Archibald Forbes

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Meanwhile Colonel Guardlex had passed his dismounted men through the still mounted front rank of the squadron he had kept in his own hand, had numbered them off—there were thirty of them—and held them with loaded carbines, waiting for his command to fire. “I can plug that beggar out to the front there, sir,” said Jack Osborne, the champion marksman of the Regals, in a low tone to the Adjutant; “will you ask the Colonel whether I may fire?” Colonel Guardlex overheard the entreaty. “No, my man,” answered the chief; “please God, we’ll take that scoundrel alive. Shooting is too good for him!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lord Ebor was in command of the third—the rear—squadron, and, as his custom was, he had remained with his command instead of joining his brother officers at the front. His lordship was “making much” of his gallant charger when Sergeant L’Estrange strode up to him, halted at “attention,” and spoke thus in a quiet measured tone—
“My Lord, the regiment is about to revolt—in plain language, to mutiny. The whole British Army is with us, and the people as well, determined no longer to endure tyranny and wrong. Lord Ebor, it will be a great and glorious revolution. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The truth is, L’Estrange,” continued Oronzha, springing to his feet and speaking earnestly—“the truth is, d—n him! I want him ruined socially, utterly and beyond recovery—he has thwarted me in a matter very dear to me. Can you help in this?”
“I think I can succeed in compromising him completely with us, if that is what you aim at,” replied L’Estrange. “It is a result you must not expect all of a sudden. Ebor is an officer and a gentleman. He is a dreamer, and he has what the Scotch call ‘a bee in the bonnet’; but it is a ‘far cry’ from that to being a traitor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In war such petty fallings away from the ideal are happening all the time. They occur in every army I have ever known, and I have watched the conduct in the field of the armies of eight European nations. There is infinitely less steady valour in the soldiery of any nationality than the civilian who idealises it imagines. I never was in a battle, with the single exception of Ulundi, in the course of which I did not witness a stampede. The Germans are grand fighting men, and at Gravelotte they had the glow in them of three victories in a fortnight ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the living God, the blackguards are shooting down their officers! The Scarlet Hussars have mutinied! Steady there, the Regals!” roared the chief, wheeling his horse and facing his own regiment “Squadrons, eyes centre! Officers, see to the dressing!”
280 Suddenly from near the flank of the right troop of the first squadron shot out a dragoon, bellowing, as he turned in his saddle—
“To h— with the Widow! Down with the officers! Come on, chaps, and join our gallant comrades yonder. On, lads, to liberty and license!” ”

“ 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. ”