The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fix Bay'nets, by George Manville Fenn

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Title: Fix Bay'nets
The Regiment in the Hills

Author: George Manville Fenn

Illustrator: W.H.C. Groome

Release Date: January 27, 2009 [EBook #27908]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIX BAY'NETS ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

Fix Bay'nets, by George Manville Fenn.

CHAPTER ONE.

ON THE MARCH.

Trrt--trrt--trrt. Just that little sound, as the sticks flirted with
the drumheads to keep the men in step; for Her Majesty's 404th Fusiliers
were marching "easy." So it was called; and it meant with the men
smoking, and carrying their rifles as they pleased--shouldered, at the
trail, slung muzzle up or muzzle down. But, all the same, it was a
miserable fiction to call it marching easy, for it was impossible to
make that march anything but hard. Why? Because of the road.

No; that is a fiction, too. It is absurd to call that stony shelf of
rock, encumbered with stones of all sizes, full of cracks and holes, a
road. It was almost in its natural state, with a smooth place here and
there where it had been polished in bygone ages by avalanches of ice or
stones.

But the sun shone brightly; the scenery was glorious, and grew in places
awe-inspiring, as the regiment wound up and up the pass, and glimpses of
snow-capped mountain and glowing valley were obtained.

To any one perched on high, as were a few scattered goats, the regiment,
with its two mounted officers, its long train of mules, ambulance, and
baggage-guard, and the native attendants, must have looked like a colony
of marauding ants on their march, so wonderfully was everything dwarfed;
even the grand deodar cedars growing far down the precipitous slopes
below the track, which were stately trees, springing up to a hundred and
a hundred and fifty feet, looking like groups of shrubs in the clear,
pure air.

It was as much climbing as marching, and, as Bill Gedge said, "all agin
the collar;" but the men did not seem to mind, as they mounted higher
and higher in the expectation of finding that the next turn of the
zigzag was the top o