THE LAST OF THE OLD BRIGADE.
I WILL now relate as a fitting end to these long reminiscences what I
witnessed forty years ago in the island of Mauritius, when death was
having a fine harvest by the ravages of a plague, and how a
hurricane—terrific in even that so-called focus of hurricanes, and
compared with which the storms we occasionally encounter in Merrie
England are but gentle zephyrs—obliterated all the germs of infection.
It was in ’67 that a terrible epidemic—new to science—burst without
warning on the beautiful island of Mauritius. Its very symptoms were
unfamiliar to the faculty, and so, for a better name, it was called
jungle fever. Fever and ague were its chief characteristics, followed by
absolute prostration, and death with alarming rapidity.
Like its dread ally cholera, its first appearance was irresistible; then
the attack became less formidable, and as the atmosphere became saturated
with its poisonous germs, every living thing suffered from exhaustion,
and man and beast literally dragged one leg after another, and almost
prayed for release.
The scourge, it was supposed, had been introduced by the 100,000 Madras
coolies who worked on the sugar plantations under conditions as nearly
approaching slavery as our beneficent Government would admit.
It was under these depressing circumstances that a British regiment, 800
strong, and in the best of health, was landed, and within a month not 100
would have been available for duty. Not daring to keep them in Port
Louis, where the deaths were some 400 a day, the regiment was split into
fragments and billeted wherever an empty outhouse or a few obsolete tents
could afford temporary shelter. But the ingenuity of the inefficient
staff in no way averted the danger, and within a month a dozen minor
centres were created, where British soldiers succumbed and died who ought
never to have been disembarked.
Not an officer who was sufficiently well but had to read the burial
service almost daily over Protestant and Catholic comrades, and not a
drum was heard whilst the scant ceremony was being repeated and repeated
in its terrible monotony.
To make matters worse quinine, which ordinarily costs a few pence, was
selling at auction at £30 per ounce. Then the supply ran out, and so
valuable did the drug become that the dose a dying man’s stomach could
not retain was carefully bottled up for the next urgent case.
Soon the very wood for coffins ran short, and the carpenters who made the
ghastly necessaries were themselves dead or dying, so long trenches were
improvised in which the dead were laid in rows.
Every house bewailed a departed relative, for there was no pitying angel
to sprinkle the door-posts in that remote isle of the sea, and the sound
of wailing went up from Indian compound and European cantonment alike as,
smiting their breasts, the cry ascended to Brahmah and the God of the
Christians to stay the hand of the destroying angel.
Truly the grasshopper had become a burden and desire failed, when a
change as sudden as the arrival of the terrible scourge ensued, and a
hurricane, unprecedented in its violence, swept over the island for days.
Fields of sugar cane, ripe for the sickle, were laid low in a twinkling;
houses were unroofed, and tents blown into space; huge bridges were
twisted like corkscrews, and bolts weighing a ton were hurled about like
cricket balls. A heavily-laden goods train, standing outside the station
(as instanced by the Governor in his official report), was turned on its
side, and, joy of joy, the terrible plague and its insidious germs were
wafted into eternity. And when the death roll was called a few months
later, what a cloud of victims did it show! Bishop Hatchard, not long
arrived, whose funeral I attended; the General, who came home to die; the
wives and daughters of many it is needless to recapitulate, and brave
soldiers innumerable discharged as medically unfit or still sleeping in
that distant oasis of the Indian Ocean.
But even this awful drama has associations that lend themselves to
comedy. A representative of a Deep Sea Cable Company, who was
conspicuous for his flowing mane and superabundant hair, emerged from his
illness as smooth as a billiard ball, and the local snuff-coloured wig he
donned to hide his nakedness was as bewildering as it was irresistible.
The coolies, too, desirous of apprising their friends in Madras of their
safety, and thinking it a favourable opportunity to defraud the Revenue,
would slip unstamped letters into the post, oblivious of the columns of
names that appeared weekly in the local paper as not having been
forwarded in consequence of insufficient postage. And then the Creoles—a
snuff-and-butter combination of English, French, and Indian—desirous of
airing their European pretensions, would hail one with: “Ah, the
plague—we are now far from IT,” or, anxious to be polite, would add: “I
have heard your name with great advantage.”
Sitting round a blazing fire some few years ago at Christmas, in the
comfortable chambers (since demolished) at the corner of Hanover Square
and George Street, three friends were discussing the various changes they
had witnessed together in the past forty years. Not that the
conversation was unattended with drawbacks, for a gang of “waits” were
disseminating discord through the still hours of the night. An asthmatic
harmonium was the chief culprit, and bore on its back the blasphemous
inscription, “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord,” the
remainder of the orchestra being a clarionet and a fiddle; all the
operators had red noses, and the instruments suffered accordingly. A
public-house within measurable distance may explain the welcome silence
that occasionally intervened and justify the assumption that it was
responsible for the discord.
Be that as it may, “The voice that breathed o’er Eden”—with whisky
variations—does not lend itself to concentration of thought or deed, save
of an irreverent kind, so I will conclude by describing my companions
whom we’ve frequently met in our various rambles.
Of these, one was a country-looking squire with grey hair and cropped
beard, who, on closer inspection, was recognisable as the wiry bruiser
who had thrashed the “Kangaroo” thirty years previously at the Alhambra;
the other was Bobby Shafto, still erect and soldier-like, but divested of
the curly locks that had won their way into everybody’s favour a decade
previously.
For Bobby had only just left the Service, after holding a series of
personal staff appointments through the influence of powerful friends of
the days of his youth.
So great, indeed, had been his interest at the Horse Guards
that—admittedly, the worst of company officers—he was discovered to
possess military talents of the highest order. He was “a born leader of
men” it was asserted; he had a “capacity for organisation” and for
“licking a hopeless rabble into a military force.” Had he continued
soldiering he would doubtless have been covered with “orders,” appointed
Governor of one of our important fortresses, given the command of an Army
Corps, or created a peer—as many an amiable donkey with interest has been
before and since.
But both these good fellows have since passed away, and I—only
I—remain—like a modern Elijah—to commune within myself of the various
incidents with which we were associated in the long-ago sixties.
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THE END.
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_Printed at The Chapel River Press_, _Kingston_, _Surrey_