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    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 <DW72> 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,