With these two narratives of the sergeant’s adventures abroad, I must close my remarks concerning him. How he lost his money, got into the Spanish service, and eventually in the British army, he never appeared ready to explain.
Chapter Twenty Five.
Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give
To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails.
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow’d sea,
Breasting the lofty surge.
Shakespeare.
Beyond the ordinary routine of barrack life, and the every-day duty of a dragoon, nothing very remarkable occurred during my term of service, in addition to what I have related, until the embarkation of my regiment for active service in the Crimea.
The reader will please to observe that I had never before been on a campaign, and the regiment in which I had the honour to serve had never been particularly distinguished in battle for a period of more than twenty years. It had been well understood for years, that whenever a serious war was declared we should be first on the roll of regiments for service. In fact, we had twice been under orders for India—once during the Affghanistan campaign in 1841-2, and again when the Sikh war broke out—but the cavalry already abroad turned out a sufficient force for the purpose.
I may safely remark that three-fourths of the soldiers in the British army would sooner serve on a campaign than endure the monotony of life in a barrack. The former kind of service is just the sort of life for which all really good men join the army. There are many very respectable, educated men serving in the ranks of our dragoon regiments that would cheerfully endure the hardships of a campaign and the privations of a camp life, surrounded by danger, disease, cold, hunger, and even death, in preference to years of drudgery and comparative inactivity in barracks.
It is wonderful to see with what rapidity the ranks of a cavalry regiment proceeding on active service are augmented from other corps not under orders to serve. As may be supposed, when a regiment is told off for service abroad, there are numbers who are physically incapable of enduring the change of climate, and others whose term of service having nearly expired, with other considerations, render it advisable for commanding officers to reject them; consequently, their places have to be filled up by a system of volunteering from other regiments.