CHAPTER XXI.
I GO CAMPAIGNING WITH LORD WELLINGTON.
The vessel to which they rowed me was the _Bute_ transport, bound for Portugal with one hundred and fifty officers and men of the 52nd Regiment, one hundred and twenty of the third battalion 95th Rifles, and a young cornet and three farriers of the 7th Light Dragoons in charge of fifty remounts for that regiment.
We weighed anchor at daybreak (the date, I may mention, was July 28th), and cleared the Sound.

At ten o'clock or thereabouts the wind fell, and for two days and nights we drifted aimlessly about the Channel at the will of the tides, while the sergeant--a veteran named Henderson, who had started twenty-five years before by blowing a bugle in the 52nd, and therefore served me as index and example of what by patience I might attain to--filled the most of my time between sleep and meals with lessons upon that instrument.

From a hencoop abaft the mainmast (the _Bute_ was a brig, by the way) I blew back inarticulate farewells to the shores receding from us imperceptibly, if at all; and so illustrated a profound remark of the war's great historian, that the English are a bellicose rather than a martial race, and by consequence sometimes find themselves committed to military enterprises without having counted the cost or made complete preparation.
On the third day the wind freshened and blew dead foul, decimating the horses with sea-sickness, prostrating three-fourths of the men, and shaking the two regiments down into a sociability which outlasted their sufferings.

To be sure my comrades of the 52nd (as, with a fearful joy, I named them to myself in secret), being veterans for the most part, recovered or recovering from wounds taken in the land to which they were returning with common memories of Sir John Moore, of Benevente, Calcabellos and Corunna, treated the riflemen with that affable condescension which was all that could be claimed by third battalion youngsters with their soldiering before them.

But the 52nd knew the 95th of old.