Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/575

 But it's not with men alone that the wanderer on the war-path is in touch. His faithful ally, the horse, has a share of his sympathy, specially if in the course of his peregrinations he waded through the mud to headquarters in Bulgaria in 1877. Facts are stubborn things, and, when I say it was a matter of statistics that twenty-two thousand draught and other horses alone fell between Sistova and Plevna from the combined effect of fatigue and mud, it will be seen that "going to the front" is as difficult as getting to the rear—touching which, by the way, I may on another occasion have something interesting to say.

Mud! why, we were in a very sea of mud; it found its way over the tops of our jack-boots till it saturated our socks, this always happening when, and it was often, we dismounted to lend a hand at the spokes of our supply waggon, from the bottom of which came many-coloured streams of half-diluted coffee, weak tea, and moist, very moist sugar. Crimean mud is historic, yet one who had gone through that campaign and who was with me in Bulgaria assured me we ran it very close.

Dead horses were to be seen here, there, and everywhere, some having died in the most grotesque attitudes, and all the victims of that muddy deluge. In some cases, reaching as it did to our own horses' girths, we came to a standstill altogether, and it was only after hiring at enormous cost many others, to which we sometimes added oxen, that we could plough our way through it at all to some more elevated spot, with the prospect on our arrival of descending into an equally deep and depressing slough of despond within the next five minutes on the other side.

Did it ever strike you that the mother-in-law is often a much-misunderstood and under-valued individual?

If great men owe their greatness in many cases to maternal influence, is it not possible that even the much-derided mother-in-law may sometimes have had hers, too, on the destinies of mankind? Yet, it would seem in Servia—at least, when I was there, during that short but sharp campaign—that the mother-in-law was at a greater discount than here. And this is my reason—not a bad one, I take it—for coming to that conclusion. One morning, when in Belgrade, I saw a sturdy Serb being roughly hustled off to prison. Inquiring the cause, I found he had been condemned for the murder of his mother-in-law to five years' penal servitude, but that his conduct had been so exemplary that he had for some weeks been out on a sort of Servian ticket-of-leave. When I saw him, however, he had just committed an offence beside which