigade, following close as it did,

yet was not up in time to redress the dangerous situation. In regard

to its severity, General Hamley permits himself to use language of the

most vivid character. “A hotter fire it is impossible to imagine.”

The brigade was “enclosed in a triangle of fire.” “The enemy’s

breechloaders were good, his ammunition abundant, and the air was a

hurricane of bullets, through which shells from the valley tore their

way.” “The whole area was swept by a storm of bullets.” Stronger words

could not have been used by an enthusiastic war correspondent gushing

his level best about his first skirmish; General Hamley’s expressions

are fuller-volumed than those used by the compilers of the German

staff chronicle in describing that Titanic paroxysm the climax of

Gravelotte. What stupendous damage, then, did this hottest of all hot

fires, this hurricane of bullets, effect? The casualties of the whole

division reached a total of 258 killed and wounded. Of these, “nearly

200,” General Hamley distinctly states, occurred exclusively in the

first brigade in the rush up to the entrenchment. If we assume that

the second brigade had no losses at all, and that the whole balance

of casualties occurred to the first brigade when in “the triangle

of fire,” the fall of some 60 men out of 2800 was hardly a loss to

justify the “recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment” of troops

possessed even of a moderate amount of fire-discipline. General Hamley

explains that but for the darkness and the too high aim of the enemy,

“the losses would have been tremendous.” In other words, if an actual

loss of 2 per cent, and the turmoil of the hottest fire imaginable,

yet fortunately aimed over their heads, caused the troops “to recoil

even to the edge of the entrenchment,” the “tremendous losses” that

a better-aimed fire would have produced, it seems pretty evident,

would have caused them to “recoil” so much farther that Tel-el-Kebir

would have been a defeat instead of a victory. The Egyptians did not

shoot straight because they were flurried, that is, were deficient in

fire-discipline; our men “recoiled” after a very brief experience of

a devilish but comparatively harmless battle-din, because the ardour

of the first rush having died out of them, fire-discipline was not

strong enough in them to keep them braced to hold the ground the rush

had won them. It was fortunate that in Hamley they had a chief who had

prescience of their feebleness of constancy, and had taken measures to

remedy its evil effects.

During the afternoon and evening of August 18, 1870, six regiments

of the Prussian guard corps made repeated and ultimately successful

efforts to storm the French position of St. Privat. What that position

was like, the following authentic description sets forth. “In front of

St. Privat were several parallel walls of knee-high masonry and shelter

trenches. Those lines, successively commanding each other, were filled

with compact rows of skirmishers, and in their rear upon the commanding

height lay like a natural bastion, and girt by an almost continuous

wall, the town-like village, the stone houses of which were occupied

up to the roofs.” There was no shelter on the three-quarters of a mile

of smooth natural glacis, over which the regiments moved steadfastly

to the attack; every fold of it was searched by the dominant musketry

fire. They tried and failed, but they kept on trying till they

succeeded. And what did the success cost them? The six regiments (each

three battalions strong) numbered roughly 18,000 men; of these, 6000

had gone down before Canrobert quitted his grip of the “town-like

village.” One-third of their whole number! It was the cost of this

sacrifice that caused the Germans to adopt the unprecedented step of

altering their attacking tactics in the middle of a campaign. But the

change was made, not because the troops had proved unequal to the task

set them, but because the cost of the accomplishment of that task, in

the face of the Chassepot fire, had been so terrible. Now I am not

concerned to exalt the horn of the Prussian fighting men at the cost

of the British soldier. I will assume, and there is full evidence in

favour of the assumption, that the British soldier of the pre-dodging

era could take his punishment and come through it victoriously, as

stoutly as any German that ever digested _Erbswürst_ and smelt of

sour rye-bread. Of the 10,000 British fellows whom Wellington sent at

Badajos, 3000 were down before the torn old rag waved over the place.

Ligonier’s column was 14,000 strong when the Duke of Cumberland gave

it the word to make that astounding march through the chance gap, a

bare 900 paces wide, between the cannon before the village of Vezon

and those in the Redoubt d’Eu, right into and behind the heart of

the French centre on the bloody day of Fontenoy. There is some doubt

whether those quixotic courtesies passed between Lord Charles Hay and

the Count d’Auteroche, but there is no doubt whatever that when the

column, thwarted of the reward of valour by deficiency of support, had

sturdily marched back through the appalling cross-fire in the cramped

hollow-way, and had methodically fronted into its old position, it

was found that at least 4000 out of the 14,000 had been shot down.

Carlyle, indeed, makes the loss much heavier. Yet a notabler example

of the British soldier’s gluttony for punishment is furnished in the

statistics of the Inkermann losses. The total force that kept Mount

Inkermann against the Russians amounted to 7464 officers and men.

Of these, when the long fierce day was done, no fewer than 2487 had

fallen, just one-third of the whole number. The manner in which our

soldiers successfully contended against fearful odds in this battle

is a phenomenal example of fire-discipline of the grand old dogged

type. It is but one, however, of the many proofs that the world has no

stauncher fighting-man than is the British soldier intrinsically.

But I think it would be difficult to convince the mind of an impartial

man that the British soldiers who, at Tel-el-Kebir, “recoiled even

to the edge of the entrenchment” under the stress of a “hurricane of

bullets” fired high and of a loss of 2 per cent, could have borne up

and conquered under such a strain of sustained and terrible punishment

as that through which the Prussian Guard struggled to the goal of

victory at St. Privat. And if not, why not? There was a larger

proportion of veterans among the Prussians at St. Privat than in the

Highland Brigade at Tel-el-Kebir, and that gave a certain advantage,

doubtless, to the former. Some would lean on the superior “citizenhood”

of the Prussian over the British soldier; but our Highland regiments

are exceptionally respectably recruited. Yet I venture to set down as

the main distinction that, while the Prussian soldier of 1870 was a

soldier of the “shoulder-to-shoulder” era, the British soldier of 1882

was a creature of the “get-to-cover” period. Then, it may be urged, the

Prussian soldier of to-day--creature, nay, creator as he is of this

new order of things--is as incapable of repeating St. Privat as the

British soldier of to-day is of rivalling that stupendous feat. No. It

is true the German is no longer a “shoulder-to-shoulder” man, but he is

not drilled with so single an eye to cover-taking (and, I might add,

cover-keeping) as is our British Thomas Atkins. He is trained to expect

to be “a little shooted” as he goes forward; he has better-experienced

non-commissioned officers to supervise the details of that advance than

our soldier has; his individuality is more sedulously brought out. In

a word, everything with him makes toward the development in him of a

higher character of fire-discipline even in his first initiation into

bullet-music.

It may be said that the Germans, because of the magnitude of their

forces, have not so urgent need to be careful of their men as is

requisite in regard to an army of scant numbers and feeble resources.

They can afford, it may be said, to be a little wasteful; whereas a

weaker military power must practise assiduous economy of its live

material. But if the seeming wastefulness contributes to win the

battle, and the economy endangers that result, the wastefulness is

surely sound wisdom, the economy penny-wise. The object before either

army is identical--to win the battle. If an army shall come short of

success because of its reluctance to buy success at the price success

exacts, the wise course for it is to refrain altogether from serious

fighting. It is the old story--that there is no making of omelettes

without the breaking of eggs. You may break so many eggs as to spoil

the omelette; but the Germans have realised how much easier it is to

spoil the omelette by not breaking eggs enough. And so they break their

eggs, not lavishly, but with a discreet hand, in which there is no

undue chariness. They lay their account with taking a certain amount of

loss by exposure in the “swarm-advance” as preferable, for a variety of

reasons, to the disadvantages of painful cover-dodging. They can afford

to dig a few more graves after the battle is won, if, indeed, taking

all things into consideration, that work should be among the results of

the day’s doings.

Than “annihilation” there is no more favourite word with the critics

of manœuvres and sham-fights. In truth it is as hard a thing to

“annihilate” a body of troops as it is to kill a scandal. In a literal

sense there are very few records of such a catastrophe; if used in

a figurative sense to signify a loss so great as to put the force

suffering it _hors de combat_, there is amazing testimony to the

quantity of “annihilation” good troops have accepted without any such

hapless result. Here are four instances taken almost at random. The

Confederates, out of 68,000 men engaged at Gettysburg, lost 18,000,

but Meade held his hand from interfering with their orderly retreat.

Of that battle the climax was the assault of Pickett’s division, “the

flower of Virginia,” against Webb’s front on the left of Cemetery Hill.

Before the heroic Armistead called for the “cold steel” and carried

Gibbon’s battery with a rush, the division had met with a variety of

experiences during its mile-and-a-half advance over the smooth ground

up to the crest. “When it first came into sight it had been plied

with solid shot; then half-way across it had been vigorously shelled,

and the double canisters had been reserved for its nearer approach.

An enfilading fire tore through its ranks; the musketry blazed forth

against it with deadly effect.” This is the evidence of an eye-witness

on the opposite side, who adds, “but it came on magnificently.” Yes,

it came on to cold steel and clubbed muskets, and after a desperate

struggle it went back foiled, to the accompaniments which had marked

its advance. But, heavy as were its losses, it was not “annihilated.”

Pickett’s division survived to be once and again a thorn in the Federal

side before the final day of fate came to it at Appomatox Court-House.

At Mars-la-Tour, Alvensleben’s two infantry divisions, numbering

certainly not over 18,000 men (for they had already lost heavily at

the Spicheren Berg), sacrificed within a few of 7000 during the long

summer hours while they stood all but unsupported athwart the course of

the French army retreating from Metz. But so far were they from being

annihilated, that forty-eight hours later they made their presence

acutely felt on the afternoon of Gravelotte. In the July attack on

Plevna, of the 28,000 men with whom Krüdener and Schahofskoy went

in, they took out under 21,000. One regiment of the latter’s command

lost 725 killed and 1200 wounded--about 75 per cent of its whole

number--yet the Russian retirement was not disorderly; and next day

the troops were in resolute cohesion awaiting what might befall them.

In the September attack on Plevna, of 74,000 Russo-Roumanian infantry

engaged, the losses reached 18,000. Skobeleff commanded 18,000 men, and

at the end of his two days’ desperate fighting, not 10,000 of these

were left standing. But there was no annihilation, either literally or

conventionally, if one may use the term. The survivors who had fought

on the 11th and 12th September were ready at the word to go in again on

the 13th; and how they marched across the Balkans later is one of the

marvels of modern military history.

Those examples of stoicism, of fire-discipline strained to a terrible

tension, but not breaking under the strain, were exhibited by

soldiers who did not carry into practice the tactics of non-exposure.

The Russo-Turkish war, it is true, was within the “cover” era, but

the Russians in this respect, as in a good many others--such, for

instance, as in their lack of a propensity to “recoil”--were behind the

times. But with a strange callousness to the effect of breechloading

fire against infantry, the Russians were singularly chary of exposing

their cavalry to it. Indeed, cavalry may be said to have gone out of

fashion with many professors of modern war. With the most tempting

opportunities we made the scantiest use of our brigade of regular

cavalry in the Zulu war, and the best-known occasion on which the

cavalry arm was prominently called into action in Afghanistan was

the reverse of a signal success. But although the critics oracularly

pronounce that the day of cavalry charges has gone by, and blame

the Germans for exposing their cavalry to the breechloader in their

manœuvres, the Germans adhere to the conviction that in the teeth of

the breechloader a cavalry charge is not only not an impossibility,

but an offensive that may still be resorted to with splendid effect.

They can point back to an actual experience. I think there is no more

effective yet restrained description of fighting in all the range of

war literature than the official narrative of Bredow’s charge with the

7th Cuirassiers and the 16th Lancers on the afternoon of Mars-la-Tour.

“It was only 2 P.M., the day yet young; no infantry, no reserves, and

the nearest support a long way off.... Now was the time to see what a

self-sacrificing cavalry could do.... Bredow saw at a glance that the

crisis demanded an energetic attack in which the cavalry must charge

home, and, if necessary, should and must sacrifice itself. The first

French line” (breechloaders and all) “is ridden over; the line of guns

is broken through; teams and gunners put to the sword. The second line

is powerless to check the vigorous charge of horse. The batteries on

the heights farther to rear limber up and seek safety in flight. Eager

to engage and thirsting for victory, the Prussian squadrons charge even

through the succeeding valley, until, after a career of 3000 paces,

they are met on all sides by French cavalry. Bredow sounds the recall.

Breathless from the long ride, thinned by enemy’s bullets, without

reserves, and hemmed in by hostile cavalry, they have to fight their

way back. After some hot _mêlées_ with the enemy’s horsemen, they once

more cut their way through the previously overridden lines of artillery

and cavalry, and harassed by a thick rain of bullets, and with the foe

in rear, the remnant hastens back to Flavigny.... The bold attack had

cost the regiments half their strength.”

They had gone in under 800 strong; the charge cost them 363 of their

number, including sixteen officers. But that charge in effect wrecked

France. It arrested the French advance till supports came up to

Alvensleben, and to its timely effect is traceable the current of

events that ended in the surrender of Metz. It was a second Balaclava

charge, and a bloodier one; and there was this distinction, that

it had a purpose, and that that purpose was achieved. It succeeded

because of the noble valour and constancy of the troopers who made

it. Balaclava proved that our troopers possessed those virtues in no

feebler degree. Till the millennium comes there will be emergencies

when cavalry that will “charge home” and “sacrifice itself” may be

employed purposefully; and cavalry should never be allowed to forget

that this is its ultimate _raison d’être_. There is the risk that

it may do so, if it is kept always skulking around the fringes of

operations, and not given any opportunity of being “a little shooted.”

A CHRISTMAS DINNER DE PROFUNDIS

I have eaten a good many Christmas dinners in strange places, and have

gone without the great feast of our nation in yet stranger. I have lost

my Christmas dinner in a wholly unexpected manner, and have achieved

that meal by a not less unexpected stroke of good fortune. At noon on

Christmas Day, just thirty years ago, the outlook for our Christmas

dinner consisted of a scrap of raw rusty pork and a ship-biscuit sodden

in sea-water; and the prospect of even that poor fare was precarious,

in face of the momentary danger of a watery grave. Four hours later I

was the guest at a board groaning with the good cheer appropriate to

the “festive season.”

Just of age, I had been spending the summer of 1859 in travelling

through Canada, and in the late autumn found myself in Quebec,

intending to be back in England in time for the Christmastide with my

relatives at home. One evening I took stock of my financial resources,

and found I had only a very small sum to the fore--barely enough to

clear me in Quebec and pay my fare to England either as steerage

passenger in a steamer or as cabin passenger in a sailing-vessel.

I had made the passage out very pleasantly in an emigrant sailing-ship.

It had been a summer voyage, and I did not reflect that on the Atlantic

summer does not last the year round. My pride rather revolted at a

steerage passage, and I determined on the cabin of a sailing-ship.

I know now, but I did not know then, that the sailing-ship trading

between the United Kingdom and Quebec is of the genus “timber-drogher,”

species ancient tub, good for no other trade, and good for this only,

because, no matter how leaky the timber-laden ship may be, owing to

the buoyancy of her cargo she cannot sink, and (unless the working of

her cargo break her up) the worst fate that can befall her is that she

becomes water-logged.

Of course there are bad timber ships and worse timber ships, but I

had left myself no selection. I had dallied on in the pleasantness

of Quebec until the close of navigation was imminent, and Hobson’s

choice offered in the shape of the last lingering drogher. Her brokers

advertised a cabin passage at a low fare; I engaged it without taking

the trouble to look at the ship, and on the morning named for sailing

went on board. My arrival occasioned the profoundest surprise. The

skipper had received no intimation to expect a cabin passenger,

and there were no appliances aboard for his accommodation. I took

possession of an empty bunk, into which by way of mattress I threw the

horsehair cushion of the cabin locker. My bedclothes consisted of my

travelling rug and a rough old boat-cloak I had brought from England.

We were on salt tack from the second day out, and I could not have

believed that there was a ship that sailed so badly found as was this

battered, rotten, dilapidated _Emma Morrison_--that was the jade’s

name. I should have been more savage at the egregious swindle, but that

I was too sorry to leave Quebec to have thought to spare for material

concerns. By and by that sentiment became less poignant, and was soon

supplanted by utter disgust at my surroundings. The skipper of the

_Emma Morrison_ was a sullen gloomy dog--a fellow of that breed which

has all the evil attributes of the Scot and the Irishman, and none of

the virtues of either. He hardly made a pretext of being civil to me.

He helped readily but gloomily to drink the few bottles of Canadian

whisky I had brought aboard, and, when that supply was finished,

produced a single flask of the most atrocious gin that ever was

concocted in the vilest illicit still of the Lower Town of Quebec, and

swore it constituted his entire alcoholic supply for the voyage.

Even in fine weather the loathsome old tub leaked like a sieve: she

had about half a foot of freeboard, and the water came through her

gaping top-sides and uncaulked deck, so that the cabin and my berth

were alike a chronic swamp. The junk we ate was green with decay and

mould; the ship-biscuits were peripatetic because of the weevils that

inhabited them; the butter was rancid with a rancidness indescribable;

and the pea-soup was swarthy with the filth of vermin. With a fair

wind--and as far as the Traverse we carried a fair wind--the rotten

old hooker--rotten from truck to keel, for her sole suit of canvas was

as rotten as the ragged remains of her copper-sheathing--had a maximum

speed of five knots per hour. As she rolled lumberingly through the

short seas of the Upper Gulf, the green water topped her low bulwarks,

and, swashing down on to the deck, lifted heavily the great undressed

pine-trunks which, lashed to stanchions, formed her deck load. As

those rose they strained the deck till they all but tore it from the

beams, and as they dropped when the water receded they fell with a

crash that all but stove in deck and beams together. With all her

defects and abominations, there was one redeeming feature in the _Emma

Morrison_. Her mate--she had but one--was a stanch, frank, stalwart

seaman; the boatswain was a tough old man-o’-war’s man; and the

crew--scant in numbers, for she was atrociously undermanned--were as

fine a set of fellows as ever set foot in ratline. How they obeyed the

ill-conditioned skipper; how they endured the foul discomfort of the

fo’k’sle and the wretched rations; how, hour after hour and day after

day, they dragged loyally at the Sisyphean toil of the pumps; how they

bore freezing cold, exposure, sleeplessness, and general misery I shall

never forget.

Off Anticosta we had our first gale. It was a good honest blow, that a

staunch craft would have welcomed; but the rotten old _Emma Morrison_

could not look it in the face. It left her sails in ribbons, her

top-hamper anyhow, her hold full of water, in which her ill-stowed

cargo of timber swashed about with gruesome thuds on her ribs and

knees. When the gale blew itself out we were out somewhere on the

western edge of the banks of Newfoundland, and dead helpless. All hands

went to the pumps save the captain, the mate, and a couple of old

seamen, who betook themselves assiduously to sail-mending. My work was

at the wheel. With the foresail on her, the only whole sail extant, she

had just steerage way; and I stood, twelve hours a day, day after day,

at the old jade’s wheel. It was bitter work, for by this time it was

the middle of December, and the spray froze where it lighted.

Before the sails were half repaired we encountered another spell of

heavy weather, which reduced us to tatters again, and the ship was

drifting about as wind and wave listed. Her masts and spars were a

confused mass of wreckage. A green sea had swept the flush deck,

carrying off galley (with the unfortunate cook inside) and long-boat,

leaving standing only the wretched pigeon-hole of a topgallant fo’k’sle

and the stumpy little companion-house abaft the mizzen. The bulwarks

were shattered piecemeal; the tree-trunks constituting the deck load

had worked their grapplings loose, and rose and fell with the wash of

the cross seas. Two of the best men had been washed under the massive

trunks, which had settled down on them and crushed the life out of

them. Two more poor fellows had suffered broken limbs, and were lying

helpless on the fo’k’sle exposed to the seas that continually broke

over the bows. The ship was full of water, and pumping was useless. She

lay like a log on the heaving face of the winter sea; helpless, yet

safe from the fate of foundering unless the timber cargo working inside

her should burst her open. The only dry spot aft was the top of the

little companion-house, which belonged to the skipper and myself; the

crew had the raised deck of the topgallant fo’k’sle and the upper bunks

in its interior. One of these constituted our larder; its contents,

some pieces of salt pork and beef, dragged out of the harness cask, and

a bag of sodden biscuit rescued from the lazarette ere the water rose

into the ’tween-decks. A water-cask had been trundled into the fo’k’sle

before the great wave swept the deck. About five feet of water stood

in the cabin, under which lay my portmanteau, and every belonging save

the rough sea-worn suit I stood upright in. Altogether it was not easy

to imagine a grimmer present or a darker future. And it was Christmas

morning!

About 11 A.M. the remnant of the crew that were alive and could move

came splashing along the main deck aft to the companion-house to

propose launching the one boat left and abandoning the ship. The mate

was in the maintop, where he had lashed himself and gone to sleep. The

skipper had waded down into the cabin, as he said, to fish up from his

desk the ship’s papers. I followed him to tell him of the errand of the

crew. Wading across the cabin I could see into his state-room. There

sat the fellow on his submerged bunk, up to the waist in water, with a

black bottle raised to the ruffianly lips of him. He had lied when he

denied having any store of spirits, and had been swigging on the sly,

while his men had been toiling and suffering day and night in misery

without a drop of the spirit that would have revived their sinking

energies.

Enraged beyond the power of self-restraint by the caitiff’s

selfishness, I gripped him by the throat with one hand as I wrenched

the bottle from him with the other. He fell a-snivelling maudlin tears.

I swore I’d drown him if he did not deliver up for the common good what

of his spirit-supply remained. He fished up three bottles from out the

blankets in the inundated bunk. That ran to just a glass apiece for all

hands except him, leaving another glass apiece for “next time.” While

he yet snivelled, the mainbrace was promptly spliced on deck.

The mate and myself persuaded the crew to hold by the ship yet a little

longer. By the morrow the sea might have gone down, or we might sight a

ship; the _Emma Morrison_ promised to hold together, after her fashion,

a bit longer, and she was, after all, preferable to a frail boat in

heavy weather.

About one o’clock the mate, who had gone back to his uncomfortable but

dry dormitory in the maintop, suddenly shouted “Sail ho!” The poor

fellows came tumbling out of the fo’k’sle with eager eyes; a bit too

diffident of fortune to cheer just yet, but with the bright light of

hope in their faces. Yes; there she was, presently visible from the

fo’k’sle, and the abominable old _Emma Morrison_ right in her fairway.

And now with a hearty cheer we finished to the last drop the skipper’s

grog. Our flag of distress had been flying for days, but the chaos

aloft was more eloquent than any upside-down Union Jack. With what

majesty came the succouring ship, borne by the strong wind of favour,

the white seas dashing from her gallant stem, her great wet sides

rising higher and higher as she neared us! Up alongside she ranged,

scarce a pistol-shot distant, a full-rigged clipper: “One of the flying

Yankees,” said the mate, with, as it seemed, a touch of envy in his

voice. “Get ready smart; going to send for you right away!” came her

commander’s cheery shout across the sullen water. As she came up into

the wind and lay to, she showed us her dandy stern, and sure enough

on it in gold letters was the legend, “Moses Taylor, of New York.”

Her boat put off; her second mate jumped aboard us with a friendly

peremptory “Hurry up!” in five minutes more we had quitted the _Emma

Morrison_ for ever, her skipper skulking off her hang-dog fashion, yet

the last man. We had agreed, for the good name of the old country

among foreigners, to keep counsel regarding the selfish sneak, but he

never held up his head more during the time he and I were in the same

ship.

A ship like a picture, a deck trim and clean as a new pin, a hearty

skipper with a nasal twang, his comely wife, his winsome daughter,

and a smart, full-powered crew welcomed us forlorn and dilapidated

derelicts on board the _Moses Taylor_. Circumstances prevented us from

dressing for the Christmas dinner to which we--skipper, mate, and

passenger--were presently bidden; but there were modified comfort and

restored self-respect in the long unaccustomed wash in fresh water; and

the hosts were more gracious than if we had been dressed more _comme

il faut_. To this day I remember that first slice of roast turkey,

that first slice of plum-pudding. But closer in my memory remain the

cheery accents of the genial American skipper, the glow of kindness in

the sonsy face of his wife, and the smile of mixed fun and compassion

in the bright eyes of their pretty daughter. And there hung a spray of

mistletoe in the cabin doorway of the _Moses Taylor_.

ABSIT OMEN!

CHAPTER I

Edmund L’Estrange was a man who, because of his daring, his skill

in devising, his self-possession, in no matter what situation, the

influence he could exercise over his fellow-men, would probably have

made a distinguished figure in the world if he pursued an honest and

loyal career. Circumstances in a measure, and probably a natural

bent toward plotting and duplicity, had made him what he was--a

prominent man among the dark and dangerous conspirators who live,

and who are ready to die, in the devilish cause of anarchy, and of

whose machinations the communities of civilisation may well be more

apprehensive than of the most widespread and prolonged war, or any

other phase of unquietude with which the future of the world may be

pregnant.

Among his ancestors was that Sir Roger L’Estrange who was the earliest

of all the vast tribe of British journalists, and whom Macaulay

somewhat intolerantly denounced as a “scurrilous pamphleteer.”

According to the doctrine of evolution, Sir Roger’s descendant should

have been a broad-acred, narrow-minded, and pretentious squire, chief

owner of a lucrative, dictatorial, but somewhat obsolete journal, a

trimmer in politics, and ready to accept a peerage at the hands of

any party caring to concede the dignity. But Edmund L’Estrange was an

emphatic traversal of the Darwinian theory. In vigour, resource, and

personal courage he harked back to the original L’Estrange who came

over with the Conqueror, and who was the progenitor of a long line of

gallant warriors. Wellington’s regiments in the Peninsula were fuller

of L’Estranges than of Napiers. Guy L’Estrange’s stand with the 31st

at Albuera contributed as much to the winning of that bloody battle as

did the famous manœuvre which gained for Hardinge his earliest gleam

of fame. Another L’Estrange escaped from the rock-dungeon of Bitche

to fight at Orthez and Toulouse, and to meet a soldier’s death on the

field of Waterloo.

Edmund L’Estrange’s branch of the family had been long settled in

Ireland. It was staunchly loyalist. His grandfather, as colonel of

an Irish militia regiment, had been active in the quelling of the

Rebellion of ’98, and had smitten his malcontent fellow-countrymen hip

and thigh. His father was a conscientious absentee. Edmund, a younger

son, had spent his youth on the old L’Estrange demesne in county Clare,

and, an Englishman by extraction, had grown up more Irish than the

Irish. As a lad of fifteen he had commanded a scratch company of Fenian

rapparees, he armed with a shot-gun, his ragged band with pikes. One

dark night the dragoons swept on to the moorland where the Fenian drill

was in progress. In the stampede fierce old Major Towers, outstripping

his squadron, felled young L’Estrange with a blow of his loaded

riding-whip, and then savagely rode over the prostrate lad. Edmund,

bruised and half-stunned, rolled into a bog-hag, and fainted. When he

recovered he staggered to his feet, softly cursed a little--he was not

a violent person--then knelt down and swore eternal enmity against

England and against all persons, things, enterprises, and devices

that were English. After two years spent in hard study of Continental

languages, he sold for money down his succession to his dead mother’s

property which he was to inherit when of age, and left the country

without the ceremony of bidding farewell to his family.

It is for the most part in the poor and proud old families of Scotland

wherein generation after generation has been developed that centrifugal

force which propels their cadets all over the face of the earth.

But this force has been in operation also in many Irish and in some

English houses. It had been a characteristic, for instance, of the

L’Estranges. Of that race there had been a cadet family in Russia ever

since a young L’Estrange had found his way to St. Petersburg along

with a Greig, a Barclay, a Ramsay, a Taafe, and a Mackenzie--bent on

taking service in the army or the navy of the Empress Catherine--not

Carlyle’s _infâme Catin du Nord_, but the greater and perhaps more

infamous Muscovite sovereign. To General L’Estrange, the chief of the

famous Pauloff Grenadiers, his young cousin betook himself and was

well received. Tactful, astute, silent, and resourceful, the youngster

made his way marvellously. Treskoff the arch-policeman, and Milutin

the War Minister, both had uses for this scion of the British Empire

who notoriously hated the realm whose fealty he had repudiated. When

the Russo-Turkish War began, Ignatieff brought him to Kischeneff and

presented him to the Emperor. He and poor Prince Tzeretleff together

exploited the Hankioj Pass for Gourko’s troopers. He was with Skobeleff

before Plevna and before Constantinople. When, baulked of the fair

Queen of the Bosphorus, Alexander determined on the Afghan diversion,

young L’Estrange was sent post haste to Samarcand, and rode into

Cabul as Stolietoff’s subaltern. When Stolietoff and his Cossacks

scrambled back to the Oxus over the craggy pathway by Bamian and Balkh,

L’Estrange remained in Afghanistan. It was he, when the Afghan Major

courteously enough blocked the entrance of Neville Chamberlain and his

mission into the Khyber Pass, who jeered at that grand old soldier as

he wheeled his Arab in front of the _sungah_ behind which the Afghan

picket lay with fingers on the triggers. He it was, on that gloomy day

in the rough valley beyond the Sherpur cantonment, when the jezail-fire

staggered the finest Lancer regiment in the British service, from

whose rifle sped the bullet that wrought the long agony and final

death of the gallant Cleland.

Commissioned always from Russia, L’Estrange was in Joubert’s camp

when poor Colley climbed the Majuba to his untimely death. Those who

held that it was the futile and garrulous Aylward who gave the Boers

the plan of campaign which scared Mr. Gladstone into restoring their

independence, were strangely mistaken. L’Estrange prescribed the

tactics which prevailed at Laing’s Neck and the Ingogo, and it was he

who lured Colley to his disaster by enjoining the removal of the Boer

picket which had been wont to occupy the summit of the Majuba. When

Herbert Stewart was brought a prisoner into the Boer camp, L’Estrange

insulted the captive man as he was being led away from his interview

with the studiously courteous Joubert. With a straight one from the

shoulder, learnt in the big dormitory of Winchester College, Stewart

promptly grassed the renegade, who, as he rose to his feet, muttered

with an evil smile that he would “bide his time.”

From the Transvaal restored to independence by Mr. Gladstone,

L’Estrange, having made his way to Egypt, stimulated covertly the

Nationalist rising in that country; and he it was who was known

among our people in the campaign of 1882 as “Arabi’s Englishman.” He

supervised the preparation of the fortified position of Tel-el-Kebir,

and was the real leader of the Egyptian soldiery in the fight of

Kassassin, which came so near being disastrous to Sir Gerald Graham.

The shout of “Retire! Retire!” which caused the temporary retirement

of the Highland Brigade from the _mêlée_ inside the Egyptian position

in the gray morning of the storm of Tel-el-Kebir, and which Sergeant

Palmer has persisted in ascribing to a couple of “Glasgow Irishmen” of

the Cameron Highlanders, really came from the lips of L’Estrange--a

ready-witted ruse on the part of the renegade, which was foiled only

by Hamley’s soldier-like precaution. From Egypt, under a safe-conduct

and recommendation furnished him by Zebehr, he journeyed southward

into the Soudan and joined the Mahdi at El Obeid. It was he who mainly

planned and conducted the annihilation of Hicks Pasha’s ill-fated army.

In the climax of the massacre he recognised and was recognised by

Edmund O’Donovan, the correspondent of the _Daily News_, whom he had

known and admired in his youth-time in Ireland. In an impulse of kindly

emotion, he offered to save the life of his brother Irishman. O’Donovan

replied with a contemptuous objurgation and a pistol-shot. L’Estrange,

wounded in the arm and faint as he was, pulled himself together

sufficiently to send a bullet through O’Donovan’s head, and so by the

hand of a fellow-countryman was ended a life of singular adventure and

vicissitude.

Later, L’Estrange went east to Osman Digna. After the Arab stampede

from El Teb, he rallied the spearmen who tried to hinder Herbert

Stewart’s gallop in pursuit. Stewart, well mounted and a fine horseman,

rode him down, parrying his spear-thrust with his sabre. L’Estrange lay

where he fell for a moment, till Barrow came dashing on at the head of

the 19th Hussars, when he sprang up, gave Barrow the spear-wound which

ultimately caused his death, and then leaped into the bush. L’Estrange

it was who later headed the sudden rush of Arab spearmen up from out

the khor into the heart of Davis’s square at Tamai, and drove it back

in chaotic confusion on the steadfast phalanx of Redvers Buller. His

last fight in the Soudan was at Abu Klea. The rush he headed there on

the corner manned by the Royal Dragoons was meant by him to open a path

for him toward Stewart, for whose blood he had thirsted ever since

that knock-down blow in the Boer camp under the Majuba. The rush was

baulked, but L’Estrange doggedly maintained his bloodthirsty purpose.

When the British column had halted after the fight, he ascended the

low elevation commanding the position. He marked down Herbert Stewart

through his field-glasses, he judged the distance, and deliberately

sighted his rifle accordingly. Then he drew trigger, and as the gallant

Stewart first staggered and then dropped on the sand, L’Estrange

muttered while he reloaded, “We are quits now--I told him I should

‘bide my time’!”

Journeying from Berber to the coast, he was carried by an Arab dhow

across the Red Sea, and at Hodeidah embarked on a British India

steamer homeward bound from Kurrachee. Among the passengers in this

vessel was an Anarchist leader of dubious and probably complex

nationality, named Oronzha, who was returning from a secret mission to

India, attended by an East Indian whose name was Shere Ali Beg, and

who passed for, and acted as, Oronzha’s travelling servant, but whose

relations with his apparent master L’Estrange soon discerned were too

intimate for those of a domestic. Oronzha cautiously made some advances

to the European gentleman who had embarked from a port so unwonted for

Europeans as Hodeidah; with at least equal caution those advances were

reciprocated by L’Estrange. At length Oronzha made a covert gesture,

the significance of which, and the response to which, L’Estrange had

learned among his varied experiences in Russia. He made the answering

signal, and at once Oronzha and L’Estrange met on the common ground of

anarchical Socialism. There was much matter for mutual communication.

Oronzha expressed his conviction to L’Estrange that profound discontent

with the English _raj_ existed throughout the population of the

Punjaub, and that the head of a Russian column on the Helmund or above

the Bamian would be the signal for a universal uprising. He thought

it advisable that, in the hope of such an incentive to revolt, Russia

should, for the present, be exempted from the active machinations

of Socialist propaganda. L’Estrange, in his turn, informed Oronzha

that the harvest of Socialism in that empire might be garnered at any

period thought fitting, since Nihilism and Socialism were practically

synonymous, and since he believed the Russian people, from the very

foot of the throne downward, were honeycombed with Nihilism. His old

chief Skobeleff and all his dare-devil staff were Nihilists at heart.

Ignatieff, at the late Czar’s right hand as he was, had a distinct

leaning in the same direction. Nay, he had discerned in the course of

his confidential intercourse with that monarch that a warp of Nihilism

had been interwoven through the curious and complicated mental texture

of Alexander himself.

As the _Chybassa_ steamed languidly against the scorching wind that

swept down the Red Sea, those two men--so diverse in birth and

upbringing, yet so near akin in sentiment and hatred of the British

power--discussed many problems and contrived many schemes, while the

supple and astute Shere Ali Beg, conversant with the suppressed yet

seething disaffection of all the great Indian cities from Peshawur to

Calcutta, and thoroughly versed in the tortuous and fanatical plottings

of that widespread Wahabee organisation which covers the East from the

Golden Horn to the eastern coasts of the Bay of Bengal, interpolated

occasionally a sentence of gloomy and ferocious import.

Oronzha was an arch-plotter, all the more influential and dangerous

that he played the great game through instruments, and consistently

kept his own personality in the background. His mission to the Punjaub

had been a mere incident in the deep and far-reaching scheme he had

been furthering for years. He had been in close although unobtrusive

touch with every phase of the widespread Socialism of Europe, but

his absence in India had thrown him somewhat in arrear regarding its

latest developments. Before the _Chybassa_ reached Port Said, he had

confided to L’Estrange the commission to visit all the great centres

of Continental Socialism, charged to communicate confidentially with

the inner conclave at each, and to bring to him in London a report of

the general situation. L’Estrange started on his errand, duly fortified

with such credentials--a sign, a watchword, an apparently innocent note

of introduction--as would insure to him the unreserved confidence of

the leaders of the great International organisation which has for its

aim the fundamental subversion of the political and social order of

things throughout the length and breadth of the Continent.

It might be interesting to narrate in detail the experiences of

L’Estrange in the fulfilment of this commission: how from Galatz

he visited Lemberg, from Lemberg went on to Warsaw, from Warsaw to

Cracow, thence into the chief cities of Hungary, from the Marchfeldt

to Vienna, thence into Croatia and Dalmatia, from Trieste to Prague,

from Prague through Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, into the teeming

operative and mining regions of Westphalia and the more southern Rhine

provinces; from Alsace to Lyons and thereabouts, through Paris into

Belgium, and so, after the lapse of some months from his parting with

Oronzha at Port Said, to the house in a court in Soho which Oronzha

had designated as a rendezvous. Met here by this _dégagé_-seeming man

of many subtle plots, he was bidden, as the best method of furthering

the cause, to enlist in that crack English cavalry regiment the Scarlet

Hussars, then quartered at Hounslow, with instructions covertly and

cautiously to aim at subverting the loyalty of the troopers of that

regiment, and to labour to instil mutinous tendencies by dwelling on

the materialistically pleasant results, to the appreciation of the

private soldier grumbling at scant rations and poor pay, of a fine

free-and-easy _régime_ of lawlessness and unlimited drink.