“ Sometimes, by way of change, a column of horsemen—helmeted dragoons, cuirassiers in glittering breastplates, red lancers of the Guard—broke through the fog, rode at the stubborn line of the Rifles, and reeled off into the fog again, pursued by darting musketry volleys. To endure and to repel incessant attacks, hour after hour, was the business of the dwindling companies of the Rifles. The third battalion, to which Kincaid belonged, formed part of Adams's brigade. It stood a hundred yards to the rear of La Haye Sainte, a little to the left of Wellington's centre. ”

“ The batmen and baggage-guard join the jocund circles round the camp-fires, and exhibit some full canteens of wine, the hastily snatched spoil of the day, or the plunder of some poultry-house, baker's oven, or farmer's pantry, no less acceptable to men long used to mouldy ship biscuit and scanty fare than silver or gold would have been to those who experienced no want.
"Midnight shuts our eyes in welcome slumber, and nought is heard to break the awful stillness that prevails, save the tinkling of the mule-bells and the tread of a silent soldier round the expiring embers of a camp-fire." ”

“ But by the time that the pound of beef was parboiled, and while an officer of dragoons was in the act of reporting that he had just patrolled six leagues to the front, without seeing any signs of an enemy, we saw the indefatigable rascals, on the mountains opposite our windows, just beginning to wind round us, with a mixture of cavalry and infantry; the wind blowing so strong that the long tail of each particular horse stuck as stiffly out in the face of the one behind, as if the whole had been strung upon a cable and dragged by the leaders. ”

“ The trees all about were most woefully cut and splintered both by cannon shot and musketry. The courts of the château presented a spectacle more terrible even than any I had yet seen. A large barn had been set on fire, and the conflagration had spread to the offices and even to the main building. Here numbers, both of French and English, had perished in the flames, and their blackened swollen remains lay scattered about in all directions. Amongst this heap of ruins and misery many poor devils yet remained alive, and were sitting up endeavouring to bandage their wounds. ”

“ On his left was the river Ers. The road was so difficult that the guns were left behind. There was deadly peril at every step that the French might overwhelm the toiling column with a flank attack; or break through betwixt it and the main body of the British army.
But Beresford—who had fought Albuera—was exactly the man for a task which required blind and desperate valour. His men splashed doggedly on their way; on their right the foe, tormenting their flank with his fire; the fordless river to their left; their guns left behind them. ”

“ The man in patched clothes and a piece of untanned hide about his feet, when he looked around him, saw others in some respects as ill appointed as himself; and he almost felt a pride in despising any new-comer with dangling plumes, plaited or crimped frills, white gloves, and handsome shoes—all good-for-nothing frippery to the hardy, toil-worn soldier, the man of flint, powder, and steel, as he thought himself. His was the gloveless hand and the shoeless foot that braved alike the cold and the heat, the toil of the field and the fatigue of the march ”

“ Every ear now catches the sound, and every man grasps his musket. The distant report of the guns becomes more loud, and our march is urged on with greater speed. Quatre Bras appears in view; the frightened peasantry come running breathless and panting along the way. We move on to the left of the road, behind a gently rising eminence, form column of companies, regardless of the growing crop, and ascend the rising ground; a beautiful plain appears in view, surrounded with belts of wood, and the main road from Brussels runs through it. ”

“ Every man may write a book for himself, if he likes; but this is mine; and, as I borrow no man's story, neither will I give any man a particle of credit for his deed, as I have got so little for my own that I have none to spare. Neither will I mention any regiment but my own, if I can possibly avoid it, for there is none other that I like so much, and none else so much deserves it; for we were the light regiment of the Light Division, and fired the first and last shot in almost every battle, siege, and skirmish in which the army was engaged during the war. ”

“ Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best nightcap; no matter that the veteran's countenance is alternately stormed with torrents of rain, heavy dews, and hoar-frosts; no matter that his ears are assailed by a million mouths of chattering locusts, and by some villainous donkey, who every half-hour pitches a bray note, which is instantly taken up by every mule and donkey in the army, and sent echoing from regiment to regiment, over hill and valley, until it dies away in the distance ”

“ Sabugal was the last combat fought on Portuguese soil in Massena's sullen retreat from the lines of Torres Vedras. Massena was never so dangerous as in retreat, and Ney, with all his fiery valour, commanded his rearguard. The French, too, were in a mood of almost reckless savagery, and they greatly exceeded in numbers the force pursuing them. It may be imagined, then, what an incessant splutter of fierce and angry skirmishes raged betwixt Wellington's advance-guard and the French rear. ”

“ Every man stood steadily at his post, the guns ready, loaded with a round-shot first and a case over it; the tubes were in the vents; the port-fires glared and spluttered behind the wheels; and my word alone was wanting to hurl destruction on that goodly show of gallant men and noble horses. I delayed this, for experience had given me confidence. The Brunswickers partook of this feeling, and with their squares—much reduced in point of size—well closed, stood firmly with arms at the recover, and eyes fixed on us, ready to commence their fire with our first discharge. ”

“ What does each separate human atom feel, when caught in that whirling tornado of passion and of peril? Who shall make visible to us the actual faces in the fighting-line; or make audible the words—stern order, broken prayer, blasphemous jest—spoken amid the tumult? Who shall give us, in a word, an adequate picture of the soldier's life in actual war-time, with its hardships, its excitements, its escapes, its exultation and despair? ”

“ They are not liable to be discouraged, still less put to rout, by the most magnificent display of what may be called the millinery of war.
But that aspect of war has faded, never to revive. Khaki kills the picturesque. Battle has grown grey, remote, invisible. It consists of trenches miles long, in which crouch unseen riflemen, shooting at moving specks of grey, distant thousands of yards; or in guns perched on hills five miles apart bellowing to each other across the intervening valleys. It is not merely that in a battle of to-day a soldier cannot see the features of the man he kills ”

“ We breathed a new atmosphere—the air was suffocatingly hot, resembling that issuing from an oven. We were enveloped in thick smoke, and, malgré the incessant roar of cannon and musketry, could distinctly hear around us a mysterious humming noise, like that which one hears of a summer's evening proceeding from myriads of black beetles; cannon-shot, too, ploughed the ground in all directions, and so thick was the hail of balls and bullets that it seemed dangerous to extend the arm lest it should be torn off. ”

“ I had fancied we were almost alone on the field, seeing only the remains of Major Bull's troop of horse artillery not far from us (the Prussians had gone forward about or a little before daybreak) ; but in wandering towards the Charleroi road I stumbled on a whole regiment of British infantry fast asleep, in columns of divisions, wrapped in their blankets, with their knapsacks for pillows. Not a man was awake. There they lay in regular ranks, with the officers and sergeants in their places, just as they would stand when awake. ”

“ Kincaid's "Adventures in the Rifle Brigade" is a book of great merits and of great faults. It is brisk, stirring, and picturesque, and paints with great vividness the life of a subaltern in a fighting regiment and during fighting times. But the book lacks order. Dates are dropped into it, or are left out of it, with the most airy caprice. It has no intelligible relationship to history. It never gives the reader a glimpse of the history-making events which serve as a background to the marching and the fighting of the Rifles. ”

“ Kincaid represents a type of officer in which the British army of all days is rich; and whose qualities explain some of the failures, and most of the triumphs of that army. He was gallant in every drop of his blood; cool, hardy, athletic, a fit leader of the fighting line. He had been reared in luxury, accustomed to feed daintily every day, to lie softly every night; he was full of the pride of his caste; yet in the actual business of fighting, Kincaid, like all officers of the type to which he belonged, could outmarch the privates in the ranks. ”

“ I do not mean to insinuate that a country is never so much at peace as when at open war; but I do say that a soldier can nowhere sleep so soundly, nor is he anywhere so secure from surprise, as when within musket-shot of his enemy. ”

“ There the piercing shrieks and dying groans; here the loud cheering of an exulting army, animating the slayers to deeds of signal vengeance upon a daring foe. It was a scene [Pg 303] of vehement destruction, yells and shrieks, wounds and death; and the bodies of the dead served as pillows for the dying.
"A thousand prisoners are driven in before our cavalry as they return over the corpse-strewn field, and the loud shouts of ten thousand soldiers welcome the victors back. But long and loud are the enthusiastic cheerings of the proud Highlanders as they greet the gallant Greys' approach. ”

“ The soldier to-day sees neither the pin-pricks of flame nor the whiff of grey smoke which tell that somebody is shooting at him. For these are days of smokeless powder and long-range rifles. The man shot at only learns that circumstance as he catches the air-scurry of the passing bullet, and the atmosphere about him grows full of what one half-terrified war correspondent calls "little whimpering air-devils." ”

“ A sergeant of the 92nd Highlanders, just about this time, fell dead with fatigue, and no one stopped as we passed to offer him any assistance. Night came down upon us, without our having tasted food or halted—I speak for myself and those around me—and all night long we continued this dreadful march. Men began to look into each other's faces, and ask the question, 'Are we ever to be halted again?' and many of the weaker sort were now seen to stagger, make a few desperate efforts, and then fall, perhaps to rise no more. ”

“ Our guns were served with astonishing activity, whilst the running fire of the two squares was maintained with spirit. Those who pushed forward over the heap of carcasses of men and horses gained but a few paces in advance, there to fall in their turn and add to the difficulties of those succeeding them. The discharge of every gun was followed by a fall of men and horses like that of grass before the mower's scythe. When the horse alone was killed, we could see the cuirassiers divesting themselves of the encumbrance and making their escape on foot. ”

“ Anton attempts a more ambitious account of the battle of Toulouse than of any other fight in which he was engaged; and there is some reason for this. It was a cluster of Scottish regiments—the 42nd conspicuous amongst them—which, by mere invincible and all-enduring valour, saved Wellington from failure in that great fight. Soult, it will be remembered, knew Toulouse almost with the familiarity of a native. A strong place by nature, he had made it almost impregnable by the energy and skill with which he had multiplied its defences during the long pause before the British advanced. ”

“ We were, take us all in all, a very bad army. Our foreign auxiliaries, who constituted more than half of our numerical strength, with some exceptions, were little better than a raw militia—a body without a soul, or like an inflated pillow, that gives to the touch and resumes its shape again when the pressure ceases—not to mention the many who went clear out of the field, and were only seen while plundering our baggage in their retreat. ”

“ The sun shone brightly on our arms as we left the fields of Quatre Bras, and passed the farms round which the remains of some thousands of brave men, British, Brunswick, Belgic, and French, were interred; and many yet lay scattered over the fields, and may have remained hidden amidst the grain which still continued standing, until the sickle or the scythe laid the fields bare. ”

“ A man may drop behind in the field but this is a dreadful risk to his reputation, and even attended with immediate personal danger, while within the range of shot and shells; and woe to the man that does it, whether through fatigue, sudden sickness, or fear—let him seek death, and welcome it from the hand of a foe, rather than give room for any surmise respecting his courage ”

“ Harris is loyal to his comrades; cherishes an undoubting confidence in his officers; believes that, man for man, any British regiment can beat twice its numbers of any other nation; while his own particular regiment, the 95th, will cheerfully take in hand four times that ratio of foes. Harris has no hate for a Frenchman; he respects and likes him indeed, but he always expects to thrash him, and having shot his French foe he is quite prepared to explore his pockets in search of booty. ”

“ The French came down upon us in a column, and the Riflemen immediately commenced a sharp fire upon them from whatever cover they could get a shelter behind, whilst our cannon played upon them from our rear. I saw regular lanes torn through their ranks as they advanced, which were immediately closed up again as they marched steadily on. Whenever we saw a round shot thus go through the mass we raised a shout of delight. ”