Gil the Gunner: The Youngest Officer in the East

by George Manville Fenn

I felt the colour come into my cheeks, and a sense of delight such as I had not experienced for months; and then I gave my horse’s sides a nip with my knees, which made it start, for I caught sight of Barton smiling superciliously, and supplying the drop of bitterness which kept me from growing conceited.

I must hurry through these early days, a full account of which would sound dull and uninteresting, but during which I had grown to be quite at home on the Sheik, and on another horse which Brace purchased for me, and which, from his speed, I called Hurricane. For though I found that I belonged to the fastest and best-trained troop of horse artillery in the service, from being so light a weight, I had to keep a pretty tight rein on my new horse, so as to hold him in his place.

Barton laughed at it, and called it a wretched screw; but I did not mind, for I found out before I had been attached to the corps long that everything in which Brace had a hand was wrong, and that he bore anything but a friendly feeling toward me, dubbing me Brace’s Jackal, though all the time I felt that I was no nearer being friends than on the day I joined.

I had learned from Barton why Brace had been over to England. It was to take his young wife, to whom he had only been married a year, in the hope of saving her life; and if I had felt any repugnance to the lieutenant before, it was redoubled now by the cynically brutal way in which he spoke.

“She died, of course,” he said. “We all knew she would—a poor, feeble kind of creature—and a good job for him. A soldier don’t want an invalid wife.”

These words explained a good deal about Brace that I had not grasped before, and as I thought of his quiet, subdued ways, and the serious aspect of his face, I could not help feeling how fond he must have been of the companion he had lost, and how it had influenced his life.

At the end of a year, we received the route, and were off, to march by easy stages, to Rajgunge, where we were to be stationed, and a glorious change it seemed to me, for I was as weary of the ugly town, with its dirty river and crowded bazaars, as I was of our hot, low barracks and the dusty plain which formed our training-ground. Rajgunge, Brace told me, was quite a small place, in a beautifully wooded, mountainous country, where there was jungle and cane-brake, with plenty of sport for those who cared for it, the rajah being ready enough to get up shooting-parties and find elephants and beaters for a grand tiger battue from time to time.

It was quite a new experience to me, all the preparations for the evacuation of the barracks, and I stared with astonishment at the size of the baggage-train, with the following of servants, grooms, tentmen, elephants, and camels, deemed necessary to accompany our marches. It was like the exodus of some warlike tribe; but, as Brace told me, it was quite the regular thing.

“You see, everything is done to spare our men labour. Their profession is to fight, and as long as they do that well, John Company is willing that they should have plenty of assistance to clean their horses, guns, and accoutrements.”

Our marches were always made in the very early morning, many of our starts being soon after midnight, and a curious scene it was in the moonlight, as the long train, with its elephants laden with tents, and camels moaning and grumbling at the weight of the necessaries they were doomed to carry, the light flashing from the guns or the accoutrements of the mounted men, and all on and on, over the sandy dust, till I grew drowsy, and nodded over my horse’s neck, rousing myself from time to time with a start to ask whether it was not all some dream.