"How do you like the mare?" he asked.
"Very much indeed, sir," I replied.
"Would you like her as your charger?"
"Certainly," I said.
"Very well," said the officer, "you shall have her, as you seem to be able to ride."
I was quite delighted, and very soon made friends with the little beast (she was hardly 15 hands high); she came to know me so well that at the end of a few months she used to follow me about like a dog. She was, it is true, very vicious at times, and would not let certain men come near her; she also had a hatred of officers, as years before she had been one of the Surgeon-major's chargers, and the fellow used to thrash her unmercifully. She was one of the oldest chargers in the regiment—being eighteen years old—and originally came from Hungary, where many horses were bought just after the Franco-Prussian war, but notwithstanding her age, she was full of "go" and of play. We became such good friends that many a time when I was on stable guard I used to lie alongside of her, my head resting on her neck, and she would remain quite still for hours until I moved. I always bought extra food for her, and kept her in tip-top condition.
After "Stables" we were taken to get our arms and saddlery, and shown how to take our carbines to pieces and put them together again. We then had the Gras carbine, which has long since been discarded.
At the call of "Soup" (10 A.M.) the troopers rushed off to the kitchen, and wishing to taste regimental food, I told Titi to bring me my ration, and waited until it arrived. In those days food came from the kitchen in what was called a gamelle—a stout tin pot in the shape of a saucepan, without a handle, but with a tin cover. Each man found his ration ready in the kitchen, with an allowance of salt on the lid of the gamelle; the fare consisted that morning of thin soup which tasted like sloppy water in which dishes might have been washed, with lumps of bread soaked in it and a little fat floating about in cold lumps. At the bottom of the pan was a bit of bone with very little meat on it, the ration of meat allowed to each man being four ounces including bone. The mere sight of that so-called soup and the filthiness of the pan which contained it, was too much for me. However ill-fed the men were, very few of them could ever finish the whole of their ration. When a man had finished eating he chucked his gamelle into a corner, a trooper being told off every day to take the tins back to the kitchen. In my time men had to feed on their beds, but since the days of General Boulanger things have, as I stated before, greatly altered. The men now eat at table, the food is served in dishes, and the man at the head of each table, who is generally a Corporal, helps each man on his own enamelled plate.
To return to my own experiences: I went to the canteen to get something to eat. Most of the other Volontaires were already there, and, although the place was horribly dirty, I ate with great relish a couple of cutlets. We tried the various brands of wine; that at fivepence a bottle was more suitable for use as a dye than as a beverage, but the one at sixpence was quite drinkable, and the one at eightpence quite equal to the so-called claret sold at two shillings a bottle in second-rate London restaurants. We discovered that the canteen-keeper had a yet better brand at a shilling a bottle, and this was really very good. It was a genuine bottled wine, and not drawn from the cask like the others. During my stay in the regiment I was much struck with the fact that hardly any beer is drunk by Frenchmen belonging to the lower classes. To see troopers drinking it was quite exceptional; wine was their staple drink, except when they wanted to get drunk, in which case they went in for brandy, which was served in flasks holding about two-thirds of a pint and costing fourpence. It took about a pint and a quarter of this stuff to have the desired effect.
It was nearly 11 A.M. before we had finished our breakfast, and I then returned to my quarters, most anxious to have a wash, which I had so far been obliged to do without. I asked Titi where the lavatory was.