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Updated: June 16, 2025
Corporal North, however, lost no opportunity of making himself disagreeable in a small way to Edgar. More than that he could not venture upon, for the men would at once have taken the lad's part. The regiment had been for some little time first on the list for foreign service, and there was no surprise when the news ran round the barrack-rooms that the order had come to prepare for embarkation.
The closing in of the verandah would of course give additional barrack accommodation, but there were quarters in the barrack-rooms for at least all the European troops. In the southern face of the enciente were three gateways, and in the centre of the western face there was a fourth, each gate covered adequately by a curtain. Between each gate were semicircular bastions for guns.
It was darkly whispered in the barrack-rooms that he had been told to go, and that he had been bribed with a ten-pound note to desert the regiment. I dare not mention names; but I think I could lay my hand on the gallant officer who went to this expense for the credit of the corps.
The royalist faction the women as well as the men spend the whole day in and out of the barrack-rooms talking to the men, trying to infuse into them loyalty to the King, and to cheer them up by bringing them wine and provisions. In the afternoon the Vicomte de St.
This army of young men doing two years, with its odd silence and its sharp twittering movements, and the sense of eyes all round one, of men glancing and appreciating: individual men catching an opportunity for cover; and commanding men catching the whole countryside.... Then, in the early afternoon, the bugles and the trumpets sounded that long-drawn call which has attended victories and capitulations, and which is also sounded every night to tell people to put out the lights in the barrack-rooms.
He, too, could look one through and through like that; but one need never cast down one's eyes if one has a clear conscience. The recruits were next conducted into the barrack-rooms, where to each was allotted a locker of his own, in which a white napkin and a spoon had already been placed. After putting their bundles into these lockers, they were taken straight to the dining-hall.
There were low whisperings in barrack-rooms and canteens, stealthy meetings in public-house parlours, bandying of passwords from mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right glad when the order came which sent them to foreign, and better still, to active service.
'No; he's either fallen into a mischief among the villagers and yet that isn't likely, for he'd blarney himself out of the Pit; or else he is engaged on urgent private affairs some stupendous devilment that we shall hear of at mess after it has been the round of the barrack-rooms.
Around was the bustle of the barrack-rooms, where hundreds of others were called up, like himself, chosen for the Chinese squadron. And rapidly he wrote to his old grandmother, with a stump of pencil, crouching on the floor, alone in his own feverish dream, though in the thick of the continual hurry and hubbub amidst all the young sailors hurried away like himself.
Shortly after reveille various rumours had been current in the stables and in the barrack-rooms that something had happened at the Heppners'; and just as the men were getting into their places the news spread from one to the other that the sergeant-major's wife was dead. As this was a private and personal matter, it could not give cause for the slightest delay.
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