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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 11

The Ghost he Didn't See

The Ghost he Didn't See.

I was rather disappointed, if the truth must be told—so indeed we all were at home—at his scanty flow of words, when he returned to us from that grim Crimean campaign.

As for the general story of the war, we did not want that from him, as they might have done whose kinsman should have returned to them from so distant a scene of warfare in the old days when electric telegraph and express trains and steamers were not, and when the Times had not invented its "Own Correspondent" We used to send him that general story, in comprehensive chapters on that journal's broad sheet, and with the pictorial panoramas of the London Illustrated News. He and his comrades read it thus, so I have heard him say, with curious, eager, and intense delight. I think his heart must have beat quick one day upon reading, in one of its very noblest chapters, his own name, scored under by my pen as I had read it proudly, before sending him that paper.

But what we wanted were particulars of what had personally befallen him; for we knew that, though it was hard, indeed, to be preeminent in discharge of duty or daring of danger amidst that flower of the world's soldier hood, he had been noted as noteworthy, even among such, by those who had the best means of appreciating his courage and his industry. In explanation of the latter word, I may remark that his arm of the service was one of those which our then allies designate as "Armes savantes," or "Scientific Arms."

I have found this modest manly silence, touching personal exposure and achievement, an almost invariable characteristic of our noble fighting men. My reader will, therefore, kindly bear it in mind that the detailed and continuous narrative I put under his eyes here is of my writing rather than of his telling, short as it is. But I have interwoven in it, so far as I know, nothing but authentic threads of recollection. I picked page 326 the matter for the spinning of them bit by bit out of his conversation, as an old woman might pick out of a long hedgerow, at great intervals, wool enough to furnish worsted for her knitting needles to work up into a stocking or a pair of mits.

He had been under fire continuously, for seven hours and more, on one of the most hard-fought days of all that hard-fought struggle, and, as he rode away at evening towards the camp, rode bareheaded, in reverent acknowledgment to Heaven for the marvel that he was riding out of that hail of iron himself unhurt.

As for the unobserved incidents of that day's danger, from which so merciful a preservation had been vouchsafed, they would be hard to reckon; but upon three several occasions during those seven exposed hours, it really seemed that the messengers of death avoided him, as in some legend they turn aside from the man who bears a charmed life. There was a six-pound shot, which he saw distinctly coming, as a cricketer eyes the projectile which threatens his middle wicket. It pitched right in front of him, and rose as a cricket-ball when the turf is parched and baked, bounding clean up into the air, and so passing right over his untouched head. It fell behind him, and he looked at it more than once that day, and, but for its inconvenient bulk, thought of carrying it away for a memento. There was a four-and-twenty-pound shot next, a sort of twin-brother to that which, some three weeks before, had actually torn his forage-cap from off his head; but it came too quick for sight. He was at that moment hacking towards the shafts of an ammunition eart a horse, whose reins he hold close to its jaw, as he spurred on his own to make it give way in the right direction. Smash! came the great globe of iron, and as the bones and blood and brains bespattered him, he almost himself fell forward; for the poor brute was restive no longer: headless horses don't strain against the bit, although 'tis just as hard as ever to back them into the shafts.

Then there was a moment, one of those of direst confusion, of what other than such soldiers as fought that fight would have reckoned a moment of dismay,—a moment wherein regimental order itself was in part broken and confused; guardsmen mingled with linesmen, linesmen with blue-coated artillery.

There had been fearful havoc among those noble servants of the deep-voiced cannon, and men were wanted to hand out the shells from a cart he had himself brought up, replenished, to a breastwork. He called in some of the linesmen. One of them stood by him foot to foot, almost or actually in contact. They were handing ammunition, from one to other, as men do fire-buckets when fires are blazing in a street. He leant in one direction to pass on the load he had just taken from the soldier's hand; the soldier was bending towards the next man in the chain; a Russian shell came bounding with a whirr, then burst and scattered its deadly fragments with terrific force. One of its great iron shreds passed—there was just room for it—between his leg and the soldier's that stood next him. They looked each other in the face.

"A near shave that, sir!" said the man, "Nearer than you think for, per-haps," he answered; for he had felt the rounder surface of the fragment actually bruise him as it passed, whereas its ragged edge had shaven, with a marvellous neatness, from his trouser, part of the broad red stripe upon the outer seam.

I venture to give these minute details, because they may help other civilians, as they helped me, to "realise," as they call it now-a-days, more vividly the risks of a day of battle, and the large drafts they draw upon a man's fund of nerve and composure, just as he stands, without coming into any close encounter.

But at last the firing was done; and, bareheaded, as I have said, he turned and rode back towards the camp.

It was before the famine period there, and though there was no superfluity of food, there was food to be had, and that page 327 long day's fighting-men were in sore need of it.

It was dusk, and he was lighting a candle to sit down to his meal, when the voice of a French soldier called some-thing like his name from the outside. He was himself a perfect master of that language, as the "Soldat-du-train" who stood outside found to his great relief upon his first utterance of inquiry.

The Frenchman held a mule by the bridle, and across the creature's back lay something which looked like a heavily filled parti-coloured sack. It was a far otherwise ghastly burden. The body of an officer, stripped bare all but the trousers, the dark clothed legs hanging one way, the fair skinned naked shoulders and arms the other, the face towards the ground.

"I was directed, mon officier, to bring this poor gentleman's corpse to you. They say you were a friend of his—his name is Captain X——"

Even at that early stage of the campaign such shocks had lost the startling effect of novelty; nevertheless, there were few names among those of his friends and comrades which it could shock and grieve him more to hear pronounced under such circumstances. The light was fetched He raised the poor body; then, with a sigh, let it once more gently down. There was a small round hole in the very centre of the forehead, whereat the rifle ball had darted into the brain of his hapless friend.

He called an orderly, and directed him to accompany the Frenchman to the dead man's tent. He would himself soon follow and see to his receiving a soldier's obsequies. His weariness and exhaustion were such as to render it imperatively necessary that he should first take his food, to which he returned, with what increased weight at heart, who shall rightly tell? It needs not that the tension of a man's nerves should have been strung tight by the hand of battle, for him to know, from his own experience, what is the strange, and awful, and weird feeling of the first relaxation of them in the early after-hours of responsibility, danger, or important crisis of decision. If apparitions and visions of things unearthy be indeed mere fictions of men's brain, such after-hours are just those wherein the mind is readiest to yield to the power of illusion, illusion or reality more startling, more unaccountable by far than it? Whether of the two was this?

There entered at the curtain of his tent the dead man, towards whom, in some few minutes more, he should have been showing the last sad kindnesses. The light fell full and clear upon his face. He took off his forage cap as he came in. The broad white forehead showed no longer any trace of the murderous incrash of the ball which had slain him. Into the poor dull glazed eyes the gleam had returned—could it indeed be the gleam of returned life? Or do the eyes of ghosts gleam life-like so?

"What made you send that French-man with my corpse to me? At least, he would insist that it was mine."

"X——! Good heaven! Can it be you, indeed?"

"Who should it be? What ails you, man? Why do you stare at me so?"

"I cannot say what ails me; but I am surely under some strange delusion. It is not half an hour surely, since I saw you stretched lifeless across a mule's back, with a rifle bullet between your eyes. What can this mean? You are not even wounded."

"No, thank God! nothing has touched me for this once; but that French soldier—did you then send him up, indeed?"

"Indeed I did."

Hideous comico-tragic episode in the awful drama of war! They discovered by-and-by that their slain brother soldier was no comrade of their own corps, but a brave officer of another arm. Neither of them had known him personally, nor had they heard before that between him and X——existed, in his lifetime, the most remarkable and close resemblance—such an identity of feature as is rarely seen save in twin-brothers. Now, it has struck me sometimes as I have turned over in my mind this strange but true page 328 story, that there may have been among that wearied host that night men to whom indeed what happened appeared a demonstration of the truth concerning ghostly visitants; men who may have known only the gallant man that fell, as my kinsman only knew the man for whom he was mistaken; they may have seen him fall, or have known of his fatal misadventure; and then they, too, may have seen his perfect image, his very self—as they needs must have reckoned it—pass by them, in the gleam of their tent's lantern, through that November mist;—pass by them, though they had been dear friends and comrades, without a word, a nod, a sign of recognition;—pass by them upon some unearthly errand, on his way back, per-haps, to answer, in the ghost-world, to the roll-call of the dead.