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"Loch Lomond" dies away with uncanny suddenness discipline is waxing stronger every day and tunics are buttoned and rifles unslung. Three minutes later we swing demurely on to the barrack-square, across which a pleasant aroma of stewed onions is wafting, and deploy with creditable precision into the formation known as "mass." Then comes much dressing of ranks and adjusting of distances.
At any rate, no one will deny that parade-ground evolutions and barrack-square drill expressly aim at the elimination of individuality, or just the quality to the possession of which we owe the phenomenon called, in vulgar speech, the 'handy man. Habits and sentiments based on a great tradition, and the faculties developed by them, are not killed all at once; but innovation in the end annihilates them, and their not having yet entirely disappeared gives no ground for doubting their eventual, and even near, extinction.
Had the battalion belonged to the Brigade of Guards it would no doubt have gone on doing barrack-square drill every day and all day long until the men learned to move like parts of a machine. But this was a Territorial battalion, and the colonel held reasonable views about modern warfare. The value of drill, a mechanical business, was in his opinion easily exaggerated.
After three years' service down the sewers or at the smelting works, our men of leisure would no longer raise their wail over national degeneracy or the need of maintaining the standard of hardihood by barrack-square drill. As things are now, it is themselves who chiefly need the drill. "Those who live at ease," said Professor James, "are an island on a stormy ocean."
And what the mischief did you do to MacRae that he quit the South next spring after I did, and straightway went to soldiering in this country?" She shied away from that query, just as I expected. "We had oceans of trouble after you left there, Sarge," she told me, turning her head from me so that her gaze wandered over the barrack-square.
I jumped hastily from my bed, and looked out, and there, to my horror, perceived the regiment under arms. It was one of our confounded colonel's morning drills; and there he stood himself with the poor adjutant, who had been up all night, shivering beside him. Some two or three of the officers had descended; and the drum was now summoning the others as it beat round the barrack-square.
The barrack-square, a green grass field of considerable extent, was covered with the native soldiers, all dressed in their gayest holiday costume, and decorated with scarves and handkerchiefs of the brightest colours, which streamed loosely from their elbows.
About this time we received extremely sad news to the effect that Lieutenant-Colonel Crofton, who so recently left us, had been assassinated on the barrack-square in Colchester. It appears that a private had neglected his duty when on picket sentry, and the adjutant brought him before the colonel and reported his neglect, and he was sentenced to an extra duty.
What a picture rises before us. The mid-day sun, the glittering barrack-square, the scarlet and white tunics and polished side-arms of the frightened soldiers, with Brock, the embodiment of power and stern justice, towering above the shrinking culprits. Expiation of the offence had yet to follow. The appetite of the law had to be appeased. The trial took place at Quebec.
There he is below, of every type, lolling outside the hotel-door that looks on that Commercial Square which is so thorough a barrack-square, with its romping children, its dogs, its dust, its guard-house with chatting soldiers on a form in front, and the important sentinel pacing to and fro, regular and rigid as a pendulum, keeping vigilant watch and ward over nothing in particular.
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