"They transferred us to a battalion that lay in Siebenburgen, and which was not yet completely equipped. Our principal wants were muskets and cartouch-boxes. Nobody had a greatcoat; and, in another respect, the battalion was quite uniform, for every one went barefoot. My lieutenant often complained to the captain, who had been a Bohemian forester, and afterwards a coffee-roaster in Pesth, but who, when his daughter's husband was promoted to be major of our battalion, was by him appointed captain--to him, I say, the lieutenant repeatedly complained that the poor soldiers were frozen, and should at least be supplied with greatcoats. But all in vain; the superior officers gambled the money sent them by Government for the equipment of the troops; and all my lieutenant could obtain from the ex-coffee-roaster was a _bon-mot_ which Napoleon, he said, had addressed to his soldiers when they complained in Egypt of bad clothing: 'Avec du pain et du fer on peut aller à Chine.' "The lieutenant made me write these words on one hundred and fifty small slips of paper, pinned these upon his men's shoulders, and said--'There, my lads, are your greatcoats.' Boots were all that was now wanting. One fine morning we received a hundred and fifty bran-new--blacking-boxes! "'_Engem ucse_,' said the lieutenant: ''tis good; instead of boots they send us blacking.' And next day, when the little gray general passed a review, our company marched past with their bare feet blacked and polished, and with spurs drawn in chalk upon their heels. The general laughed at first, and then reprimanded the major. The major laughed too, and scolded the captain. Finally, the captain abused my lieutenant, who abused him in return; but, as the one understood no Hungarian, and the other no German, the dispute led to nothing. "At last we got ourselves shod, by gloriously ransacking a Wallachian village, and thrusting our feet into the red boots the women had left behind them. Thenceforward our company was known everywhere as 'the regiment of Red Boots.' "In our first engagement we had not much to do. The enemy fired at us from a distance, whilst we stood still and looked at them. Some of the recruits bobbed their heads aside when they saw the shot coming through the air. 'Don't shake your head, my man,' the lieutenant would say; 'you might chance to knock it against a cannon-ball.' In the second action we took a gun from the enemy. It came up very near us and unlimbered; but, before it had time to fire a shot, my lieutenant made the soldiers believe it was one of our own guns; that the enemy were about to capture it; and could we suffer this? We could not suffer it, and rushed on: a few shots met us; but before we well knew what we did, the gun was in our power. The whole was over in less time than I take to tell it.