“That is the worst part of these Arabs, letting their children go into the ranks so soon. I hate to see babies made into little men and women. If they must fight, let them punch one another’s heads with their fists.”
“I suppose, major, that as these Arabs are always fighting with one another, if there is no one else, it becomes a necessary branch of education.”
“Well, at any rate,” said Jones, who was learned in dogs—their training and management—and who, indeed, was known as Doggy Jones, “they need not ‘enter’ them to the British soldier. There are plenty of Egyptians for them to worry till they have come to their full growth.”
“That is a curious thing about General Baker,” said the colonel to Major Elmfoot.
“Yes, indeed, it is.”
“Was he hit, sir?” asked Dudley. “I heard something of it.”
“Yes, by a splinter of a shell in the face, just as we came under fire.”
“But I saw him after that.”
“Oh, yes; he got the wound dressed, and remounted, knowing how useful he could be, knowing the ground. But it is a nasty wound for all that, MacBean says. The strange thing is that he should have passed unscathed through the hordes a month ago, when his troops fled and left him unprotected, and the chances against him looked a hundred to one, and get hit to-day; the odds were a hundred to one the other way.”
“The most curious case of that sort was Sir Charles Napier,” said the major. “He was one of the most unlucky men that ever lived in the way of getting hit. In every great battle in which he took part during the Peninsular War he was severely wounded. But at Meeanee and Dubba, where he was in command, and almost everything depended upon him, and where, too, he exposed himself in a manner which made the Sindhees think he had a charmed life, he did not get a scratch.”