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Updated: May 11, 2025
Officers had collected little parties, companies and half-companies; here and there larger bodies had formed, but there was no possibility, in the darkness, of gripping anybody or anything. Yet it must not be imagined that the infantry were demoralised. Stragglers and weaklings there were in plenty. But the mass of the soldiers were determined men.
I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double.
"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company for a month in Rhodesia over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em properly. It's a gift." "Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?" "They can command 'em on the 'heef. We've only four company officers Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in charge of the ponies.
At other intervals, present Austinians of tender years were manoeuvring half-companies of sisters, aunts, and mothers, and trying without much success to pretend that they did not belong to them. In short, the afternoon wore on. Welch won the hundred by two yards and the quarter by twenty, and the other events fell in nearly every case to the favourite.
In our rooms, as we say in the Guard, all men are men. Outside we are officers and men." "I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants handled half-companies and rose from the ranks and I don't see that there are any lieutenants and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman." Burgard leaned forward didactically.
There we extend, as arranged, into lines of half-companies, and go at 'em, making Douvrin our objective, and keeping the Hohenzollern and Fosse Eight upon our left." Fosse Eight is a mighty waste-heap, such as you may behold anywhere along the railway in the colliery districts between Glasgow and Edinburgh. From this distance, two miles away, the Fosse looks as big as North Berwick Law.
Advancing under a very heavy fire the brigade experienced much the same ordeal as their comrades of Hart's brigade, which was mitigated by the fact that from the first they preserved their open order in columns of half-companies extended to six paces, and that the river in front of them did not permit that right flank fire which was so fatal to the Irishmen.
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