George Fenn - Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills

Trrt – trrt – trrt. Just that little sound, as the sticks flirted with the drumheads to keep the men in step; for Her Majesty’s 404th Fusiliers were marching “easy.” So it was called; and it meant with the men smoking, and carrying their rifles as they pleased – shouldered, at the trail, slung muzzle up or muzzle down. But, all the same, it was a miserable fiction to call it marching easy, for it was impossible to make that march anything but hard. Why? Because of the road.

No; that is a fiction, too. It is absurd to call that stony shelf of rock, encumbered with stones of all sizes, full of cracks and holes, a road. It was almost in its natural state, with a smooth place here and there where it had been polished in bygone ages by avalanches of ice or stones.

But the sun shone brightly; the scenery was glorious, and grew in places awe-inspiring, as the regiment wound up and up the pass, and glimpses of snow-capped mountain and glowing valley were obtained.

To any one perched on high, as were a few scattered goats, the regiment, with its two mounted officers, its long train of mules, ambulance, and baggage-guard, and the native attendants, must have looked like a colony of marauding ants on their march, so wonderfully was everything dwarfed; even the grand deodar cedars growing far down the precipitous slopes below the track, which were stately trees, springing up to a hundred and a hundred and fifty feet, looking like groups of shrubs in the clear, pure air.

It was as much climbing as marching, and, as Bill Gedge said, “all agin the collar;” but the men did not seem to mind, as they mounted higher and higher in the expectation of finding that the next turn of the zigzag was the top of the pass.

“Here, I say,” cried the owner of the just-mentioned name, a thin, wiry-looking fellow, whom so far drill and six months in the North-west Territory of Her Majesty’s Indian dominions had not made muscular-looking; though, for the matter of that, he did not differ much from his companions, who in appearance were of the thorough East-end Cockney type – that rather degenerate class of lads who look fifteen or sixteen at most when twenty. Stamina seemed to be wanting, chests looked narrow, and their tunics covered gaunt and angular bodies, while their spiked white helmets, though they fitted their heads, had rather an extinguisher-like effect over the thin, hollow-cheeked, beardless faces.

Defects, all these, that would naturally die out; but at the time now under consideration any newspaper writer would have been justified in calling them a regiment of boys.

But, boy-like, it did not trouble them, for, apparently as fresh as when they had started hours before, they seemed to be revelling in the wonderful air of the mountain region, and to be as full of antics as a party of schoolfellows out for a day. Songs had been sung, each with a roaring chorus; tricks had been surreptitiously played on the “pass it on” principle – a lad in the rear tilting the helmet of the file in front over his eyes, or giving him a sounding spank on the shoulder with the above admonition, when it was taken with a grin and passed on right away to the foremost rank; while the commissioned officers seemed to be peculiarly blind and deaf so long as their lads marched well, and there was no falling-out of done-up fellows waiting for the ambulance to overtake them for the rest of the march.

“Here, I say,” cried Private Gedge, “I ain’t a-going to drop no coppers in no blessed hats when that there band comes round. They don’t ’arf play.”

“Don’t keep on ,” said the file on his left.

“Play? Yah! Why, we might jest as well have a dozen of them tom-tomming niggers in front saying ‘Shallabala’ as they taps the skins with their brown fingers.”

“You are a chap, Bill,” said another. “Talk about yer Syety for Cruelty to Hanimals! Why, yer orter be fined. It’s all I can do to keep wind enough to climb up here, let alone having to blow a brass traction-engine, or even a fife.”

“Gahn! They’re used to it. They don’t half play. Pass the word on for ‘Brish Grannydiers.’”

Bang – bang – bang – bang! Four distinct beats of the big drum, which were taken up by the echoes and repeated till they died away in the distance, in company with volleys of notes in a spirited crash from the brass instruments far in front, as the band struck up a rattling march, whose effect was to make breasts swell, heads perk up, and the lads pull themselves together and march on, many of them beginning to hum the familiar melody which had brightened many a long, up-country tramp.

“Talk about telly-phoning, Billy; they heered you without.”

“Yes, that’s your style,” cried the first speaker, bursting out with a very good imitation of Punch in one of his vocal efforts, and supplementing it with a touch of the terpsichorean, tripping along in step with a suggestion of a nigger minstrel’s jig.

Marching easy does not mean free and easy: and this was too much for one of the sergeants of the company, a tall, gaunt, particularly bony-faced fellow, frowning and full of importance, but almost as boyish of aspect as those who bore no chevrons on their sleeves.

He came up at the double, unnoticed by the dancer, and tried to range up alongside; but the rocky shelf was for some minutes not wide enough. Consequently he had time to grow redder in the face and more angry.

At last, though, he was in a position to speak.

“Here, you, sir,” he shouted; “drop that. You’re not on a cellar flap now. Recollect where you are.”

Private Gedge gave a start, and squinted horribly for the benefit of his comrades right and left, as he pulled himself together, jerked his rifle over from one shoulder to the other, and marched on with his body stiff as a rifle-barrel.

“You’re too full of these monkey-tricks, sir; and if there’s any more of them I shall report you.”

Private Gedge squinted more horribly than ever, as he marched on now as stiffly as if being drilled – too stiffly to satisfy the sergeant, who kept close behind.

“March easy, sir! march easy!” he cried importantly, and the offender dropped his rigidity, the result being that the sergeant returned to his place in the rear of the company, while Private Gedge relieved his feelings in a whisper.

“Yah! Gee up! Gee! Who wouldn’t be a sergeant? Bless his heart! I love him ’most as much as my mother dear – my mother dear – my gee-yentle mother deear.”

He sang the last words, but in a suppressed voice, to the great amusement of his fellows.

“Oh, I say, I wish I warn’t a swaddy,” he whispered.

“Why?” asked the lad on his left.

“So as to give old Gee one on the nose, and then have it out with him. I’d make him warm. It’s this sort o’ thing as makes me hate it all. The orficers don’t mind us having a bit of a lark to make the march go light. They takes no notice so long as we’re ready for ’tention and ’ll fight. It’s on’y chaps like Tommy Gee as has got his stripes that comes down upon you. Why, I was singing and doing that plantation song on’y yesterday, and Mr Bracy and Cap’en Roberts come along, and they both laughed. Bet sixpence the Colonel would have looked t’other way. – Oh, I say, ain’t I hungry! Is it much farther?”

“I dunno,” said another; “but ain’t the wind cold up here?”

“Band’s done again,” said Gedge. “That was a short un. I s’pose if I was to cry ‘Hongcore’ old Gee ’d be down upon me again.”

Ten minutes later the men had something more substantial to think about than music, for the shelf-like track came to an end in a great natural amphitheatre, whose walls were dwarfed mountains streaked with rifts and ravines which glistened white and sparkling as they scored the green grassy slopes, while the floor of the great hollow was a beautiful mead through which a fairly rapid torrent ran.