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Three months had elapsed three months of growing misery and despair; three months of tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London.
The King does not allow them to be treated as slaves, and they are granted and withdrawn as he pleases. When they are summoned, as soldiers or camp-followers are drafted by recruiting agents, the islanders fly to the woods and mountains if they can, and rather than submit to this labour they live on whatever wild fruit they find.
It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight.
The camp-followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.
"The soldiers, though with some reluctance, obeyed. But the camp-followers, being in great want of water for themselves and their cattle, ran in crowds to the stream, some with pick-axes, some with hatchets, and some with swords and javelins, along with their pitchers; for they were resolved to have water, even if forced to fight for it.
It was calculated that twenty thousand soldiers and camp-followers obtained loot of more or less value, from the case of jewelry, valued at one hundred thousand pounds, that fell into the hands of an officer, to clocks, candelabra, and articles of furniture, carried off by the least fortunate. The value of the treasure there was estimated at ten millions of money at the lowest computation.
To deceive the foe, the Emperor told off a regiment or two southwards with a long tail of camp-followers that were taken to be an army. And this wily move, harmonizing with recent demonstrations of the Austrians on the side of Minsk, convinced the Muscovite leader that Napoleon was minded to clasp hands with them.
In view of the above statements, made, not by irresponsible "newspaper correspondents and camp-followers," but by the officers and men of the Fifth Army-Corps, and in view of the confirmation given to them by the commanding general himself in a telegram to the President, it is proper, I think, to press once more the question, Why was the army left for almost a month without suitable tents, without adequate hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without cooking-utensils, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets, and with only a limited supply of food?
Where few women except their own camp-followers would have to do with the soldiers, where the men despised them and the boys jeered, where "lobster-back" was the mildest term that was flung at them, there was no satisfaction in wearing the king's uniform. Eighteen months of this life wore upon the soldiers.
The Norman soldiery and camp-followers had stripped and gashed the slain; and the two monks vainly strove to recognise from among the mutilated and gory heaps around them the features of their former king. They sent for Harold's mistress, Edith, surnamed "the Fair" and the "Swan-necked," to aid them.
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