by Neil Munro
CHAPTER XXXIV
OF MY WINTER CAMPAIGN IN PRUSSIA, AND ANOTHER MEETING WITH MACKELLAR OFKILBRIDE
I have no intention here of narrating at large what happened in myshort career as a soldier of the French Army, curious though some ofthe things that befell me chanced to be. They may stand for anotheroccasion, while I hurriedly and briefly chronicle what led to mysecond meeting with MacKellar of Kilbride, and through that same to therestoration of the company of Father Hamilton, the sometime priest ofDixmunde.
The Regiment d'Auvergne was far from its native hills when first Ijoined it, being indeed on the frontier of Austria. 'Twas a corps notlong embodied, composed of a preposterous number of mere lads as soft askail, yet driven to miracles of exertion by drafted veteran officers ofother regiments who stiffened their command with the flat of the sword.As for my lieutenancy it was nothing to be proud of in such a battalion,for I herded in a mess of foul-mouthed scoundrels and learned little ofthe trade of soldiering that I was supposed to be taught in the intervalbetween our departure from the frontier and our engagement on the fieldas allies with the Austrians. Of the Scots that had been in the regimentat one time there was only one left--a major named MacKay, that camesomewhere out of the Reay country in the shire of Sutherland, and wasreputed the drunkenest officer among the allies, yet comported himself,on the strength of his Hielan' extraction, towards myself, his Lowlandcountryman, with such a ludicrous haughtiness I could not bear theman--no, not from the first moment I set eyes on him!
He was a pompous little person with legs bowed through years of ridinghorse, and naturally he was the first of my new comrades I introducedmyself to when I joined the colours. I mind he sat upon a keg ofbullets, looking like a vision of Bacchus, somewhat soiled and pimply,when I entered to him and addressed him, with a certain gladness, in ourtongue.
"Humph!" was what he said. "Another of his Royal Highness's Sassenachfriends! Here's a wheen of the lousiest French privates ever shook intheir breeks in front of a cannon, wanting smeddum and courage drummedinto them with a scabbard, and they send me Sassenachs to do thebusiness with when the whole hearty North of Scotland is crawling withthe stuff I want particularly."
"Anyway, here I am, major," said I, slightly taken aback at this, "andyou'll have to make the best of me."
"Pshaw!" cried he vulgarly and cracked his thumb. "I have small stomachfor his Royal Highness's recommendations; I have found in the past thathe sends to Austria--him and his friends--only the stuff he has no usefor nearer the English Channel, where it's I would like to be this day.They're talking of an invasion, I hear; wouldn't I like to be among thefirst to have a slap again at Geordie?"
My birse rose at this, which I regarded as a rank treason in any manthat spoke my own language even with a tartan accent.
"A slap at Geordie!" I cried. "You made a bonny-like job o't when youhad the chance!"
It was my first and last confabulation of a private nature with MajorDugald MacKay. Thereafter he seldom looked the road I was on beyond togive an order or pick a fault, and, luckily, though a pleasant footingwith my neighbours has ever been my one desire in life, I was not muchput up or down by the ill-will of such a creature.
Like a break in a dream, a space of all unfriended travelling, whichis the worst travelling of all, appears my time of marching with theRegiment d'Auvergne. I was lost among aliens--aliens in tongue andsentiment, and engaged, to tell the truth, upon an enterprise that neverenlisted the faintest of my sympathy. All I wished was to forget thepast (and that, be sure, was the one impossible thing), and make aliving of some sort. The latter could not well be more scanty, formy pay was a beggar's, and infrequent at that, and finally it whollyceased.
I saw the world, so much of it as lies in Prussia, and may be witnessedfrom the ranks of a marching regiment of the line; I saw life--thelife of the tent and the bivouac, and the unforgettable thing of it wasdeath--death in the stricken field among the grinding hoofs of horses,below the flying wheels of the artillery.
And yet if I had had love there--some friend to talk to when thesplendour of things filled me; the consciousness of a kind eye to sharethe pleasure of a sunshine or to light at a common memory; or if Ihad had hope, the prospect of brighter days and a restitution of myself-respect, they might have been much happier these marching days thatI am now only too willing to forget. For we trod in many pleasant placeseven when weary, by summer fields jocund with flowers, and by autumn'sladen orchards. Stars shone on our wearied columns as we rested in themeadows or on the verge of woods, half satisfied with a gangrel's supperand sometimes joining in a song. I used to feel then that here was abetter society after all than some I had of late been habituated withupon the coast. And there were towns we passed through: 'twas sweetexceedingly to hear the echo of our own loud drums, the tarantara oftrumpets. I liked to see the folks come out although they scarce werefriendly, and feel that priceless zest that is the guerdon of the corps,the crowd, the mob--that I was something in a vastly moving thing evenif it was no more than the regiment of raw lads called d'Auvergne.
We were, for long in our progress, no part of the main army, somestrategy of which we could not guess the reasoning, making it necessarythat we should move alone through the country; and to the interestof our progress through these foreign scenes was added the ofttimesapprehension that we might some day suffer an alarm from the regimentsof the great Frederick. Twice we were surprised by night and ourpickets broken in, once a native guided us to a _guet-apens_--anambuscade--where, to do him justice, the major fought like a lion, andby his spirit released his corps from the utmost danger. A war is like aharvest; you cannot aye be leading in, though the common notion isthat in a campaign men are fighting even-on. In the cornfield the workdepends upon the weather; in the field of war (at least with us 'twasso) the actual strife must often depend upon the enemy, and for weeks onend we saw them neither tail nor horn, as the saying goes. Sometimes itseemed as if the war had quite forgotten us, and was waging somewhereelse upon the planet far away from Prussia.
We got one good from the marching and the waiting; it put vigour in ourmen. Day by day they seemed to swell and strengthen, thin faces grewwell-filled and ruddy, slouching steps grew confident and firm. And thusthe Regiment d'Au-vergne was not so badly figured when we fought thefight of Rosbach that ended my career of glory.
Rosbach!--its name to me can still create a tremor. We fought it inNovember month in a storm of driving snow. Our corps lay out upon theright of Frederick among fields that were new-ploughed for wheat andbroken up by ditches. The d'Auvergnes charged with all the fire ofveterans; they were smashed by horse, but rose and fell and rose againthough death swept across them like breath from a furnace, scorchingand shrivelling all before it. The Prussian and the Austrian gunswent rat-a-pat like some gigantic drum upon the braes, and nearerthe musketry volleys mingled with the plunge of horse and shouting ofcommanders so that each sound individually was indistinguishable, butall was blended in one unceasing melancholy hum.
That drumming on the braes and that long melancholy hum are what mostvividly remains to me of Rosbach, for I fell early in the engagement,struck in the charge by the sabre of a Prussian horseman that cleftme to the skull in a slanting stroke and left me incapable, but notunconscious, on the field.
I lay for hours with other wounded in the snow The battle changedground; the noises came from the distance: we seemed to be forgotten. Ipitied myself exceedingly. Finally I swounded.
When I came to myself it was night and men with lanterns were movingabout the fields gathering us in like blackcock where we lay. TwoFrenchmen came up and spoke to me, but what they said was all beyondme for I had clean forgotten every word of their language though thatmorning I had known it scarcely less fully than my own. I tried to speakin French, it seems, and thought I did so, but in spite of me the wordswere the broadest lallands Scots such as I had not used since I had run,a bare-legged boy, about the braes of, home. And otherwise my facultieswere singularly acute, for I rememb
er how keenly I noticed the pityingeye of the younger of the two men.
What they did was to stanch my wound and go away. I feared I wasdeserted, but by-and-by they returned with another man who held thelantern close to my face as he knelt beside me.
"By the black stones of Baillinish!" said he in an unmistakable Hielan'accent, "and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed thebylie? You were not in your mother's bosom when you got that stroke!"
I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, 'twas no other thanMacKellar of Kilbride!
He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade inanother part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised mefor a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot.
Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him)I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over thefrontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of allthe Continent of Europe in these stirring days.
I mended rapidly, and cheery enough were these days of travel in a cart,so cheery that I never considered what the end of them might be, but wascontent to sit in the sunshine blithely conversing with this odd surgeonof the French army who had been roving the world for twenty years likemy own Uncle Andrew, and had seen service in every army in Europe, butyet hankered to get back to the glens of his nativity, where he hopedhis connection with the affair of Tearlach and the Forty-five would beforgotten.
"It's just this way of it, Hazel Den," he would say to me, "there'sthem that has got enough out of Tearlach to make it worth their whileto stick by him and them that has not. I am of the latter. I have beenhanging about Paris yonder for a twelvemonth on the promise of the bodythat I should have a post that suited with my talents, and what does hedo but get me clapped into a scurvy regiment that goes trudging throughSilesia since Whitsunday, with never a sign of the paymaster except theonce and then no more than a tenth of what was due to me. It is, maybe,glory, as the other man said; but my sorrow, it is not the kind thatmakes a clinking in your pouches."
He had a comfortable deal of money to have so poor an account of hispaymaster, and at that I hinted.
"Oh! Allow me for that!" he cried with great amusement at my wonder."Fast hand at a feast and fast feet at a foray is what the other mansaid, and I'm thinking it is a very good observation, too. Where would Ibe if I was lippening on the paymaster?"
"Man! you surely have not been stealing?" said I, with such greatinnocency that he laughed like to end.
"Stealing!" he cried. "It's no theft to lift a purse in an enemy'scountry."
"But these were no enemies of yours?" I protested, "though you happen tobe doctoring in their midst."
"Tuts! tuts, man!" said he shortly. "When the conies quarrel the quirkyone (and that's Sir Fox if ye like to ken) will get his own. There seemsfar too much delicacy about you, my friend, to be a sporran-soldierfighting for the best terms an army will give you. And what for need yougrumble at my having found a purse in an empty house when it's by virtueof the same we're at this moment making our way to the sea?"
I could make no answer to that, for indeed I had had, like the otherthree wounded men in the cart with me, the full benefit of his purse,wherever he had found it, and but for that we had doubtless beenmouldering in a Prussian prison.
It will be observed that MacKellar spoke of our making for the sea, andhere it behoves that I should tell how that project arose.
When we had crossed the frontier the first time it was simply becauseit seemed the easiest way out of trouble, though it led us away fromthe remnants of the army. I had commented upon this the first night westopped within the Netherlands, and the surgeon bluntly gave me his mindon the matter. The truth was, he said, that he was sick of his post andmeant to make this the opportunity of getting quit of it.
I went as close as I dared upon a hint that the thing looked woundilylike a desertion. He picked me up quick enough and counselled me tofollow his example, and say farewell to so scurvy a service as that Ihad embarked on. His advices might have weighed less with me (though intruth I was sick enough of the Regiment d'Auvergne and a successionof defeats) if he had not told me that there was a certain man atHelvoetsluys he knew I should like to see.
"And who might that be?" I asked.
"Who but his reverence himself?" said Kilbride, who dearly loved aneffect. "Yon night I met you in the Paris change-house it was planned bythem I was with, one of them being Buhot himself of the police, that theold man must be driven out of his nest in the Hotel Dieu, seeing theyhad got all the information they wanted from him, and I was one of theparties who was to carry this into effect. At the time I fancied Buhotwas as keen upon yourself as upon the priest, and I thought I was doinga wonderfully clever thing to spy your red shoes and give you a warningto quit the priest, but all the time Buhot was only laughing at me, andsaw you and recognised you himself in the change-house. Well, to makethe long tale short, when we went to the hospital the birds were bothof them gone, which was more than we bargained for, because some sortof trial was due to the priest though there was no great feeling againsthim. Where he had taken wing to we could not guess, but you will nothinder him to come on a night of nights (as we say) to the lodging Iwas tenanting at the time in the Rue Espade, and throw himself upon mymercy. The muckle hash! I'll allow the insolency of the thing tickledme greatly. The man was a fair object, too; had not tasted food for twodays, and captured my fancy by a tale I suppose there is no trusting,that he had given you the last few _livres_ he had in the world."
"That was true enough about the _livres_," I said with gratitude.
"Was it, faith?" cried Kilbride. "Then I'm glad I did him the littleservice that lay in my power, which was to give him enough money to payfor posting to Helvoetsluys, where he is now, and grateful enough so faras I could gather from the last letters I had from him, and also mightyanxious to learn what became of his secretary."
"I would give the last plack in my pocket to see the creature," said I.
"Would you indeed?" said Kilbride. "Then here's the road for you, andit must be a long furlough whatever of it from the brigade of MarshalClermont."