Scotland/Scots > Wilson's tales of the Borders and of Scotland > Volume 3

114
TALES OF THE BORDERS.
have an opportunity of speaking to him. He told him
that, whether he died or lived, he would take care that
lie should be provided for. He gave Captain Turpic
charge, too, that he should keep a warm side to Bill. I
overheard our major say to the captain, as we left the tent
—‘ Good heavens 1 did you ever see two men liker one
another than the colonel and our new sergeant ? ’ But
the captain carelessly remarked, that the resemblance didn’t
strike him.
We met, outside, with a comrade. He had had a cousin
in the Forty-Second, he said, who had been killed that
morning, and he was anxious to see the body decently
hurried, and wished us to go along with him. And so
we both went. It is nothing, master, to see men struck
down in warm blood, and when one’s own blood is up;
but oh, ’tis a grievous thing, after one has cooled down to
one’s ordinary mood, to go out among the dead and the
dying. We passed through what had been the thick of
the battle. The slain lay in hundreds and thousands—
like the ware and tangle on the shore below us—horribly
broken, some of them, by the shot; and blood and brains
lay spattered on the sand. But it was a worse sight to
see, when some poor wretch, who had no chance of living
an hour longer, opened his eyes as we passed, and cried
out for water. We soon emptied our canteens, and then
had to pass on. In no place did the dead lie thicker than
where the Forty-Second had engaged the Invincibles,
and never were there finer fellows. They lay piled in
heaps—the best men of Scotland over the best men of
France—and their wounds, and their number, and the
postures in which they lay, showed how tremendous the
struggle had been. I saw one gigantic corpse, with the head
and neck cloven through the steel cab to the very brisket.
It was that of a Frenchman ; but the hand that had drawn
the blow, lay cold and stiff, not a yard away, with the