Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles

by Archibald Forbes

JELLYPOD; ALIAS THE MULETEER

I need not say that neither of these was the name by which he appeared in the Army List. The Muleteer was not his original by-name, although there may be a good many people who never knew him by another. When I remember him first—that was about thirty years ago—he was familiarly known in the cavalry regiment he had then recently joined, as Jellypod. I knew more of him as Jellypod than I did of him after he came to be known by the other name; but have you never noticed how completely a later by-name supersedes an earlier? I think of him habitually as the Muleteer, and had even to tax my memory to recollect the earlier Jellypod appellation.

He came to the Potterers from a militia regiment. Nowadays the militia is a chartered and approved vestibule to the regular army: and it is quite the thing for a youngster to go straight from the Outlandshire Rurals into the Grenadier Guards or the Blues. But it was a different matter thirty years ago, when the aspiring militiaman had to purchase, and when it was regarded as a mild form of impertinence on his part if he did not creep humbly into some unpretentious high-low regiment. But this man had actually bought into cavalry, and what made his outrecuidance the more marked was that he had come from a London militia regiment. No doubt times are changed, and the salt of the earth do their mimic soldiery in the corps which now swaggers as the 10th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers or the 21st battalion of the Rifle Brigade. But thirty years ago the metropolitan and suburban militias were not held in lofty esteem. In a county militia regiment you might lay your account with finding a considerable sprinkling of younger sons of the territorial families, and probably the major would be a man who had served in the regulars, and had gone in for the local corps when he married and retired to settle down on his patrimonial estate. But the London regiments had not this stamp of officerhood. As like as not the Colonel Commandant would be a soap-boiler engaged in the active duties of his odoriferous profession. You would find no doubt ex-regulars holding commissions, but they were rather of the copper captain variety, who bound their militia commissions as phylacteries on their foreheads in evidence that their claim to the title of officer and gentleman was unimpaired by the little cloud under which they had retired from more active service. A militia commission has always been more or less of a useful item of stock-in-trade to a man living by his wits; and gentlemen of this type were sandwiched freely in the old days in the London regiments between the dashing scions of aldermen and the jeunesse dorée of the Stock Exchange.

Jellypod was a good sort of fellow in his way, but he did not hit it off with the Potterers. For one thing he was a married man with two children. Now in the matter of matrimony among the officers, the Potterers might have belonged to the army of the late lamented Cetewayo. Old Growler the colonel—he had been chief ever since the Crimea, and it was currently believed that he had sworn to live to a hundred and to die in the command of the Potterers, resolutely refusing promotion—old Colonel Growler had laid down the rule that no officer should marry and remain in the regiment who was not at least half-way up among the captains. A junior captain might wed, although frowned upon, on giving his pledge to send in his papers within the year; but lo! here was a cornet joining, not only with a wife, but with a wife who was a foreigner, and there was the additional aggravation of brats.

Then Jellypod, subsequently the Muleteer, had a modest confidence in himself. Among his burglars and pickpockets he had learnt foot drill thoroughly, and the first time he turned out to recruits’ drill in the barrack square, had affably set the “regimental” right in regard to a word of command. He had studied Jomini, had detected the superficiality of Hamley’s Operations of War, and had visited scientifically the battlefields of 1859 in Northern Italy. He had not been in the Potterers a week before he had tendered every officer a printed copy of an (undelivered) lecture before the United Service Institution on the utility of cavalry as a support to infantry. Before a fortnight was over he had confided to the adjutant, who—of course I mean the fine old ranker adjutant—was always very friendly and confidential with newly joined officers, that he regarded the regimental system of the Potterers as reprehensibly slack; and that he thought every one under the rank of field-officer should invariably attend morning and evening stables. One fine day after luncheon he followed the chief into the anteroom and asked him whether he would have any objections to a project he (Jellypod) had conceived, that he should give a course of evening lectures in the garrison library to the non-commissioned officers of the regiment on the German cavalry method of working by “fours.” Old Growler stared at him grimly from under his shaggy eyebrows for the space of about a minute, deliberately expectorated into the grate, then rose, and, without a word, stalked out of the room. Jellypod did not win much favour from the fat old quarter-master when he suggested to that worthy that the regimental meat should be cast every morning, until the contractor realised that the second class beef he was in the practice of sending in would no longer be accepted.

With all the goodwill in the world, Jellypod did not stand well in the eyes of the men of the troop to which he was posted as cornet. He began badly. As is usual when a new officer’s furniture arrives, a squad of men under a corporal were detailed to unload the Jellypod furniture from the vans in which it had come down from town. The work done—you may be sure the fellows had some chaff among themselves about the cradle, which presented to them a strange anomaly in being part of a cornet’s goods and chattels—the oldest soldier, as the custom is, formed up to Jellypod, and, saluting, intimated the anxiety of himself and his comrades to drink that officer’s health. Jellypod wasn’t a bit mean, but he regarded this attempt to “pike” him as an impertinence, and ordered the man about his business, threatening to report him. He did report him to the corporal, who told him bluntly he thought the “kick” quite natural—the work being outside the men’s regular duty, and it being an invariable custom to reward a fatigue-party on this kind of service with the price of a drink round. In fact the honest corporal as good as hinted that he himself felt rather dry. But Jellypod stood on the principle of the thing, and refused to contribute toward the consumption of intoxicating fluids; he himself was a teetotaler. It was a high sense of principle, again, which impelled him to refuse to fall in with the immemorial practice of paying his footing the first time he entered the riding-school. He would have stood out even against the fee to the riding-master, taking the ground that among the duties for which he drew his pay was the instruction in equitation of the officer-recruit as well as of the soldier-recruit; but old Voyage had taken his grievance to the colonel, who curtly ordered Jellypod not to let him hear any more “of this d—d nonsense.” But he stood out against the dustoor to the underlings of the riding-school. Then the grim old rough-riding sergeant swore a grizzly oath, and took the corporal and the rough-riders to witness that if Mr. Jellypod did not rue his meanness before he was dismissed riding-drill, then his name was not old Tom Bridoon. And in truth it was a bad morning’s work for Jellypod when he declined to fork out that sovereign as he trod the tan for the first time; for it came to pass that he and that same tan became and remained exceptionally intimate.

The universal wonder was why Jellypod should have come into cavalry. He was a fine-looking florid man of some seven-and-twenty, with a full round face, encircled by long chestnut whiskers. He was straight and square-shouldered, but had already begun to run into flesh, displaying a not inconsiderable protuberance in front, whence his by-name; and in point of fact exhibiting the reverse of attenuation when taken in reverse. With his round fleshy thighs, he looked just the sort of man to have a washball style of seat in any position, and bound to endure much in the effort to obtain the correct cavalry seat of the period, then much longer and less easy to acquire than now.

The Potterers hunted to a man; they would have hunted every day of the week, including Sunday, if their studs had run to it, and if there had been a sufficiency of attainable meets. The chief was the keenest of any; the prime article of his simple faith was that so long as unfortunately there was no fighting to be done, the chief end of the cavalryman was to gallop after hounds. So, the day Jellypod came to the regiment, the chief, never dreaming that there was any need to ask him whether he hunted, simply put the question, “How many hunters are you bringing; how many days a week do you care to hunt?” You might have knocked him down with a feather—he was stricken absolutely dumb, when Jellypod in the most matter-of-fact way replied:

“I am bringing no hunters, sir. 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. This was a great pull for Jellypod; if only he could have kept in the saddle, the gallant old horse would have kept him right. But with “stirrups up” he couldn’t keep in the saddle had his life depended on doing so. At a walk he was all right; but as soon as the word “Trot!” was given, he was all over the place. If he hung on by his eyelids for a round or two, old Bridoon, the non-payment of footing rankling in his mind, would touch up the old chestnut with the long whip; and then Jellypod would shut his eyes and gently roll off the saddle on to the tan. The man, however, had both pluck and perseverance. He never did get his seat without stirrups, but when these were allowed to the ride, he did better; trusting to them and to the reins to an unjustifiable extent, and rolling about, as old Bridoon used to say, “like an apple in a bucket”—only the expression was mostly a good deal coarser; but coming to grief altogether with much greater rarity. To the last he was the most abject duffer at “heads and posts,” and it was well that the old chestnut carried a good head, else every time he and his rider went over the bar, the latter would have shot bodily over the former’s ears. Altogether, Jellypod had a good six months in the school before he was dismissed riding-drill, and then it was only because, as the riding-master said, he could not be bothered with him any longer.