“Humph!” he ejaculated, and drew rein for the rear of the regiment to file past.
“And now my poor boy will be sent away, Joe,” said the agitated woman that night; but Joe said nothing, not even when he felt his wife get up and go to where the little fellow was sleeping soundly, and he heard her utter a curious sobbing sound before she came to lie down again.
But no orders were given next day for the boy to be sent to the rear, nor yet during the next week, during which the men were still hunting frogs, as they called it—frogs which took such big leaps that the toiling British soldiers could not come up to them.
“Oh, if they only would let us,” Joe used to say every night when he pulled off his boots to rest his feet. “It’s my one wish, for we must give ’em a drubbing, or we shall never have the face to go back to old England again.”
Joe had his wish sooner than he expected.
It was in a wild mountainous part of the beautiful country, so full of forest and gorge that there was plenty of opportunity for the French to hide their force on the mountain slopes of a lovely valley and let the English regiment get well past them before they attacked.
The result was a desperate fight which lasted a couple of hours before the 200th managed to extricate themselves with the loss of many killed and wounded, and in spite of every man fighting like a hero, they were beaten and had to suffer the miseries of a retreat as well as a defeat.
But the 200th did not fall back many miles before the major of the regiment halted the main body of the men on the slopes of a rocky mount which he determined to hold and to give the scattered and wounded a chance to return, so a stand was made. For there was no hiding the fact; the poor 200th had been badly beaten, as an English regiment might reasonably be when every man was surprised and called upon to fight six, mostly hidden from him by rocks and trees.
The enemy did not follow their advantage, so that the English had the whole of that night to rest and refresh, though there was not much of either, for upon the roll of the companies being called a hundred brave men did not answer; many were wounded; and, worst misfortune of all, the Colonel was among the missing, and had been seen last fighting like a hero as he tried with a small company of men to save the baggage and ammunition.
“And our poor boy, Joe,” sobbed Mrs Corporal that night, as she sat by the watch-fire, “trampled down and killed, just as I had begun to love him as much as if he had been my own.”