Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/301

 General Pennefather, to whom he gave his horse when the general's horse was killed, and mounted a troop horse which was struck very soon after; and in one of his journeys to bring up ammunition—the road he had to traverse being swept by the Russian artillery—as he was galloping forward he heard a thud behind him, and, turning his head round, saw his brother staff officer rolling on the ground in the last death agonies, having been struck by a shot and almost cut in two, gave me his notions about standing fire, which were as follows:—

"I do not care twopence for being handed down to posterity any how—such a posterity as it is likely to be. Why, under the tuition of the Quakers and the philanthropists, people have come to such a pass nowadays that they can never speak of any act of war except with a whine and an intimation that it is half criminal; in another generation they will hold it altogether criminal; and will look upon it as that pious skunk, oldseems to have done when he entered in his journal—that journal which I believe he wrote with the idea that God Almighty was looking over his shoulder all the time, and would be gammoned by what he read—my uncle's death in action as 'an awful instance.'

"By the way, did it ever occur to you to speculate what will be the result of the peculiar course of tuition which I have just spoken of? Perhaps it is all owing to my deficiency