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On the Dixmude line all that remained of the active Belgian army was in a death struggle in the rain and mud. To these "schipperkes" honour without stint, as to their gallant king. Slightly-wounded Belgians and Belgian stragglers roamed the streets of Calais. Some had a few belongings wrapped up in handkerchiefs. Others had only the clothes they wore.
We now entered upon the bargaining phase, a process which threatened to last some time; all the stragglers in the place assisted at the conference, taking a patriotic interest in their own countryman. The matter was finally adjusted by the Wallack agreeing to take a sixth part of the original sum.
To-day I noticed a new species with a grey body, elegantly striped with black, and pink legs a very pretty spider. "26th. Went again to-day and found that the whole vast army of gossamers, with the exception of a few stragglers sitting on posts and dry stalks, had vanished.
"I was detained out last night on an errand," explained he to some three or four stragglers who had gathered round him, "and when I got in, my old mother told me a cock-and-bull story of a cry and a splash, as if somebody had fallen into the river. It don't look much like it, though." "A dead dog, maybe," suggested one of the idlers. "They're always throwing rubbish into this river on the sly."
The peasants, whose feelings of hatred we can hardly wonder at, waylaid the stragglers, and Egyptian-like as the Greeks said, or slave-like as it would be wiser to say, often put them to death in cold blood. But a long course of good government had at last quieted the whole country, and left room for further improvements by Philadelphus.
Blackburn was at the head of the herd with three men, riding some little distance in front of the cattle, inspecting the trail. Lawler and the others were holding the stragglers at the top of the mesa, endeavoring to prevent the crowding and confusion which always results when massed cattle are being held at an outlet.
I saw only a few stragglers. The wilds were like an empty house where once had lived happy children, where there had been music and laughter, shouts and romping, but now remained only silence, freighted with sadness. A great loneliness surged over me.
The Roman defence must have been hampered by the absence of that portion of the cavalry which had accompanied Rutilius; it was more sorely tried by the dazzling sun, the floating dust and the intolerable heat. The Numidians hung on the rear and either flank, cutting down the stragglers and essaying to break the order of the Roman ranks on every side.
On this occasion could be seen how much brutality, and even cold-blooded ferocity, can be produced in the human mind by the instinct of self-preservation. There were some stragglers most frantic of all, who wounded, and even killed, with their bayonets, the unfortunate horses which obeyed the lash of their guides; and several caissons were left on the road in consequence of this slaughter.
They know what it's like up yonder amongst the snows, and they think that, tired and half starved, our poor fellows will be marching to their death, leaving their enemies very little work to do beside cutting down the stragglers.
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