"I have actually been thinking of turning Tartar, and speculating seriously on the merits of horseflesh," said Scarlett, as he tore away at a drumstick of the bustard. "I suppose you know that the chargers of the Heavies are dying like sheep with the rot?"
"Now, M'Goldrick, pass the bottle, will you!" said Jack. "By Jove! you Scotchmen are such slow fellows!"
"Slow or fast," growled the paymaster, "I don't know how in this war you would get on without us. You have the two Dundases, Charley Napier, Sir George Cathcart, two Campbells—Sir John and Sir Colin—Jamie Simpson, and Sir George Browne."
"Anything you like; but pass the wine from right to left," said the jovial adjutant, who began to sing—
Right about went horse and foot,
Artillery and all,
And as the devil left the house,
They tumbled through the wall,
When
They saw our light dragoons,
With their long swords, boldly riding,
Whack! fol de rol, &c.
Amid this kind of merriment and banter, we heard ever and anon the thunder of the heavy guns from the batteries of Sebastopol, as they fired on the lines where our brave troops were working to get under cover—working with old spades and mattocks, which the Iron Duke had sent home as unserviceable from Spain—and I felt saddened by the idea that every boom which pealed in the distance was, perhaps, the knell of at least one human soul. I had other thoughts that made me grave and stern.
No letters had reached me from home; nor had anything come, save an old Punch or two, addressed in my uncle's handwriting. Even Cora was forgetting me!
My blood was boiling against Berkeley. A long debt of cowardly wrong was about to be paid off, if he did not elude me by a hasty departure on leave. The clear grey eye of the colonel was fixed on me at times. He knew my thoughts; but he and the others, with the intuitive delicacy peculiar to well-educated and highly-bred men, forbore to speak of Berkeley, and the grave obligation which they were aware I was about to clear off in a manner that had become unusual now.
"You are listening to the cannon of the siege train," said Beverley. "We cavalry are in clover here, when compared to our poor infantry, who are potting the Russians like partridges, from amid the mud of the trenches."
"Mud, thickened by blood, and fragments of shot and shell—a veritable Slough of Despond!" added the paymaster.