Once I had a narrow escape.
On the hilly grounds above the Monastery of St. George, seeing a Turkish officer busy with an old rusty bombshell, the fuse of which had long since burned out, and the contents of which he was investigating by sedulously poking them with the point of his sabre, as he sat cross-legged with the missile in his lap, I drew near. At that moment it exploded, blowing him nearly to pieces, while a splinter tore away my left epaulette!
"Allah be praised! so ends thy black and most unholy magic!" exclaimed a Turkish onbashi, who stood near; and then, in the mutilated dead man, I recognised the hakim Abd-el-Rasig, the magician and chief doctor of the 10th regiment of the Egyptian Contingent; and in the speaker, who coolly proceeded to search his remains for coins or valuables, the corporal whose mother's image he had failed to produce in the necromantic shell at Varna!
Squalid, dirty, and miserable, the sentinels of the once splendid 93rd Highlanders, with frayed tartans, patched jackets, and tattered plumes, while guarding Balaclava, presented a very different aspect now from that which they showed when their grand advance along the slopes of the Kourgané Hill struck terror to the souls of the Muscovites.
The Black Watch and the gay Cameron Highlanders were in the same condition. I saw the latter erecting a cairn above the grave of one of their officers—young Francis Grant, of Kilgraston, who had died at Balaclava, and it made me think of the words of Ossian: "We raised the stone, and bade it speak to other times."
So the time passed quickly in our cavalry quarters at Balaclava, while the siege was being pressed, amid misery, blood, and disaster, by the infantry of the Allies. Our duties were the reverse of monotonous, and were frequently varied by most desperate rows among the Montenegrins, Albanians, Arnauts, Greeks, and Koords, who all hated each other cordially, and were always ripe and ready for mischief, as they swaggered about, each with a barrowful of pistols and yataghans in the shawl that formed his girdle; or it might be the alarm of fire, broken out none knew how. Then the trumpets were blown loudly; the gathering pipes of the Highland Brigade would send up their yells; and the fire-drum would be beaten on board the war-ships in the harbour. Then their boats would come off, full of marines and seamen, chorusing "Cheer boys, cheer," while rumours were rife of incendiary Greeks hovering about our stores and powder with lucifer matches and fusees; shots might be fired, a few men cut down, and then we would all dismiss quietly to quarters again.
Dreaming of cutting foreign throats, my groom and servant (until they got a dog tent) slept under a tree close by my tent, each with his martial cloak around him, as Lanty said, "Like two babbies in the wood, only the divil a cock robin ever came to cover them up with leaves."
Lying by night in my tent, around which a wall of turf had been raised for warmth, to sleep after a day of harassing excitement was often impossible. Through the open triangular door, I could see the same bright stars and the same moon that were looking down on the quiet harvest fields at home, where the brown stubble had replaced the golden grain; the line of camp fires smoking and reddening in the breeze as it passed along the hostile hills. I could hear our horses munching as they stood unstalled close by in the open air, and the baying of the wild Kurdistan dogs in the distance far away.
From these, and the nearer objects within the tent, its queer furniture and baggage-trunks, the varnished tins of preserved fish, flesh, and fowl, the warming-pan in which Pitblado stewed my beef and boiled my potatoes (when I had either), hanging with my sword, sash, pistols, and lancer-cap on the tent-pole; a cheese and a frying-pan, side by side with a tea-kettle and writing-case; boots and buckets in one corner, a heap of straw in another; empty Cliquot bottles and a gallant leather bag for holding six quarts of cognac—from all these my thoughts would wander away in the hours of the night to home, and all its peace and comfort.
I thought—I know not why—of the village burying-ground in Calderwood Glen, where my mother and all my kindred lay, and I shuddered at the idea of being flung into one of those Crimean hecatombs that studded all the ground about Sebastopol. On the grassy graves in Calderwood, how often had I seen the summer sun shine joyously, and the summer grass waving in the warm breezes that swept the Lomond hills. The bluebell and the white marguerite, the wild gowan and the golden buttercup, were there growing above the dead; the old kirk walls and its haunted aisle, covered with ivy and the lettered tombs where laird and lady lay, with all the humble dwellers of the hamlet near them, came before me in memory, and I felt intensely sad on reflecting I might be buried here, so far from where my kindred slept, though