[F] No allusion to the last-mentioned officer, who was one of another stamp.
As this particular period furnished few occurrences to vary the monotony of the hammer-and-tongs sort of life we led, I shall take advantage of the opportunity it affords to fire a few random shots for the amusement of my readers.
SHOT THE FIRST.
The Duel.
On reaching Paris, after the battle of Waterloo, we found Johnny Petit in very bad humour; and that three out of every four of the officers in each army were not disposed of by private contract, with pistols and small swords, must be ascribed to our ignorance alike of their language and their national method of conveying offence; for, in regard to the first, although we were aware that the sacre bœuftake and sacre pomme de terre, with which we were constantly saluted, were not applied complimentarily, yet, as the connecting offensive links were lost to most of us, these words alone were not looked upon as of a nature requiring satisfaction; and, with regard to practical insults, a favourite one of theirs, as we afterwards discovered, was to tread, as if by accident, on the toe of the person to be insulted. Now, as the natural impulse of the Englishman, on having his toe trodden on, is to make a sort of apology to the person who did it, by way of relieving him of a portion of the embarrassment which he expects to be the attendant of such awkwardness, many thousand insults of the kind passed unnoticed:—the Frenchman flattering himself that he had done a bold thing,—the Englishman a handsome one; whereas, had the character of the tread been distinctly understood, it would, no doubt, have been rewarded on the spot by our national method—a douse on the chops! However, be that as it may, my business is to record the result of one in which there was no misunderstanding; and, as some one has justly remarked, "when people are all of one mind, it is astonishing how well they agree."
It occurred at an early hour in the morning, at one of those seminaries for grown children so common in Paris, and the parties (a French officer and one of ours) agreed to meet at day-light, which left them but brief space for preparation, so that when they arrived on the ground, and their fighting irons were paraded, the Frenchman's were found to consist of a brace of pocket-pistols, with finger-sized barrels,—while our officer had a huge horse pistol, which he had borrowed from the quarter-master, and which looked, in the eyes of the astonished Frenchman, like a six-pounder, the bore of it being large enough to swallow the stocks, locks, and barrels of his brace, with the ball-bag and powder-horn into the bargain; and he, therefore, protested vehemently against the propriety of exposing himself to such fearful odds, which being readily admitted on the other side, they referred the decision to a halfpenny whether they should take alternate shots with the large, or one each with the small.
The Fates decreed in favour of the small arms; and, the combatants having taken their ground, they both fired at a given signal, when the result was that the Frenchman's pistol burst, and blew away his finger, while our man blew away his ramrod; and as they had no longer the means of continuing the fight, they voted that they were a brace of good fellows, and after shaking the Frenchman by his other three fingers, our officer accompanied him home to breakfast.
SHOT THE SECOND.
Cannon-Law.
While stationed, in the province of Artois, with the Army of Occupation, one of our soldiers committed a most aggravated case of highway-robbery upon a Frenchwoman, for which he was tried by a court-martial, condemned, and suffered death within three days. About a fortnight after, when the whole affair had nearly been forgotten by us, the French report of the outrage, after having gone through its routine of the different official functionaries, made its appearance at our head-quarters, describing the atrocious nature of the offence, and calling for vengeance on the head of the offender. The commander-in-chief's reply was, as usual, short, but to the purpose:—The man was hanged for it ten days ago.
SHOT THE THIRD.
Civil Law.
Whilst on the station mentioned in the foregoing anecdote, two of our medical officers went in a gig, on a short tour, in the neighbourhood of our cantonments, and having unconsciously passed the line of demarkation, they were pulled up on their entrance into the first town they came to, for the payment of the usual toll; but they claimed a right to be exempted from it on the score of their being officers of the Army of Occupation. The collector of the customs, however, being of a different opinion, and finding his oratorical powers thrown away upon them, very prudently called to his aid one of those men-at-arms with which every village in France is so very considerately furnished. That functionary, squaring his cocked hat, giving his mustachoes a couple of twists, and announcing that he was as brave as a lion, as brave as the devil, and sundry other characters of noted courage, he, by way of illustration, drew his sword, and making half-a-dozen furious strokes at the paving stones, made the sparks fly from them like lightning. Seeing that the first half dozen had failed to extract the requisite quantity of sous, he was proceeding to give half-a-dozen more, but his sword broke at the first, and our two knights of the lancet, having fewer scruples about surrendering to him as an unarmed than an armed man, made no further difficulty in accompanying him to the municipal magistrate.