The fact of his knowing his drill thoroughly made matters easier for him, and he soon learned how to clean his arms and accoutrements, make his bed, and so forth. And by dint of unhesitating obedience to orders, even when foolish, and never answering or arguing with superiors, he got a good name without subserviency.
Chapter Nine.
The Army of Hicks Pasha.
It may have seemed to you that Harry Forsyth took the death of the Egyptian soldier rather callously, seeing that he was not used to such scenes, and that he ought to have been a little more impressed. But you see he had resided in Egypt, and been some way up the Nile before; and in hot countries people not only live a good deal, but die a good deal, in the open air, so that he had seen human bodies; and more than once, in the course of his journeys, he had come upon one such lying much as you will see that of a dog on the mud of a tidal river at home at low water.
It is astonishing how soon we grow hardened to such spectacles. And then, unless he has become exceptionally cosmopolitan, a Briton finds it very difficult to reckon an African, or even an Asiatic, as quite a human being. Of course he knows that he is so, just as much as himself. He knows, and perhaps vehemently asserts, if necessary, that even the lowest type of negro is a man and a brother, and not a connecting link between man and monkey. But he cannot manage to feel that he is of the same value as a European, or to look upon his corpse with a similar awe.
In the early days of the Australian colonies, an officer in a Scottish regiment quartered out in that hemisphere caught a native robbing his garden, chased him with a club, and hit him harder than he intended, so that the man fell down and never got up again, for which the officer was sorry, though held justified. About that time bad news from home oppressed his spirits to such an extent that his soldier-servant, who was much attached to him, and was allowed considerable freedom of speech in consequence of his value and fidelity, thought fit to remonstrate. He attributed his master’s lowness of spirits entirely to his brooding over the accident, and said one morning when he had brushed the clothes and brought the shaving-water—
“I ask your pardon, meejor; but it’s sair to see you take on so aboot the likes of that heathen body. A great traveller I was conversing with last night, and a respectable and trustworthy man, sir, told me that there’s thousands and thousands of them up the country.”
He thought that his master was fretting over the wanton destruction of a rare specimen, a sort of dodo!