Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
recommending to their German subjects the grand republican remedy of the
guillotine for all the disorders of the government, past, present, and
to come.
Circumstances seldom give an infantry officer more than a view of the
movements in front of his regiment; but my intimacy with Guiscard
allowed me better opportunities. Among his variety of attainments he was
a first-rate engineer, and he was thus constantly employed where any
thing connected with the higher departments of the staff required his
science. He was now attached to the Prussian mission, which moved with
the headquarters of the British force, and our intercourse was
continued. I thus joined the reconnoitring parties under his command,
and received the most important lessons in my new art. But one of my
first questions to him, had been the mode of his escape on the night of
our volunteer reconnoisance.
"Escape? Why, I committed the very blunder against which I had cautioned
you, and fell into the hands of the first hussar patrole I could
possibly have met. But my story is of the briefest kind. I had not rode
forward above an hour, when my horse stumbled over something in that
most barbaric of highways, and lamed himself. I then ought to have
returned; but curiosity urged me on, and leading my unfortunate charger
by the bridle, I threaded my way through the most intricate mesh of
hedge and ditch within my travelling experience. The trampling of
horses, and the murmur of men in march, at last caught my ear; and I
began to be convinced that the movement which I expected from Dampier's
activity was taking place. I then somewhat questioned my own
_insouciance_ in having thrust you into hazard; and attempted to make my
way across the country in your direction. To accomplish this object I
turned my horse loose, taking it for granted that, lame as he was, he
was too good a Prussian to go any where but to his own camp. This
accounts for his being found at morn. I had, however, scarcely thus
taken the chance of losing a charger which had cost me a hundred and
fifty gold ducats, when I received a shot from behind a thicket which
disabled my left arm, and I was instantly surrounded by a dozen French
hussars. I was foolish enough to be angry, and angry enough to fight.
But as I was neither Samson, nor they Philistines, my sabre was soon
beaten down, and I had only to surrender. I was next mounted on the
croup of one of their horses, and after a gallop of half an hour reached
the French advanced guard. It was already hurrying on, and I must
confess that, from the silence of the march and the rapid pace of their
battalions, I began to be nervous about the consequences, and dreaded
the effects of a surprise on some of our camps. My first apprehension,
however, was for you. I thought that you must have been entangled in the
route of some of the advancing battalions, and I enquired of the colonel
of the first to whom I was brought, whether he had taken any prisoners.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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