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It was pitch dark at five o'clock this morning, the hour for parade at the fine new barracks at Tipperary. The air, too, was keen, and the detachment of the gallant 48th Regiment ordered for service at Pallas paraded in no very affectionate spirit towards the Palladians. The ill-humour of the 48th is easily accounted for.
To dress well is half a passport to a soldier's respect; whilst on the other hand, it requires many excellent qualities, to counterbalance in his mind a careless and slovenly exterior. Colonel Vavasour had an independent fortune, which he spent at the head of his regiment.
I strongly approved this idea, and on the morrow, Rion received at Meudon a curt and positive order to depart at once and join his regiment in the army of the Duc de Berwick. Madame la Duchesse de Berry was all the more outraged, because she knew the cause of this order, and consequently felt her inability to hinder its execution. Rion on his side did not dare to disobey it.
All these letters had to be censored, and the censor was not Lord Kitchener, as some people seem to think, nor Sir John French, as the London papers would have it, but the colonel of each regiment.
Many times he lay awake in the night, his face wet with tears. But with reveille he would be up, laughing and joking with the soldiers, and raising a smile even on the face of the gravest. It had taken him but a very short time to make himself at home in the regiment. The men sometimes looked at him with surprise, he was so different from themselves.
The old Captain was in fact a bad parishioner, as his servant had told him, and had only one good quality in the eyes of that careful housekeeper, "that he was always shining like a new halfpenny." Durand, in fact, was what is called in a regiment "a smart soldier," which means to say "a clean soldier." And still, one of his most important occupations was to brush his things.
"The father of the young lady met him in Ireland, or Scotland, or some such place, where he was with his regiment was greatly struck with his manner and address found him out to be my nephew asked him to his house and, in fact, almost threw this lovely girl at his head before they were two months acquainted." "As nearly as possible my own adventure," thought I, laughing to myself.
Humphreys left Agra for Bombay, and was seen no more in the regiment. Sergeant Humphreys gave up his stripes and returned to the ranks, and for two years remained there. After his wife had left him he gradually gave up the habit into which he had fallen, and at the end of the two years again became a non-commissioned officer.
I wanted him to feel the impetus of the big history back of him and the big history yet to be made ahead of him. He had known nothing of that before. The word American had no meaning to him except when a regiment of soldiers was marching by.
Montrevel accordingly ordered the commandant of Lunel, M. de Grandval, to set out the next day, very early in the morning, with the Charolais regiment and five companies of the Fimarcon and Saint-Sernin dragoons, and to repair to the heights of Boissieres, where instructions would await him.