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The execution of our movement presented a magnificent military spectacle, as the plain, between us and the right of the army, was by this time in possession of the French cavalry, and, while we were retiring through it with the order and precision of a common field-day, they kept dancing around us, and every instant threatening a charge, without daring to execute it.
I have an idea that Sir Lionel is impatient to reach Graylees now, so after the Yorkshire field-day we will push on there; and I shall perhaps hear from Ellaline as to Honoré's plans. He ought to be in Scotland by that time. I've written her to wire me at the nearest post-office to Graylees Castle, as I don't like to receive telegrams there.
I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know, so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.
Another said, "Hell!" in a whisper. The adjutant answered the colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the colonel's face anxiously. "Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?" The colonel laughed. "Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training." The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof!
When he went upstairs to his own bedroom, in Piccadilly, about five o'clock, therefore, he was both sleepy and tired, and lamented to that cherished and ever-discreet confidant, a cheroot, the brutal demands of the Service; which would drag him off, in five hours' time, without the slightest regard to his feelings, to take share in the hot, heavy, dusty, searching work of a field-day up at the Scrubs.
Many of the rioters made belts of cord, of handkerchiefs, or any material they found at hand, and wore these weapons as openly as pioneers upon a field-day. There was not the least disguise or concealment indeed, on this night, very little excitement or hurry.
Toby was not a casuist that he knew of, at least and I don't mean to say that when he began to take to the Bells, and to knit up his first rough acquaintance with them into something of a closer and more delicate woof, he passed through these considerations one by one, or held any formal review or great field-day in his thoughts.
Unfortunately, being at that time temporarily in Command of the Station, he ordered a Brigade field-day. He said that he wished to make the regiment "sweat for their damned insolence," and he carried out his notion thoroughly. That Monday was one of the hardest days in the memory of the White Hussars.
I therefore immediately employed a drill serjeant, who was engaged to instruct the troop in their exercise, and who had been drilling them for some time past; and before the first field-day arrived for me to attend, my instructor pronounced me fit for service, and as well disciplined as any man in the troop.
The moment all was done the Duke clapped spars to his horse and was back in Downing Street within the two hours, breakfasted, and off to Windsor, where he transacted business for an hour or so, and then said, 'By-the-by, I was forgetting I have had a field-day with Lord W. this morning. They say the King rowed Arthur much for exposing himself at such a crisis." Art of Preserving Health, book ii.
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