“Arrah, Froggy! Don’t you know we will?”
Staff officers rocked in their saddles. Massed regiments were grinning. No one had the least idea as to the identity of the offender. But long after, when Jems Geogehagan was at his dullest, men remembered what he had once said to the French Commander-in-Chief.
The March of the Three Armies was a cure for sore eyes, the greatest sight consaivable. It was for all the worruld an’ a Chaney orange like three great snakes sthreelin’ along. A Red Snake, and a Light Blue Snake, an’ a Dark Blue snake, wid golden scales, an’ diamond hair standin’ stiff along the backs av’ thim. And the Blue Snakes were always between the Red Snake and the sea. The rowl of the Artillery batteries, and the tramplin’ of horse and fut, and the sounding of the trumpets an’ the crying of the bugles made you think again of the Day of Judgment. An’—more by tokens!—the Last Day was soon to dawn for many that was there.
The roads were more thracks than roads; the counthry Moggy considered to be not unlike the Curragh of Kildare, with a dash of Galway, a sinsation of Bagshot Heath, and a taste of Shorncliffe. There was rowling open plains to begin wid; you could see the Fleets movin’ as the Army moved, the big line-av-battle ships standin’ well out—so as to get the good av their long-range flankin’ batteries—and the smaller war-steamers keepin’ inshore, ready at the wind of a worrud to dhrop in a shell from their pivot-guns. But when the bush-covered slopes began to heave up like solid waves about you, and in front of you, begob! the say might have dhried up! For all you’d have known there was no Army in front of you at all, at all! but for the dead and dying bastes, and the sun-sick and cholera-smitten men it had sloughed as it traveled on. “Don’t leave us!” the sick cried out in a lamentable manner, and good rayson they had to cry, poor craythers! For the ambulances having been left behind at Varna, to lave them was to lave them to be aiting by the buruds av the air and the bastes av the wild. So thim among the women that was able—and many was sick, God pity them!—gave up their places on the wagons to these unfortunates, and footed it beside the thrains.
They bivouacked under a dhry sky that night, and marched in the gray of the morning, losing the road and climbing the hills in the tracks the plunging batteries had made. The bush that clad these hills was tamarisk and broom, and furze, and oak-scrub; thorny red-and-yellow berried barberry, wild grape-vines, and a shrub wid shiny leaves and the smell av thim like bog-myrtle. The scent of crushed thyme and worrumwood rose up about your feet, as you tramped on. The sun shone white-hot in a sky of harebell blue.
It was high noon of a scorching hot day when you heard the Fleet’s guns firing. Powerful the banging was. They were shellin’ the Russian Artillery posted on the heights. Then came volleys av muskethry, crackin’ and rattlin’. Clouds of salty-tastin’ powdher-smoke came driftin’ down upon the wind. And the sun bein’ in your teeth, your shadow and the shadows of the women marchin’ with you, and the carts, and the bastes, and the men that dhrove them, loomed thremenjous on the vapor that riz behind you like a wall. But when the big grass garrison-guns the Inimy had cocked up on the rock-ridges above the river began convarsin’—and the French and English Artillery answered wid shrapnel an’ rockets an’ grape—you walked in a white fog laced wid tongues of fire, an’ round-shot as big as melons trundlin’ through it—expectin’ you’d be raising the whilleleu wid the Holy Souls in Purgatory the next minute, or dhrinkin’ tay wid the Blessed in Paradise. The screaming of the bugles split the reek, and pierced the smother; and—in one lull—came the sound of the Zouave drums beating the pas de charge.
You know it.... It begins with a low faint throbbing that grows upon the ear and fills it, drowning out all other sounds. It is a hurricane from Hell that blows armed men, like red, and blue, and golden leaves before it, urged by the simultaneous desire to strike, stab, crush, overwhelm, destroy and conquer other men....
The fighting was over, when the women with the seven-mile-long wagon-train, loaded with sick and dying, drawn by gaunt horses, emaciated mules, and starving bullocks, climbed the rise where the Tartar village was still smoldering and reeking. Dismounted field-guns, shattered limbers, dead and mutilated men and horses and bloody mash that had been men and horses, showed where the Inimy’s canister and grape had done its business upon the batteries of our Artillery. Cooking-fires were already lighted, fatigue-parties were digging grave-trenches, the distant trumpets were calling the Cavalry back from the pursuit. It was for Moggy and for many of the women with the wagon-trains, the first sight of a battle-field.
But not until—word having been brought down that the Cavalry would encamp a mile south of the Katscha, and that their women were to follow them—not until their smaller train of vehicles separated from the rest, and began to roll over the ridge, and down the steep banks to the river-ford—did they realize the grim meaning of War....