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Updated: May 12, 2025
At other times, when on duty, soldiers went about almost naked, and the contrast of their dirty-white cross-belts with their brown breasts was curious, to say the least, while their straw hats and slovenly gait suggested anything but soldierly bearing. The variety of dress indulged in, however, by the crowd of officers was outrageous as well as mirth-provoking.
They have crested helmets, plain tunics confined at the waist by a broad girdle, cross-belts ornamented with circular disks where they meet in the centre of the breast, and, most commonly, round wicker shields. Among the foot soldiers of Sennacherib we seem to find a corps of pioneers.
For before we set out Miss Dorothy brings a man from town who scrubbed and rubbed me, and sandpapered my tail, which hurt most awful, and shaved my ears with the Master's razor, so you could 'most see clear through 'em, and sprinkles me over with pipe-clay, till I shines like a Tommy's cross-belts. "Upon my word!" says Jimmy Jocks when he first sees me. "Wot a swell you are!
The level morning sun blazed on acres of slanting rifles passing; a solid column of Continental infantry, drums and fifes leading, came swinging along the stockade; knapsacks, cross-belts, gaiters, gray with dust; officers riding ahead with naked swords drawn, color-bearers carrying the beautiful new standard, stars shining, red and white stripes stirring lazily in brilliant, silken billows.
The chief difference is that there are not at this time quite so many varieties of equipment, both archers and spearmen being alike divided into two classes only, light armed and heavy-armed. The light-armed archers correspond to Sennacherib's bowmen of the third class. They have the fillet, the plain tunic, the cross-belts, the broad girdle, and the phillibeg.
As soon as the women were ordered to approach us, about twenty men, whom we had not before seen, sallied from the wood, compleatly armed with lance and shield; they were painted with red and white streaks all over the face and body, as if they intended to strike terror by their appearance: some of them were painted with a little degree of taste, and although the painting on others appeared to be done without any attention to form, yet there were those who, at a small distance, appeared as if they were accoutred with cross-belts: some had circles of white round their eyes, and several a horizontal streak across the forehead: others again had narrow white streaks round the body, with a broad line down the middle of the back and belly, and a single streak down each arm, thigh, and leg.
About fifty Bodyguards, lying and sitting under arms in the Hall, were trying to spend the night, or rather the early hours before dawn, entertaining each other. They were mainly of the command of the Count de Guiche, then in its turn of service, but a number among them wore cross-belts of other companies, for the need had been pressing, and all within reach had been hastily summoned.
Upon the trees around, sabres and helmets, holsters and cross-belts, were hung like armorial bearings in some antique hall, the dark foliage spreading its heavy shadow around us.
I have a fief in the Rue Tirechappe, and all the women are in love with me, as true as Saint Eloy was an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the tanners, the tawers, the makers of cross-belts, the purse-makers, and the sweaters, and that Saint Laurent was burnt with eggshells. I swear to you, comrades.
They were most of them nearly naked, with only short calico breeches which did not quite reach to their knees, but all had muskets on their shoulders and cross-belts on their dark bodies, one of which belts sustained apparently a cartridge-box, the other a bayonet.
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