The "C" Troop chronicler's narrative of events is right in the teeth of these inferences. While the troop was halted at point F and after a great many wounded and disabled men had already passed it going to the rear, Lord Cardigan came riding by at a "quiet pace" close under the crest. He had passed the troop on his left for several horse-lengths, when he came back and halted within a yard or two of the left-hand gun, the only one fairly on the crest. He was not alone, but attended by Cornet Yates of his own old regiment the 11th Hussars, a recently commissioned ranker. "Lord Cardigan was in the full dress pelisse (buttoned) of the 11th Hussars, and he rode a chestnut horse very distinctly marked and of grand appearance. The horse seemed to have had enough of it, and his lordship appeared to have been knocked about but was cool and collected. He returned his sword, undid a little of the front of his dress and pulled down his underclothing under his waistbelt. Then, in a quiet way, as if rather talking to himself, he said, 'I tell you what it is: those instruments of theirs,' alluding to the Russian weapons, 'are deuced blunt; they tickle up one's ribs!' Then he pulled his revolver out of his holster as if the thought had just struck him, and said, 'And here's this d——d thing I have never thought of until now.' He then replaced it, drew his sword, and said, 'Well, we've done our share of the work!' and pointing up toward the Chasseurs d'Afrique on our left rear (ignorant of their opportune service), he added, 'It's time they gave those dappled gentry a chance.' Afterwards he asked, 'Has any one seen my regiment?' The men answered, 'No, sir.'" Brandling was holding aloof; and his lordship turned his horse and rode away farther back.
Just then a cheer was raised by some Heavies who had lately formed in front of "C" Troop. Cardigan, so the chronicler tells, looked backward to see the occasion, and saw the cheer was in compliment to the 8th Hussars coming back with Colonel Sewell in front and Colonel Mayow, the brigade-major, behind on the left. Cardigan wheeled, trotted back towards the 8th, turned round in front of Colonel Sewell, and took up the "walk." Then occurred something "painful to witness. It was seen from the left of 'C' Troop that the moment Cardigan's back was toward the 8th as he headed them, Colonel Mayow pointed toward him, shook his head, and made signs to the officers on the left of the Heavies as much as to say, 'See him; he has taken care of himself.'" Men in the ranks of the 8th also pointed and made signs to the troopers of the Heavies as they were passing left to left. There was, as well, a little excited undertalk from one corps to the other. Colonel Sewell neither saw nor took part in this wretched business; and of course Cardigan did not know that he was being thus ridiculed and disparaged while he was smiling and raising his sword to the cheers of the Heavies and the gunners.
Immediately after this episode the returning 4th Light Dragoons came obliquely across the North valley at a sharp pace, but fell into the "walk" as they came within a hundred yards of "C" Troop. Lord George Paget, who led what remained of the regiment, rode up to the flank of "C" Troop and halted on the very spot where Cardigan had stood a few minutes earlier. Lord George had the look of a man who had ridden hard, and was heated and excited. He exclaimed in rather a loud tone, "It's a d——d shame; there we had a lot of their guns and carriages taken, and received no support, and yet there's all this infantry about—it's a shame!" Meanwhile Lord Cardigan had come back and was close behind Lord George while he was speaking, without the other knowing it. He called out, "Lord George Paget!"; and on the latter turning round said to him in an undertone, "I am surprised!"; and "tossing his head in the air added some other remark which was not heard." Lord George lowered his sword to the salute, and, without speaking turned his horse and rode on after his men. The "C" Troop chronicler is positive that both officers visited "C" Troop before going to any general or to any other command, and that they met there for the first time after the combat.
When Lord Raglan came down from the upland after all was over, the "C" Troop chronicler says that he went straight for Lucan then in front of the Heavy Cavalry brigade, having first sent for Cardigan to meet him. After a few moments the latter repassed the troop on his way toward the remnant of his brigade. "Then Lord Raglan took Lucan a little forward by himself out of hearing of the group of staff officers, and his gesticulations of head and arm were so suggestive of passionate anger, that the onlookers did not need to be told that the Commander-in-Chief did not charge the blame chiefly on Cardigan." Lord Raglan's subsequent interview with General Scarlett, which occurred in the hearing of "C" Troop, was of a different character. After complimenting the gallant old warrior his lordship said, "Now tell me all about yourself." Scarlett replied, "When the Russian column was moving down on me, sir, I began by sending first a squadron of the Greys at them, and—" but at the word "and" Lord Raglan struck in, saying, "And they knocked them over like the devil!" He then turned his horse away, as if he did not need to hear any more.
HOW I "SAVED FRANCE"
These be big words, my masters! I can only say they are not mine,—I am far too modest to utter any such high-sounding phrase on my own responsibility,—but they are the exact terms used by a high municipal dignitary in characterising the result of what he was pleased to term my "chivalrous conduct." My sardonic chum, on the contrary,—an individual wholly abandoned to the ignoble vice of punning,—asserts that my conduct was simply "barbarous." It will be for the reader to judge.
St. Meuse—let us call it St. Meuse—is a town of what is still French Lorraine; and to St. Meuse I came drifting up the Marne Valley, over the flat expanse of the plain of Châlons, and by St. Menehould, the proud stronghold of pickled pigs' feet, in the second week of September 1873. St. Meuse was one of the last of the French cities held in pawn by the Germans for the payment of the milliards. The last instalment of blood-money had been paid and the Pickelhaubes were about to evacuate St. Meuse as soon as the cash had been methodically counted, and after they should have leisurely filled their baggage trains and packed their portmanteaus. My intention in going to St. Meuse was to witness this evacuation scene, and to be a spectator of the return of light-heartedness to the French population of the place, on the withdrawal of the Teuton incubus which for three years had lain upon the safety-valve of their constitutional sprightliness. I had been a little out of my reckoning of time, and when I reached St. Meuse I found that I had a week to stay there before the event should occur which I had come to witness; but the interval could not be regarded as lost time, for St. Meuse is a very pleasant city and the conditions which were so soon to terminate presented a most interesting field of study.
You must know that St. Meuse is a fortress. It has a citadel or at least such fragments of a citadel as the bombardment had left, and the quaint old town is surrounded with bastions which are linked by curtains and flanked by lunettes, the whole being girdled by a ditch, beyond the counterscarp of which spreads a sloping glacis which makes a very pleasant promenade. The defensive strength of the place is reduced to zero in these days of far-reaching rifled siege artillery, for it lies in a cup and is surrounded on all sides by hills the summits of which easily command the fortifications. But the consciousness that it is obsolete as a fortress has not yet come home to St. Meuse. It has, in truth, a very good opinion of itself as a valorous, not to say heroic, place; nor can it be denied that its title to this self-complacency has been fairly earned. In the Franco-German war, spite of its defects, it stood a siege of over two months and succumbed only after a severe bombardment which lasted for several days. And while as yet it was not wholly beleaguered, it was very active in making itself disagreeable to the foreign invader. It was a patrolling party from St. Meuse that intercepted the courier on his way from the battlefield of Sedan to Germany, carrying the hurried lines to his wife which the Crown Prince of Prussia scrawled on the fly-leaf of an orderly book while as yet the last shots of the combat were dropping in the distance; carrying too the notes of the momentous battle which William Howard-Russell had jotted down in the heat of the action and had taken the same opportunity of despatching. St. Meuse, then, had balked the Princess of the first tidings of her husband's safety, and the great English newspaper of the earliest details of the most sensational battle of the age. It had fallen at last, but not ingloriously; and the iron of defeat had not entered so deeply into its soul as had been the case with some French fortresses, of which it could not well be said that they had done their honest best to resist their fate. Its self-respect, at least, was left to it, and it was something to know that when the German garrison should march away, it was bound to leave to St. Meuse the artillery and munitions of war of the fortress just as they had been found on the day of the surrender.
I came to like St. Meuse immensely in the course of the days I spent in it waiting for the great event of the evacuation. The company at the table d'hôte of the Trois Maures was varied and amusing. The Germans ate in a room by themselves, so that the obnoxious element was not present overtly at the general table d'hôte. But we had a few German officials in plain clothes—clerks in General Manteuffel's bureau, contractors, cigar merchants, etc., who spoke French even among themselves, and were painfully polite to the French habitués who were as painfully polite in return. There was a batch of Parisian journalists who had come to St. Meuse to watch the evacuation, and who wrote their letters in the café over the way to the accompaniment of verres of absinthe and bocks of beer. Then there was the gallant captain of gendarmes, who had arrived in St. Meuse with a trusty band of twenty-five subordinates to take over from the Germans the municipal superintendence of the place, and, later, the occupation of the fortress. He was the most polite man I ever knew, this captain of gendarmes, with a clever knack of turning you outside in in the course of half an hour's conversation, and the peculiar attribute of having, to all appearance, eyes in the back of his head. To him, as he placidly ate his food, there came, from time to time, quiet and rather bashful-looking men in civilian attire of a slightly seedy description. Sometimes they merely caught his eye and went out again without speaking; sometimes they handed to him little notes; sometimes they held with him a brief whispered conversation during which the captain's nonchalance was imperturbable. These respectable individuals who, if they saw you once in conversation with their chief, ever after bowed to you with the greatest empressement, were members of the secret police.
As for the inhabitants of St. Meuse, they appeared to await the hour of their delivery with considerable philosophy. Physically they are the finest race I ever saw in France; their men, tall, square, and muscular, their women handsome and comely. Numbers of both sexes are fair-haired, and the sandiness of hair which we are wont to associate with the Scottish Celt is by no means uncommon. A sardonic companion whom I had picked up by the way, attributed those characteristics to the fact that in the great war St. Meuse was a depôt for British prisoners of war who had in some way contrived to imbue the native population with some of their own physical attributes. He further prophesied a wave of Teuton characteristics as the result of the German occupation which was about to terminate; but his insinuations seemed to me to partake of the scurrilous, especially as he instanced Lewes, once a British depôt for prisoners of war, as a field in which similar phenomena were to be discerned. But, nevertheless, I unquestionably found a good deal of what may be called national hybridism in St. Meuse. I used to buy photographs of a shopkeeper over whose door was blazoned the Scottish name Macfarlane. Outwardly Macfarlane was a "hielanman" all over. He had a shock-head of bright red hair such as might have thatched the poll of the "Dougal cratur;" his cheek-bones were high, his nose of the Captain of Knockdunder pattern, and his mouth of true Celtic amplitude. One felt instinctively as if Macfarlane were bound to know Gaelic, and that the times were out of joint when he evinced greater fondness for eau sucrée than for Talisker. It was with quite a sense of dislocation of the fitness of things that I found Macfarlane could talk nothing but French. But although he had torn up the ancient landmarks, or rather suffered them to lapse, he yet was proud of his ancestry. His grandfather, it appeared, was a soldier of the "Black Watch" who had been a prisoner of war in St. Meuse, and who, when the peace came, preferred taking unto himself a daughter of the Amalekite and settling in St. Meuse, to going home to a pension of sevenpence a day and liberty to ply as an Edinburgh caddie.