After the cloistered quiet of Balliol I found my new life passing strange.
Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, our Commanding Officer, was a good soldier, a martinet and a firm believer in the power of the iron hand. He was, we knew, held in high favour by the authorities, and he had been granted a commission to stamp out, by all means in his power, the pestilent and bigoted pack of rebels in Dumfriesshire and Galloway who called themselves Covenanters. He was quick of temper, but he did not lack a kind of sardonic humour, nor was he without bravery. A King's man to the core, he never troubled his mind with empty questionings; his orders were to put down rebellion and to crush the Covenanters, and that was enough for him.
My fellow-troopers interested me. Some of them were soldiers of fortune who had fought upon the Continent of Europe--hard-bitten men, full of strange oaths and stranger tales of bloody fights fought on alien soil. In their eyes the life of a soldier was the only life worth living, and they held in contempt less bellicose mortals who were content to spend their days in the paths of peace. Of the rest, some were Highlanders, dreamy-eyed creatures of their emotions, in which they reined in with a firm hand in the presence of any Lowlander, but to which they gave free vent when much liquor had loosened their tongues. Brave men all--from their youth accustomed to hardship and bloodshed--fighting was as the breath of their nostrils. To me, accustomed to the milder ales of England, their capacity for the strong waters of the North was a revelation. They could drink, undiluted, fiery spirits of a potency and in a quantity that would have killed me. I never saw one drunk; and at the end of an evening of heavy indulgence there was not a man among them but could stand steady upon his feet and find his way unaided back to billets. So far as I could see the only effect of their potations was that after the fourth or fifth pot they became musical and would sing love-songs in the Gaelic tongue with a moisture gathering in their eyes like dewdrops. After that they tended to become theological, and would argue angrily on points of doctrine too abstruse for me to follow. The Lowlanders were a curious mixture of sentimentality and sound common-sense. They carried their drink less well than the Highlanders, but they too were men of unusual capacity--at least to my way of thinking--and always passed through a theological phase on their way to a condition of drunkenness.
I do not know whether my companions found as much interest in studying me as I derived from observing them. Probably they pitied me, as the Highlanders did the Lowlanders. I had not been born in Scotland: that, in their eyes, was a misfortune which almost amounted to a disgrace. My incapacity to rival them in their potations, and my inability to take part in their theological discussions, made them regard me with something akin to contempt. Once I overheard a Highlander whisper to a Lowlander, "Surely she iss a feckless creature," and I guessed with a feeling of abasement that he was speaking of me. On the whole, they treated me with a rude kindliness, doing all they could to make me acquainted with the elements of the rough-and-ready discipline which was the standard of the troop, and protecting my ignorance, whenever they dared, from the harsh tongue of the sergeant-major.
We were mounted men, but our weapons were those of foot-soldiers. Our horses, stout little nags, known as Galloways, were simply our means of conveyance from place to place. If we had been called upon to fight, we should probably have fought on foot, and we were armed accordingly, with long muskets which we bore either slung across our shoulders or suspended muzzle-downwards from our saddle-peaks.
Equipped for rapid movement, we carried little with us save our weapons: but under his saddle-flap each dragoon had a broad metal plate, and behind the saddle was hung a bag of oatmeal. When we bivouacked in the open, as many a time we did, each trooper made for himself on his plate, heated over a camp fire, a farle or two of oat-cake, and with this staved off the pangs of hunger. It was, as the sergeant had said, a man's life--devoid of luxury, compact of hardship and scanty feeding, with little relaxation save what we could find in the taverns of the towns or villages where we halted for a time.
In my ignorance, I had thought that when we set out from Dumfries to march through Galloway we should find, opposed to us somewhere, a force of Covenanters who would give battle. I had imagined that these rebels would have an army of their own ready to challenge the forces of the King: but soon I learned that our warfare was an inglorious campaign against unarmed men and women. We were little more than inquisitors. In the quiet of an afternoon we would clatter up some lonely road to a white farm-house--the hens scattering in terror before us--and draw rein in the cobbled court-yard.
Lag would hammer imperiously upon the half-open door, and a terrified woman would answer the summons.
"Whaur's the guid-man?" he would cry, and when the good-wife could find speech she would answer:
"He's up on the hills wi' the sheep."