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Updated: May 12, 2025
The Major cursed the talk of women, and the sex in general. Everything annoyed him that day the parade was insufferably hot and wearisome. Good heavens! was a man of intellect to waste his life, day after day, inspecting cross-belts and putting fools through their manoeuvres? The senseless chatter of the young men at mess was more than ever jarring.
All classes mingled in the ranks, and all ages; the heirs of the oldest families, and the humblest of the sons of toil; boys whom it was impossible to keep at school, and men whose white beards hung below their cross-belts; youths who had been reared in luxury, and rough hunters from their lonely cabins.
Here and there, by carved doors or iron-studded gates half off their hinges, lounged purposeless sentries, barefooted, clad in old and dirty red coatees, white cross-belts and ragged blue trousers.
As the hour for the review drew near, the proportion of these to the throng with which they mingled, perceptibly increasing, seemed, little by little, to leaven the whole lump. The dress-uniform of the Ninth was everywhere, the black shakos and epaulettes, white pompons, cross-belts and gloves, and multiplicity of brass buttons, lending the immense assemblage a singular spirit and vivacity.
This gave a very high idea of the extraordinary sagacity of justice, of its prompt perspicacity, and of the rapidity with which it tracked out crime. The unfortunate woman was walked off between two gendarmes. The effect produced by the gendarmes, with their burnished arms and imposing cross-belts, when they made their appearance in a village, was very great.
I have frequently watched a party of soldiers winding along a pass, with their white trousers, red coats, white cross-belts and brass plates, at about four hundred yards, and thought what a raking that rifle would give a body, of troops in such colors for a mark. A ball of that weight with an ounce of powder, would knock down six or eight men in a row.
He dilated on the various instruments and startling costumes of his company's band; on the style of their horses and the magnificence of their reviews and parades; on the superiority of the pale blue cross-belts which distinguished them, over the silver and white ones of the Scotch company, the green of the Villeroys, the yellow of the Luxembourgs.
Nelson was calling him, and he should not call in vain. Over the crest stormed the leading Grenadier, monstrous-seeming against the sky. Kit fired at the man's cross-belts. Down the shingle the fellow sprawled, whether dead or alive, wounded or whole, Kit knew not till he splashed into the water, and lay still in the flop of the tide. Behind him came the smugglers.
The riflemen wore gray spencers and gray pantaloons. Their hats were stiff black beavers, for the comfort of a soft felt hat had not yet been discovered. Most gorgeous of all were the men of the infantry, in their white pantaloons and blue coats, the latter covered by cross-belts of white, to which priming-wires, brushes, and extra flints were chained.
On the line of march the unfortunate marines wore pigtails and cocked hats; stocks and cross-belts; tight-fitting, short-waisted red coats, and knee- breeches with boots or spatter-dashes even the stout Lord Clyde in his latest days used to recall the miseries of his march to Margate, and declare that the horrid dress gave him more pain than anything he afterwards endured in a life-time of marching.
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