The Age of Elegance Read Online Free PDF

military smartness." 1
    It was this that kept them so staunch at the testing time. They fought, not for public applause, but for an inward satisfaction that each man bore in his soul. "I should never have shown my face again," wrote one of them of a bout of fever, "had I applied for sick leave." They took their knocks as they came, believing that nothing mattered so long as they were true to code and comrade. "How did you sleep?" asked a young officer of a newcomer after a night in the clouds on the march to Arroyo-Molinos. "Slept like a fish," came the reply, "I believe they sleep very well in water." "Bravo," said he, "you'll do!" "Begin to like my trade," wrote the same apt novice a few weeks later, "seeing all my comrades as jolly and fearless as if they were fox-hunters." 2
    The Prussian rigidity, which the Horse Guards with pipeclay and
    1 Fraser, 207; Charles Napier, I, 316; Gomm, 375; George Napier, 55, 76, 174-S, 218, 221; Grattan, 57, 229, 303; Kincaid, Random Shots, 288; Tomkinson, 222: Blakeney, 178, 281-2; Leslie, 193-4. 198; Bessborough, 231; Oman, V. 453; Anderson, 14; Journal of a Soldier, 106; Boothby, 159; Costello, 74; Donaldson, 200; Bell, I, 42, 83-4; Smith, I, 46-7.
    2 Bell, I, 13-14. 22. See also Simmons, 193; Tomkinson, 22. "I knew no happier times, and they were their own reward." Kincaid, Random Shots, 252.

    lash had imposed on the eighteenth-century Army, had long been shed. Wellington's force was as knowing, adaptable and individualistic as a field of fox-hunters. After four years' campaigning in the toughest country in western Europe, it could, he claimed, go anywhere and do anything. Its courage was the cool, resourceful kind of men with complete confidence in their own skill. "Now, my lads," said Colonel Colborne, "we'll just charge up to the edge of the ditch, and, if we can't get it, we'll stand and fire in their faces." 1 Alert and wiry veterans as the French were, they had met their match. "Their soldiers got them into scrapes," Wellington replied when asked to explain his success, "mine always got me out." They were up to every trick of the game and, like their hardy adversaries, able to make themselves comfortable anywhere. Captain Leslie of the 29th and Kincaid of the Rifles have each described the scene at their nightly bivouac: the rough sedge-mats spread under a tree, the accoutrements hanging on the branches, the parallel trenches dug on festive occasions to form a table with candles stuck in the sockets of upturned bayonets, the soup made from stewed ration-beef and vegetables; the partridges and hares roasting on a turning thread suspended from a tripod of ramrods; the rough wine of the country cooled under moist cloths in canteens hung from the trees. Then with a bundle of fine branches to lie on and a green sod or saddle for pillow, the young victors would sleep in their cloaks till reveille. "The bugles sounded," wrote Ensign Bell, "I rolled my blanket, strapped it on my back and waited for the assembly call."
    It was not the French now who hunted the British, but the British the French—"to pot them, kill them and cook them in their own fashion." "Damn my eyes," the men shouted to one another when on short rations, "we must either fall in with the French or the Commissary to-day; I don't care which!" "It was like deer-stalking," wrote another, "a glorious thing to whack in amongst a lively party with their flesh-pots on the fire of well-seasoned wood, a chest of drawers, perhaps, or the mahogany of some hidalgo in the middle of the street blazing away and the crappos calling out, 'Bonne soupe, bonne soupe! " Officers and men were always thinking out new ways of surprising and harrying the enemy; Captain Irvine of the 28th taught himself to sling stones with such accuracy that, if he
    1 Random Shots, 273. "I am confident if Colborne was suddenly woken out of his sleep and told he was surrounded by treble his numbers, it would only have had the effect of making him, if possible,