“We are Moving Against the Russian Position on the River Alma which means Apple, and now my darling Mother on what Perhaps may be the Eave of Axion I must tell you that I Love her with All my Hart. What I shall Do if she will Not Marry me I don’t Know, so perhaps it Wold be Best for Me to get Shott. N.B. It is the girl they called Golden Cloak at Varna. Her Father’s Regiment is with the Turkish Army 2 milse down the Cost. Her Christian name is Zora. She told me I might call her by it....
“The Pity is——” Scratched out.
“It is Sad to Think——” Scratched out.
“Perhaps the Cheaf reason I Love her So is Because She has No Hands.”
LXXXIV
The snuff that got the best stories out of Moggy Geogehagan at Ballymullet Workhouse was a pungent, ginger-colored mixture, and an ounce cost fourpence-halfpenny. You sneezed when Mackiboy, who kept the general shop, took the lid of the tin off, but Moggy consumed vast pinches of this luxury without turning a hair. Naygurhead was her weakness when it came to smoking-tobacco. Her dearest treasure was a little old, inconceivably foul, black pipe that had belonged to Jems Geogehagan.
When the Allied Armies landed in the Crimaya, the scene upon that crowded beach was beyond all description. Every voice was swearing, the language was enough to split a stone.... You ate what you could get, or went without, according as luck would have it; and lay down anyhow and anywhere, to snatch your forty winks.
Between the crying of the trumpets, and the calling of the bugles, the shouting of men trying to find their lost regiments, and the noise of the starving beasts that clamored for their fodder, you were awake the greater part of the time you were sleeping. The hullaballoo made you think of the Judgment Day, with Donnybrook Fair thrown in.
At the beginning of the March upon the Alma, according to Moggy, the Hundredth Lancers with two other Light Cavalry Rigiments forrumed the Advance, and when the Armies were halted, and the Commanders-in-Chief rode along the Front, and Lord Dalgan—a grand, fine, bould-lookin’ ould gintleman to look at—dressed in a dark blue frock an’ gray throusers, an’ a plain undhress cap with a gould band, made a spache to the French in their quare lingo, their Commander-in-Chief, Marshal de St. Arnaud—a long, thin, painted gentleman, all over gould and jools—returned the compliment by addressing Her Majesty’s troops in their native tongue.
“Angleesh Soldats!” the Marshal is reported to have said on the occasion: “’Ow do you do? I ’ope you vill faight vell to-day!” Upon which, from the safe anonymity of the ranks, a Hibernian voice retorted: