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Updated: June 29, 2025
Through pits of mire, and pools of rain; along deep ditches, once roads, that were pounded and ploughed to pieces by artillery, heavy waggons, tramp of men and horses, and the struggle of every wheeled thing that could carry wounded soldiers; jolted among the dying and the dead, so disfigured by blood and mud as to be hardly recognisable for humanity; undisturbed by the moaning of men and the shrieking of horses, which, newly taken from the peaceful pursuits of life, could not endure the sight of the stragglers lying by the wayside, never to resume their toilsome journey; dead, as to any sentient life that was in it, and yet alive, the form that had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, with whose praises England rang, was conveyed to Brussels.
How, returning homewards, an invalided hero, Captain Doubledick becomes, in a manner, soon afterwards, the adopted son of Major Taunton's mother!
They went upstairs into the gallery from which the officer had looked down; and Monsieur le Capitaine Richard Doubledick was cordially welcomed to a grand outer chamber, and a smaller one within, all clocks and draperies, and hearths, and brazen dogs, and tiles, and cool devices, and elegance, and vastness. "You were at Waterloo," said the French officer. "I was," said Captain Richard Doubledick.
They were bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe, but they were the only eyes now left in his narrowed world that Private Richard Doubledick could not stand.
Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely as it is described in the original narrative: "Private Richard Doubledick turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a miserable salute of acquiescence."
Slowly labouring, at last, through a long heavy dream of confused time and place, presenting faint glimpses of army surgeons whom he knew, and of faces that had been familiar to his youth, dearest and kindest among them, Mary Marshall's, with a solicitude upon it more like reality than anything he could discern, Lieutenant Richard Doubledick came back to life.
At this point in the printed story, as it was originally penned, one reads that "Private Richard Doubledick began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to find the legs of the Captain's breakfast-table turning crooked as if he saw them through water."
The famous regiment was in action early in the battle, and received its first check in many an eventful year, when he was seen to fall. But it swept on to avenge him, and left behind it no such creature in the world of consciousness as Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.
At last, one fatal day in the trenches, during the siege of Badajos, Major Taunton and Ensign Doubledick find themselves hurrying forward against a party of French infantry.
"I could respect a brave Englishman, even as my foe, how much more as my friend! I also am a soldier." "He has not remembered me, as I have remembered him; he did not take such note of my face, that day, as I took of his," thought Captain Richard Doubledick. "How shall I tell him?"
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