But it's not with men alone that the wanderer on the war-path is in touch. His faithful ally, the horse, has a share of his sympathy, specially if in the course of his peregrinations he waded through the mud to headquarters in Bulgaria in 1877. Facts are stubborn things, and, when I say it was a matter of statistics that twenty-two thousand draught and other horses alone fell between Sistova and Plevna from the combined effect of fatigue and mud, it will be seen that "going to the front" is as difficult as getting to the rear—touching which, by the way, I may on another occasion have something interesting to say.
"GOING TO THE FRONT."
Mud! why, we were in a very sea of mud; it found its way over the tops of our jack-boots till it saturated our socks, this always happening when, and it was often, we dismounted to lend a hand at the spokes of our supply waggon, from the bottom of which came many-coloured streams of half-diluted coffee, weak tea, and moist, very moist sugar. Crimean mud is historic, yet one who had gone through that campaign and who was with me in Bulgaria assured me we ran it very close.
Dead horses were to be seen here, there, and everywhere, some having died in the most grotesque attitudes, and all the victims of that muddy deluge. In some cases, reaching as it did to our own horses' girths, we came to a standstill altogether, and it was only after hiring at enormous cost many others, to which we sometimes added oxen, that we could plough our way through it at all to some more elevated spot, with the prospect on our arrival of descending into an equally deep and depressing slough of despond within the next five minutes on the other side.
Did it ever strike you that the mother-in-law is often a much-misunderstood and under-valued individual?
If great men owe their greatness in many cases to maternal influence, is it not possible that even the much-derided mother-in-law may sometimes have had hers, too, on the destinies of mankind? Yet, it would seem in Servia—at least, when I was there, during that short but sharp campaign—that the mother-in-law was at a greater discount than here. And this is my reason—not a bad one, I take it—for coming to that conclusion. One morning, when in Belgrade, I saw a sturdy Serb being roughly hustled off to prison. Inquiring the cause, I found he had been condemned for the murder of his mother-in-law to five years' penal servitude, but that his conduct had been so exemplary that he had for some weeks been out on a sort of Servian ticket-of-leave. When I saw him, however, he had just committed an offence beside which the "ineffectual fire" of murder paled—he had stolen a leaden spoon from an ice-shop, and for this theft he was promptly executed the following morning—by which, I take it, leaden spoons must have been very scarce in Belgrade at that time, and mothers-in-law very plentiful.
Looking from that capital, which, unpicturesque in itself, is picturesquely situated at the juncture of the Trave and the Danube, the panorama presented of the shores of Hungary is most inviting, and at the time of which I am writing its effectiveness was added to by a large encampment of Pharaoh Nepeks—Hungarian gipsies. Ever on the alert for subjects for my pencil, I was not long before I chartered a small boat, and joined those wanderers, with whose brethren I had forgathered in many countries, and concerning whom I had written much and made innumerable sketches, and by whom I had always been received as a "Romany rye." This, however, was my first acquaintance with the Pharaoh Nepeks, of whose hospitality I cannot speak too highly. It appeared, however, that I had arrived at the moment of a political crisis. What the particular disagreement may have been—not understanding Romany sufficiently—I am unable to say. I only know that I had not been there many hours before a wordy warfare led to blows, and that encampment of about seven or eight hundred gipsies was at desperate logger-heads. Indeed, I have only on one occasion seen more frantic hand-to-hand fighting at close quarters in actual war.
Rushing on each other with long-bladed knives, they fought with a skill which must have been begotten of long practice, and terrible were the wounds which were presently inflicted; in fact, the matter was looked on as so serious that troops from the Hungarian garrison of Semlin, hard by, were sent to put a stop to the disturbance. This at once caused a diversion. Whatever their intestine troubles may have been, they were one against the invaders of their camp.
