[207]. Colonel Harry D. Jones, royal engineers.
[208]. Napier’s ‘Peninsular War,’ vi., p. 542, edit. 1840.
[209]. Ibid., p. 543.
[210]. Jones’s ‘Sieges,’ ii., p. 126, 2nd edit.
[211]. Pasley’s ‘Elementary Fortification,’ note C, p. viii., vol. 1.
[212]. Here is a practical exemplification of esprit de corps. Whilst engaged in the attempt to destroy the shipping in the basin of Antwerp, his Royal Highness Prince William frequently visited the Napoleon battery with several military officers. On one of those visits a mounted veteran in the suite of the Prince approached private John Brennan, and said, “Sapper, will you hold this horse for an old guardsman?” Brennan, who was very busy at the time with his shovel, turned his face towards the officer, and feeling that as a sapper he was two or three removes above a groom, replied, “Egad, sir, I’d sooner be shot layin' sand-bags.”
[213]. The gentle Brennan, about whom an anecdote is told in a previous page, very reluctantly quitted the ramparts. Finding, that to save himself, retreat was inevitable, he turned his back on the fortress, and with a scowl, such only as an Irishman could make, growled out, “Bad luck to the whole ov yees!” With this mild curse, so unusual in a hot-headed, free-spoken Milesian, he scampered down the ladder, escaped without wound or touch, and finally halted, still breathing the anathema, “Bad luck to the whole ov yees!” The incident is only remarkable for its freedom from those horrible epithets and curses so common in Irish execrations. Brennan was applauded for his bravery at the storming by Captain Robert Thomson, and his subsequent exertions and constancy in the restoration of the defences of Antwerp and Ypres, where he had large parties of Hanoverian troops and Dutch peasants under his superintendence, led to his promotion first to lance-corporal and then to corporal.
[214]. Lomas was discharged in 1816 by reduction, and being a young soldier, received no pension. Some thirty years afterwards, he applied for a pension, and his exploits being still remembered, he was granted 6d. a-day.
[215]. Private Henry Scrafield behaved with spirit in overpowering two armed sentinels in the Senate-house, and taking them prisoners. A more uncompromisingly independent man perhaps never lived. Once he complained, in a petition to George IV., of the conduct of an officer, but it ended without the concession of the redress which he unwarrantably sought from His Majesty. In February, 1831, he endeavoured to save the lives of five boys who had fallen into Mulgrave Reservoir, at Woolwich. An orange had been thrown on the ice by some reckless fellow, and the unfortunate youths, scrambling after it, fell into the water. Scrafield was soon on the spot, and at imminent personal risk, crossed the broken ice on ladders, and, with ropes and grapnels, succeeded in rescuing the poor boys, but not till all life had departed. The first youth was got up in ten minutes after the catastrophe. For his judgment and intrepidity on the occasion he was promoted to be second-corporal, and the Royal Humane Society granted him a pecuniary reward. Pensioned in November, 1833, he afterwards obtained a lucrative situation on a railway, and died at Bletchington, of cholera, in September, 1849.
[216]. Pasley’s ‘Elementary Fortification,’ i., note D, p. x.