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He's a proboer. STEPHEN: Did I? When? Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our monarch. O God, yes! O, make the kwawr a krowawr! O! Bo! Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals, toes the line. Up, guards, and at them! Mahar shalal hashbaz.
We were reduced to employing against them their own tactics of mounted infantry. The good old times of hussar charges are past gone, together with plumes, pelisses waving in the wind, Hungarian braiding, and sabretaches. It would be senseless to continue to be a horseman in order to fight men who are no longer cavalrymen and do not wish to be so. We should fight at a disadvantage, and since the opening of the campaign too many brave soldiers have paid with their lives for their delight in epic fights
Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches, belts, scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five to nine years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of a Napoleon. I played that mighty rôle, in my tenpenny soldier's kit, I played it from start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor.
In the valley below the infantry has started to run up the slope of La Belle Alliance: after it the cavalry with reins hanging loose, stirrups lost, casques, sabretaches, muskets anything that impedes thrown into the fields to right and left.
'How I should cut out those dreary subalterns with their mess-room drolleries, how I should shame those tiresome cornets, whose only glitter is on their sabretaches! muttered he, as he surveyed himself in his courtly attire. 'It is all nonsense to say that the dress a man wears can only impress the surrounders.
But as to this, the bridegroom's troopers might fill out the tale, and in my heated fancy I could see them grouped beneath the candle-sconces with belts and baldrics fresh pipe-clayed, and shakos doffed, and sabretaches well in front. "A man full-grown a soldier," she had said; and trooper-guests were fitting in such case. From serving in a Catholic land I knew the customs of the Mother Church.
Next morning, after the fatigues of their journey, the travelers slept till ten o'clock. In the room next their bedroom there was a confusion of sabers, satchels, sabretaches, open portmanteaus, and dirty boots. Two freshly cleaned pairs with spurs had just been placed by the wall. The servants were bringing in jugs and basins, hot water for shaving, and their well-brushed clothes.
Through the grey mists we see a medley of moving colours blue and grey and scarlet and black of shakos and sabretaches, of English and French and Hanoverian and Scotch, of epaulettes and bare knees; we hear the sound of carbine and artillery fire, the clank of swords and bayonets, the call of bugle and trumpet and the wail of the melancholy pibroch: tunics and gold tassels and kilts a medley of sounds and of visions!
It lit up with the weird light of the dying day the pallid, clean-shaven faces of gallant British boys, the rugged faces of the Scot, the olive skin of the child of Provence, the bronzed cheeks of old veterans: it threw its lurid glow on red coats and black coats, white facings and gilt epaulettes; it drew sparks as of still-living fire from breastplates and broken swords, discarded casques and bayonets, sabretaches and kilts and bugles and drums, and dead horses and arms and accoutrements and dead and dying men, all lying pell-mell in a huge litter with the glow of midsummer sunset upon them poor little chessmen pawns and knights castles of strength and kings of some lonely mourning hearts all swept together by the Almighty hand of the Great Master of this terrestrial game.
They tried to fly to run, for now the chasseurs were at them with bayonets they tried to run, but the ground was littered with their own wounded and dead with the wounded and the dead of a long day of carnage: they stumbled at every step fell over the dying and the wounded over dead and wounded horses over piles of guns and swords and bayonets, and sabretaches, over forsaken guns and broken carriages, litter that impeded them in front even as they were driven with the bayonet from the rear.
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