ork of this last five minutes has made a felon of that blackguard of a
father.'

'And that,' said Polson, 'is an English officer's answer to a blow!'

'Yes,' said De Blacquaire, 'that is the English officer's answer.' And
so saying, he put in spurs and rode away.

CHAPTER X

Here we are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind
us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something
here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders
and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors. The army
which left home in such bright array is transformed to a crowd of ragged
vagabonds, and all the services are mixed together in the trenches and
the camps before Sevastopol. Here are men of the Horse Artillery whose
batteries have lost their horses; and here are cavalrymen dismounted,
whether by reason of warlike misadventure or the sheer starvation
of horseflesh. And since folks must do something for their bread
in campaigning times, as at more peaceful seasons, the rules and
regulations of special branches of the military service are cast aside,
and men of every arm are working in the trenches together. A crowd of
vagabonds we are to look at, to be sure; but a year of war, if you only
think of it, makes a boy a veteran, and the bronzed, weatherbeaten, and
ragged lads of whom the army is in the main composed, have lived in
an atmosphere of powder for a year past; have gone marching and
counter-marching under shot and shell; and charging, and repelling
charges, until the imminent peril of their lives is a great deal more
familiar to them than their daily bread. The peril is there always, and
the bread turns up with extreme fitfulness.

On the Christmas Eve of 'fifty-five there was a time of excitement in
the second parallel before the Malakoff; and this was not because of
any special danger of the siege or any threatened imminent assault, but
simply and merely because of the late slaughter of a pig of tender age
whose screams had come up from the Turkish camp about the witching hour
of midnight.

Amongst the war-worn, ragged, bronzed and bearded crowd is that
identical Paddy who reckoned his uniform the livery of his degradation
when he first assumed it. He is as ragged as any Connemara harvester
by this time, and as tanned, as plucky, and as impudent in the face
of death and hardship as he knows how to stick; and it is he who has
brought the news which flutters