“Blessed be God! we’re as safe here as if we were in Kilmainham Gaol,” says I, looking up at the rock that was between us and the French. “If Marmont batters away till he rises the price of gunpowder, he’ll do us no harm.” Well, Pat Dogherty stepped round, to see what the firing was about—and Charley Blake had lifted the canteen:—“Here’s the pope!” says he, taking a pull of the spirits; and giving the health of his reverence out o’ compliment to me, because he thought I was a Catholic. As he said the words, down drops an eight-inch shell between us. “Murder!” says I, rowlin’ myself down the hill, like a butter-firkin. “What’s that?” says Charley, who was always a stupid divil, and never could bear to be interrupted in his drink. Och! before I could make him sensible, bang went the shell! and when Pat and I got up, we found Charley as dead as a mackarel; and dinner, drink, and Pat Dogherty’s new cloak-case, blown regularly to the divil! No wonder I hate the whiz of them—— “Well, how do ye find yerself?”
[Original]
“Oh—pretty well; but a confounded dizziness of the head annoys me.”
“Well,—take another drop. Look round, Mark—isn’t that the name ye answer to? Turn a man or two over, and you’ll find a fresh canteen, for this one’s empty.”
Indeed, there was no great difficulty in obtaining a liberal supply; for the hollow that Peter Crotty had selected as uniting safety with comfort, was thickly studded with dead and dying men: and there was scarcely a corpse, particularly a Frenchman’s, from which a canteen was not obtainable.
In the mean time, the roar of battle gradually subsided into a spattering fire of musketry, interspersed by the booming of heavy guns, as the horse artillery hung upon the French rear, and cannonaded the dense masses of broken soldiery who hurried off in the direction of Salvatierra. But, lightened of their anus, and covered by their cavalry who still showed a steady front, they reached Metaueo, closely followed; there night ended the pursuit, and the victors and the vanquished claimed that season for repose which previous fatigue had rendered so desirable to both.
There is no defeat on record, in which a beaten army lost so much and lost so little, contradictory as the statement may appear. The whole materiel of war, the entire park of artillery, with stores, ammunition, trophies, treasure, and the most enormous collection of plunder that ever an invading army attempted to carry from the country it had for years despoiled, fell into the hands of the victors, or rather into those of the degraded wretches who followed them,—while in men the French loss scarcely exceeded that of the conquerors.
Before we had been an hour on the field, we were picked up, stowed away in a French calech, from which a danseuse on King Joseph’s establishment had been ejected—and carried through the wreck of the enemy’s plunder and military stores, into a city it had only vacated at midday. Mr. Crotty’s wound was not very important, as the ball had passed clean through the thigh, and the hemorrhage been stopped by a proper ligature. Mine was a more serious accident, and gave me considerable annoyance for several weeks after it occurred. It is true that I had much reason to be thankful, if I would only put faith in the report of my medical attendant; for he demonstrated, clear as an axiom, that had the ball struck me the eighteenth part of an inch in “fuller front,” it would have popped through the “os frontis” to a moral, and I should have been then “past praying for.”