"Sunday, 21st August," I repeated; "what can that refer to?"
"I don't know, sir--do you?"
The drummer saluted and left the tent. I lay on my camp-bed weak and feverish, so weak, that I could almost have wept; for now came powerfully back to memory that episode, till then forgotten--the Sunday ramble I had with Winifred Lloyd when we visited the goat, by the woods of Craigaderyn, by the cavern in the glen, by the Maen Hir or the Giant's Grave, and the rocking stone, and all that passed that day, and how she wept when I kissed her. Poor Winifred! her pretty white hand must have engraved the date which the little drummer referred to--a date which was evidently dwelling more in her artless mind than in mine.
[CHAPTER XXXVIII.--THE CAMP AGAIN.]
After the living were mustered next morning, and burial parties detailed to inter the dead, Caradoc and one or two others dropped into my tent to share some tiffin and a cigar or two with me; for, as Digby Grand has it, "whatever people's feelings may be, they go to dine all the same."
Poor Phil looked as pale and weary, if not more so, than I did. He was on the sick-list also, and had his head tied up by a bloody bandage, necessitated by a pretty trenchant sword-cut, dealt, as we afterwards discovered on comparing notes, by Volhonski just before his recapture.
"I was first knocked over by Cathcart's riderless horse--"
"Poor old Cathcart--a Waterloo man!" said Gwynne, parenthetically. "Well, Phil?"
"It was wounded and mad with terror," continued Caradoc; "then the splinter of a shell struck me on the left leg. Still I limped to the front, keeping the men together and close to the colours, till that fellow you call Volhonski cut me across the head; even my bearskin failed to protect me from his sabre. Then, but not till then, when blood blinded me, I threw up the sponge and went to the rear."
"What news of our friends in the 19th?" I asked.