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'Nurse thinks you ought to have a good whipping, continued Captain Stuart, stroking his long, fair moustache very gravely, though there was a twinkle in his blue eyes. 'I think we must have a court-martial first. Were you trying to kill yourself, Betty? 'I was trying to save myself from a fire I mean a fire that might be. The sentence was begun bravely, but the little lips began to quiver.
Speaking with some knowledge of such matters, I should say that court-martial proceedings are studiously fair to the accused, and, all things considered, their sentences do not err on the side of severity. Even the enemy is given the benefit of the doubt. There was a curious instance of this.
The next morning, as soon as day dawned, Captain Garcia-y-Garcia, having appointed a sergeant and a corporal to assist him, constituted himself and his two assistants into what he called a "court-martial," and then proceeded to try the prisoners.
"The letters I received," observed I, "state that you took no part in the battle of Auerstadt; that I did not believe, but I suppose you saw the bulletin which I received a little after the battle, and which stated that Bonaparte said at Nuremberg, in the presence of several officers, 'Were I to bring him before a court-martial he would be shot.
You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye.
At Gibraltar, Byng was relieved by Hawke and sent home to be tried. The court-martial, while expressly clearing him of cowardice or disaffection, found him guilty of not doing his utmost either to defeat the French fleet or to relieve the garrison at Mahon; and, as the article of war prescribed death with no alternative punishment for this offence, it felt compelled to sentence him to death.
Three Boers were shot dead, five wounded, and eight taken. Of these eight three were shot next day by order of court-martial for having resumed their weapons after surrender, while two others were acquitted.
The Chaamba brigands, my dear sir, love firearms, and for the sake of the sixty muskets in your racks, I am sure they would not scruple to make an officer, whose otherwise excellent record is well known to me, account for his absence to a court-martial. Come with me, if you please. We will finish the little inspection I began too rapidly a little while ago." He was already on the stairs.
Plans, indeed, were made for his escape, but always at the last moment he failed to avail himself of them. His friends sought to win for him the clemency of Juarez, but they found him inflexible. The traitors, as he called them, should be tried by court-martial, he said and abide the decision of the court.
But, while returning to the camp-ground, calmer reflections arose, restraining him from the dastardly act, and deciding him to carry out the other alternative, already conceived, but kept back as a dernier ressort. "Sit down, camarado!" he says, addressing the adjutant on entering. "We must hold a court-martial, and that is too serious a ceremonial to be gone through without the customary forms.
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