esher after a bit
of sleep and could walk for a bit, and Jan and me managed to get mun
along so well as we could; but we growed weaker and he growed weaker
every day. How many days and nights it was I can't tell, for there was
no rest, and the French was said to be close by; so days and nights we
tramped on, through the wind and the rain and the sleet; and every day
there was more men dropped down. There was hardly a pair of shoes
among the lot, officers nor men, and our feet was cut and bleeding; but
still that General Craufurd kept driving of us on. He was always the
first ready to start, and there he would stand waiting, his beard all
white with frost on the bitter mornings, looking to the men with their
clothes all in rags, so cold and stiff and faint that they was hardly
able to move; and this I will say, that he favoured hisself no more
than he favoured the men. It was terrible to see mun looking them
over, for you could see that he feeled for them; but then he would open
his mouth and give the word to march in a voice that made you jump to
hear. And when once they was a-moving, if ever a man dropped behind, a
sarjint went at mun for all the world like a sheep-dog, and a dog that
knowed how to use his teeth too. My boy got terrible 'feared of they
sarjints, for he heard mun use rough words, ay, and more than words, to
our men, and more than once he thought the sarjint was speaking to he,
and clinged to me tight, poor little soul; and night-times he would
wake and cry that the sarjint was come for mun.

"It must have been nighly a week after we started that General Craufurd
tooked a different road from we; and we went on without mun. And then
we found what it was to have such a man, hard though he was in driving
us 'vor and keeping the men in order. For we came to a town where
there was stores and stores of wine; and there the sojers, that had
marched on before us, was lying in the gutter by scores, or staggering
about the streets more like to pigs than Christian men. I seed General
Moore that night. Ah! that was a man. The handsomest man in the army
they said he was, for all that one of his cheeks was scarred where a
bullet had gone through it years before; and sure enough I never see a
finer man 'cepting my Jan. But he was terrible stern too, and I never
saw man look so dark and angry as he did then. I seed mun many times
afterward, for he was always a-looking to the rear where our ridgment
was, a-he