This inevitable climax never failed to provoke laughter. It recalled how—briskly as some colony of whistling marmot-rats into whose rows of tenanted holes an Army naturalist had poured water—the nimble Asiatic had evacuated the Northern redoubts on the day of the Balaklava Attack.
Hopped out at the rare av the earthworks like flays, they did, whin the Inimy turraned the guns upon thim.... You might have knocked Moggy Geogehagan down with a feather when she saw the blaggyards lep....
Purty as a picther the battle was, with the green hills set round it like a frame, and the blue sea lyin’ on your right hand, so calm you saw the white clouds sailin’ in it.... Nothing Moggy had ever clapped her two eyes on would aiqual it, barrin’ the glimpse they had had of the place they called Sevastopol—a wondrous city, with great quays and populous docks edging the bright blue bay-water, white marble palaces, and yellow churches with green domes, glittering blue and green and silver ridgimints paradin’ in the public squares, and sparkling fountains springing in the sunshine—as the Red Snake and the two Blue Snakes, turning inland, crawled up the rugged heights that tower beyond the Farm of Mackenzie, and streamed down the steep defile in an endless river of dusty, dry-throated, weary, sore-footed beasts and men.
The Red Snake had led the way that day, Moggy remembered.... Riding without scouts, or advance-patrols, quite like a knightly Crusader of ancient story, the “bould ould gintleman,” with his Headquarters Staff and escort about him, had butted into the tail-end of the great Army of Russia as it ebbed away, like a great gray wounded python, towards Simferopol.
Faix an’ troth! an’ a battle there would have been to bate Banagher!—supposin’ the bould ould gintleman to have starruted two hours airlier, as the Frinch Commandher-in-Chief had coaxed him to do. As it was, there was a bit av a skirmish between the throops that did be convoyin’ the baggage-wagons av the Inimy, and our Cavalry.... When the said wagons were delivered to the sturdy hands that had captured them, Jems tasted the joys of loot.
True, his share was only a marbled paper bandbox containing some elderly field-officer’s auburn wig, and a daguerreotype of Mdlle Pasbas of the Imperial Opera, Petersburg. But as plunder, these things were prized above rubies by Corporal Geogehagan.
Often and often.... But at this point the listener would urge Moggy to speed on to the great keening-match in which the wife of Jems so grandly maintained her own against the overweening pretensions of the Woman that hailed from Clare.
You must know that on the inland side of the Valley, bottomed with coarse grass, where the Light Brigade were encamped, rose a hill that had served as a signaling-station for the Russian coastguard; and from its summit the squadron-women watched the battle throughout the livelong day.
It was when these watching women saw a cloud of men in blue and crimson and gold and scarlet—mounted on black and brown and bay horses—sweeping down the Valley towards the Cossack squadrons that had clumped in a dusk mass behind their guns on the banks of the green Tchernaya—crushing down the vines and the tamarisk-bushes and oak-scrub, falling under the plowing fire from the Russian batteries posted on the Woronzoff Ridge and the Fedioukkine Heights, vanishing in the smoke to wheel and return upon their own bloody path—that the Woman from Clare screeched out, and clapped her hands, and dropped as though she had been shot.