ote a
chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there
were against "les ordonnances" in all the glittering squadrons; and
swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands--a unit in the
mighty aggregate of the "raw material" of war.

The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, "Why don't they all
ride like that man? He has the seat of the English Guards." But that it
was in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own,
who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader
never dreamed.

From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, and
extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, poverty,
discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every sense was
gratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured. He had
led the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses,
oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been used
to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarse
black bread of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too much
trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies' ears; he came where
morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled
his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He had
known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement,
refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger,
brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and
pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.

A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man's
endurance. No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, more
staunchly than did the "dandy of the Household."

The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him.
Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant's jibe,
and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace. Misery, when hunger
and thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the
half-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood,
which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the dreary
dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of petty
tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy
duty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and the
weary night fell with the din and uproa