I am not sure that we ever saw him again, though once, weeks later, Speed and I and a dozen hussars gave chase to a mounted man near St. Brieuc, and that man might have been Buckhurst. He led us a magnificent chase straight to the coast, where we rode plump into a covey of Prussian hussars, who were standing on their saddles, hacking away at the telegraph-wires with their heavy, curved sabres.
That was our first and last sight of the enemy in either Prussian or communistic guise, though in the long, terrible days and nights of that winter of ’71, when three French armies froze, and the white death, not the Prussians, ended all for France, rumors of insurrection came to us from the starving capital, and we heard of the red flag flying on the Hôtel-de-Ville, and the rising of the carbineers under Flourens; and 380 some spoke of the leader of the insurrection and called him John Buckhurst.
That Buckhurst could have penetrated Paris neither Speed nor I believed; but, as all now know, we were wrong, though the testimony concerning his death[A] at the hands of his terrible colleague, Mortier, was not in evidence until a young ruffian, known as “The Mouse,” confessed before he expiated his crimes on Sartory Plain in 1872.
Thus, for three blank, bitter months, freezing and starving, the 1st Regiment de marche of Lorient Hussars stood guard at Brest over the diamonds of the crown of France.
This affair is dealt with in Ashes of Empire.