‘Wait there,’ said De Blacquaire. ‘I have just one word to say to you. You know that I could have you triced to the triangle and flogged?’ Polson nodded, but said nothing. His eyes spoke for him. ‘You know I could have you court-martialled and shot?’
‘Like enough,’ said Polson. Major de Blacquaire swung into the saddle. ‘I don’t care to take revenge that way,’ he said. ‘I have known you always for an impudent and underbred young cub; but you go by way of pretending to be a gentleman, and I have my punishment in store for you. I learned something of you from your friend, Captain Volnay, and amongst other things I find you are playing Quixote. When the campaign is over you’ll be going back to the old thief’s thousands. I will give you a gaol-bird to go back to. I have at quarters what amounts to a confession. It’s an offer of restitution from Mr. Jervase; and I am not disposed to accept it. The case must slumber until this little business is over; but when I get back I will make a criminal prosecution of it, and you may make up your mind for whatever it may be worth that the work of this last five minutes has made a felon of that blackguard of a father.’
‘And that,’ said Polson, ‘is an English officer’s answer to a blow!’
‘Yes,’ said De Blacquaire, ‘that is the English officer’s answer.’ And so saying, he put in spurs and rode away.
CHAPTER X
Here we are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors. The army which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and the camps before Sevastopol. Here are men of the Horse Artillery whose batteries have lost their horses; and here are cavalrymen dismounted, whether by reason of warlike misadventure or the sheer starvation of horseflesh. And since folks must do something for their bread in campaigning times, as at more peaceful seasons, the rules and regulations of special branches of the military service are cast aside, and men of every arm are working in the trenches together. A crowd of vagabonds we are to look at, to be sure; but a year of war, if you only think of it, makes a boy a veteran, and the bronzed, weatherbeaten, and ragged lads of whom the army is in the main composed, have lived in an atmosphere of powder for a year past; have gone marching and counter-marching under shot and shell; and charging, and repelling charges, until the imminent peril of their lives is a great deal more familiar to them than their daily bread. The peril is there always, and the bread turns up with extreme fitfulness.
On the Christmas Eve of ‘fifty-five there was a time of excitement in the second parallel before the Malakoff; and this was not because of any special danger of the siege or any threatened imminent assault, but simply and merely because of the late slaughter of a pig of tender age whose screams had come up from the Turkish camp about the witching hour of midnight.
Amongst the war-worn, ragged, bronzed and bearded crowd is that identical Paddy who reckoned his uniform the livery of his degradation when he first assumed it. He is as ragged as any Connemara harvester by this time, and as tanned, as plucky, and as impudent in the face of death and hardship as he knows how to stick; and it is he who has brought the news which flutters the spirits of the score of men who are huddled in the trench together, right beneath the gaping embrasure of the Russian guns.
It was near midnight, and an extreme languor of fatigue had fallen upon all men when the tattered slip of Hibernian nobility crawled up on hands and knees so as not to expose himself against the sky-line, and dropped into his own place in the trench. He dropped with his feet on the stomach of Sergeant Polson Jervase, who denounced his clumsiness in fair set terms, which came as pat to his lips as if he had rehearsed them for a year.