"Keep your ears and eyes open, young man," said Captain Brook as he left me. "Remember that you are not now a sentry at the gate of a home-barrack, which no one thinks of attacking, but that you are an advanced vidette, on whose vigilance and acuteness depend the safety of the picket, the honour of the army, and hence, perhaps, of the nation itself."
"Does he deem me stupid, or what?" thought I, with some pique, as he rode off, accompanied by Sergeant Duff of ours, and I was left alone—alone to my own reflections.
The moon which shone so brightly last night was now hidden by masses of cloud, yet a few stray beams lighted the landscape at a distance. In the immediate foreground, and around me, all was sunk in darkness and obscurity; but after my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I could make out the form of the two rugged eminences or hills which overhung my post, and the pathway that wound from thence into the defile between them.
Beyond that defile I could see the distant country, lighted at times, as I have said, by the fitful gleams of the moon.
All was still and I heard only the champing of my horse upon his powerful military bit, as I sat with the butt of my carbine planted on my right thigh, gazing steadily at the darkened pass in my front.
The time passed slowly.
Twice I threw the reins across my left arm, and twice cocked and levelled my carbine, for on each occasion figures seemed to enter the pass, some on horseback and others on foot; but the next moment showed them to be only fashioned by my overheated fancy, out of the long weeds and nettles that waved to and fro on the night wind between me and the faint moonlight beyond.
On each of these occasions I made a narrow escape; to have fired my carbine would have drawn the whole line of pickets to the front, and brought the entire army under arms; but then to give a false alarm is a crime to be punished, though not quite so severely as to omit an alarm when necessary; so my position was sufficiently perplexing.
Silence, night, and loneliness induced reverie, and from the present and from the future, memory carried me back to the past—that period which possessed so little that was bright for me.
But a few months before, how little could I have imagined, or anticipated, that I should become a soldier and be situated as I was then—a lonely sentinel amid the mountains of Brittany! I thought with some growing repugnance of war, its cruelties and stern necessities—the precipitate execution of the two unfortunate spies, and the mangled corpses of the slain seamen, whom I had seen flung like lumber from the lower deck ports of the Success, after she engaged the battery in the Bay of Cancalle, and a shudder came over me, for I was young to such work as this.