"The battalion will form quarter-distance column," cried Cosmo, as coolly as if he was in Colchester again. Then he ordered the pouches of the dead and wounded to be emptied, as ammunition was running short. The field guns were then limbered up, and once more the weary retreat was resumed with all speed.
Sergeant Ewen Donaldson, whose leg was shattered by a carbine-ball, was here left behind, after some of the soldiers had made an effort to drag him along with them.
"Push on, boys—push on, and never mind me," said the poor fellow; "before morning I shall be gone to where I'm fast wearin' awa'—the land o' the leal."
And this, too probably, was the case.
The tender and compassionate heart of Sir John Moore bled at the misery he beheld hourly on this miserable retreat. He bitterly deplored the relaxation of discipline consequent on it, and he never ceased issuing orders, warm exhortations, cheering addresses, and stirring appeals to honour and courage, to keep up the spirit of those under his command; but despair and sullen apathy reigned in many instances in officers and men alike, while the retreat lasted. But, with all this, grand and touching instances of humanity were not wanting to brighten the terrible picture.
An infantry officer, in despair of proceeding further, turned aside into a thicket of trees, to lie down and die unseen and uncared for; but there he found a soldier's wife stretched at the point of death, and, with the last effort of expiring nature, she implored him to receive and preserve her child. He did so, and endued with fresh strength and energy by the trust, he carried the infant on his back, and it never quitted his care till he reached one of the transports in the bay of Vigo, after the battle of Corunna.*
* Edinburgh Annual Register.
At a place where the green coats of the 95th dotted the snow, showing where a skirmish had been, Quentin assisted a rifleman to place one of his comrades in a waggon that stood near.
"Tom—old fellow," said the sufferer, in a weak voice, for he was dying with a bullet in his chest, and rustled fatuously among the damp straw on which they placed him; "I say, Tom—we've long been comrades."
"Yes, Bill," said the other, in a husky voice, "ever since Copenhagen."