The Regimental Wump
That peace which passeth all understanding goes up from the plains forever, filling the wide grass lands and the skies above. Because it passeth understanding it escapes the attention of the police retained in its service.
The summer cured our crisp grass into gold under a dome of azure, and across this floor of heaven groups of profane small creatures rode in important errands, bursting with an infinitesimal rage, exploding when they met with sudden cracklings of battle, one party following the other to various ambuscades and places of starvation within the shadows of the northern forest. Like bees and ants they seemed to have dim instincts, working upon some ordered plan of mutual destruction. And I was one of these.
We fought, we bickered through long delays, and fought again. A little Canadian army came very late, helped us most gallantly, sowed their dead, and went off home in triumph. We rode, we starved, we stamped out the last embers of revolt, hanged Riel the dreamer and tidied up the littered settlements. We settled back again to our routine of active service as officers of the peace. We saw the Canadian Pacific rails run clear from sea to sea, we heard the Canadian colonies awaken to find themselves a nation, we watched history casting her long shadows into the future.
We riders of the plains were as God made us, and oftentimes even worse. For a regiment is a thousand times more human than a man in childhood and in growth, in overstrain of war, and maladies of reaction, in pride of strength and languor of decay. Our regiment was more human than most, tremendously alive, enraged with the late rebellion as a breach of our great discipline of the peace, and frantic at the loss of our leaders, Sorrel Top and Paddy. We had a fit of nerves, with serio-comic mutinies, typhoid and an epidemic and desertion. Then came Larry, the new commissioner, a mere civilian to reign over us, who expelled our old hands if they dared so much as spit sidewise. And we were swamped under a heap of rookies—a sort of dirty animal, void of manners or morals.
The regiment was still painfully young, fighting the tyrant Larry, who was destined to be our best friend, and even to inherit the dear title of Sorrel Top. His godless rookies grew into the men who finally tamed the plains for settlement, the leaders in the conquest of the North, the officers of superb Canadian regiments in South Africa, with a deal more to be proud of than mere millionaires.
The floor of Heaven was of gold in autumn, like unto fine glass in winter, and paved with starry flowers in spring. Where our horses trampled there is peace, where we lay down to rest there grows the golden wheat, and where we sowed our dead a nation lives.
Buckie's Wump
In the fall of '86 our camp was at the breezy edge of the plains overlooking the ford of Battle River. Out on the flat beyond was pestilence-ridden Battleford, where D Troop was down with typhoid, losing a man a day. Our F Troop detachment had come from Prince Albert to take over the D Troop patrols. Our men were away close-herding the beaten sullen tribes of the Cree nation, and helping the burned-out settlers. I was in charge of the two or three men left behind in camp, and we had orders not to go near stricken Battleford. We sat in camp and watched the funerals.
At sunrise and at sunset we rode and led our horses down to the ford for water and those big four-footed babies had us bareback, so there was lots of fun. One morning young Hairy, on leaving the water, walked under the ferry cable, which scraped me off his back into a pool of dust. Then he turned round to grin and while I was reproaching him with my quirt, there came from across the river sounds of lamentation. There was Buckie, oh, yes, Corporal Buckie, if you please, of D Troop, in his Sunday best, while Rich Mixed, wet from the river, leaped all over him spoiling his pretty clothes. With his forage cap poised on three hairs, his glowing scarlet and his gleaming boots, Buckie was being absolutely ruined while he denounced my dog.