The trodden slopes that were strewn with shattered Minié rifles and smashed muskets, Highland bonnets, bearskins and shakos, and dead and dying men in kilts and plaids and red coats, lying in queer contorted attitudes (as if a giant child had been playing at soldiers, and had given the green board a spiteful kick and gone away)—were covered with a low shrub like billberry, seemingly laden with a plentiful crop of red fruit, yet they were not berries but blood-drops. The grasses wept—the earth was soaked—the river in the glen-bottom ran blood.
Realizing this, there was an outcry; and pale women huddled at the back of Moggy Geogehagan, as scared ewes will seek refuge behind some aged and weather-beaten herd-mother. Said Moggy, crying herrings for shame upon these tremblers:
“Hooroo, Jude! Are ye women or girshas that do be squaling an’ squaiking? Sure what’s natheral can’t be desperate, an’ what’s more natheral than blood? Her that will lie by her man this night will do as I do. Sthrip off, pluck up, an’ leg through this wid me.”
And the brave wife of Jems whipped off her brogues and footless blue yarn stockings, tucked up her petticoats, and led the way down, striding bare-shinned through the bloody bilberries. The Woman from Clare followed, after came flocking the rest.
LXXXV
Upon the rise beyant the sthrame that ran red, where yet other Tartar peasants’ huts were charring and smoking, brass-bound firelocks were mingled with the scattered Miniés and the broken Brown Besses; and the Highland plaids, and the red coats were infinitely outnumbered by the gray.
Up above on the hills, scored with rifle-pits, bristling with batteries, these gray coats lay in swaths and mounds as though the Divil had been makin’ hay there. And the wearers of the gray coats were pale, flat-faced men in black leather metal-spiked helmets, or white linen forage-caps. Clane-shaven men, wid sizable mouths on them, and little noses, as like wan anodher as pays out av the same pod. Catholics, too, sorrow a doubt on it! The open shirts beneath their unbuttoned coats showed, strung round their thick white necks, medals of the Mother and Child, and Crosses with the Image of the Crucified. The dead had died, grasping these. The dying strove to kiss these—making the Sign with fumbling, groping fingers—gasping out broken sentences of prayer.
And then it flashed on Moggy that this was the Inimy—could be nobody but the Inimy. The Barbarian, with teeth like prongs of hay-rakes—who dressed in sheepskins, relished tallow-candles and soap, and worshiped devil-gods—had never existed at all.
This was a shock, but nothing to the revelation of some seven hours later, when—as Moggy squatted over a fire of dried weeds and Commissariat cask-staves, toasting her man’s supper of salt pork on the end of a broken ramrod—under the black canopy of a starless night, came down the sickly, tainted wind the mournful cry:
“Oi-oi-oi!”