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The sight of the glittering files of the English Foot-Guards, supported by several squadrons of horse, of the cannon which the artillerymen were busily engaged in planting against the bridge, of the plaided clans who seemed to search for a ford, and of the long succession of troops which were destined to support the attack, silenced at once their clamorous uproar, and struck them with as much consternation as if it were an unexpected apparition, and not the very thing which they ought to have been looking out for.
The sight of the glittering files of the English Foot-Guards, supported by several squadrons of horse, of the cannon which the artillerymen were busily engaged in planting against the bridge, of the plaided clans who seemed to search for a ford, and of the long succession of troops which were destined to support the attack, silenced at once their clamorous uproar, and struck them with as much consternation as if it were an unexpected apparition, and not the very thing which they ought to have been looking out for.
Our cavalry was gone, our ordnance was silent, our line was pierced in many places, and more than one of our regiments had been destroyed. On the right flank the Horse Guards Blue, the Tangiers Horse, and two dragoon regiments were forming up for a fresh attack. On the left the foot-guards had bridged the ditch and were fighting hand to hand with the men from North Somerset.
Those gentlemen that were with the King there was scarcely one of them about whom I did not know something considerably to his discredit: there was my Lord Ailesbury in strict attendance on him; and Killigrew he that had the theatre and the less said of him the better: and there were three or four more like him; the Earl of Craven was there, colonel of the foot-guards; and Lord Keeper Guildford; and the Earl of Bath; and there, in the midst, the King himself, with his blue silk cloak over his shoulders, and his princely walk, going fast as he always did, and smiling-well, what of those thirteen known mistresses of his that he had had, as well as of those other God knows how many! poor maids, who must look upon him as their ruin?
He however leaped to his feet, and, as if in a great emergency, ehouted in the Macedonian tongue to the foot-guards to turn out. He bade the trumpeter sound an alarm, and as the man hesitated and refused, struck him with his fist. This man afterwards gained great credit for his conduct, as it was thought that by it he had saved the whole camp from being thrown into an uproar.
It is less offensive than the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says the footman in Moore's Zeluco.
But somehow, at length woe to "lost causes and impossible loyalties" Herrenhausen had wind of it; and one night, when the soldiers of the white cockade lay snoring beneath the stars, stealthily the white-faced Warden unbarred his postern that very postern through which now Zuleika had passed on the way to her bedroom and stealthily through it, one by one on tip-toe, came the King's foot-guards.
Hear it any morning in your London parks, at the head of a marching regiment of your giant foot-Guards. Three bangs of the drum, like the famous mountain, and the fife announces himself to be born, and they follow him, left leg and right leg and bearskin.
One leg marched and the other swam, in the prettiest semicircle imaginable. When he stopped, the flourish of the gyrator was ineffable. The drumstick in the hand of the big black drummer of the first regiment of foot-guards was nothing to it. Whenever Riprapton bowed and he was always bowing this flourish preluded and concluded the salutary bend. It was making a leg indeed.
Household Cavalry 1,039 427 Dragoon-Guards 1,208 794 Foot-Guards 1,872 859 Infantry Regiments 1,706 758 Men in healthy districts of England 723 The Foot-Guards, which lost annually 1,415 from diseases of the chest before the reform, lost only 538 in 100,000 from the same cause in 1859.
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