The Mem Sahib carried the poor thing to her own bungalow for a day or
two; and then good-hearted old Bess Bowles, the trumpeter’s wife of G
troop, came and took her and her boy away to the room that had been
prepared for her in the married quarters. Perhaps it was not exactly
in accordance with strict regulations, but the colonel had put the
widow woman “on the strength”--she was no longer an unrecognised waif,
but had her regimental position. Her ration of bread and meat her
husband’s comrades of G troop contributed; the officers made a little
fund that sufficed to give her soldier’s pay. She earned it, for a week
after she “joined,” the surgeon found her in the hospital, in quiet
informal possession of the ward in which lay the most serious cases;
and when next year the cholera smote the regiment, the rugged old Scot
pronounced her “worth her weight in gold.” She has long ago been a
member of the sisterhood of army nurses. I remember her out in Africa
during the Zulu war, and since then she has smoothed soldiers’ pillows
in the Egyptian campaigns; but she is still, and will be till the day
she dies, a supernumerary “on the strength” of the 30th Light. She
never married again; she is an elderly woman now, and the winsomeness
of the days when we knew her as “the Crayture” has gone; but the quiet
faithful courage that sustained her on the weary line of march and the
forlorn-hope expedition to the East, is staunch still in her honest
heart. The sergeant-major of to-day of G troop in the 30th Light--I
call the corps by its old familiar name still, but they are Hussars
now--is a straight, clean-built young fellow, with a light heart, a
bright eye, and a quaint humour. His name is Mick Sullivan, and he is
the son of “the Crayture,” and of the man who died in the porch of
“Doolie Square.”
THE FATE OF “NANA SAHIB’S ENGLISHMAN”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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