[Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay by George Otto Trevelyan]@TWC D-Link bookLife and Letters of Lord Macaulay CHAPTER I 28/120
In my yard alone they killed fourteen dozen of fowls, and there were not less than twelve hundred hogs shot in the town." It was unsafe to walk in the streets of Freetown during the forty-eight hours that followed its capture, because the French crews, with too much of the Company's port wine in their heads to aim straight, were firing at the pigs of the poor freedmen over whom they had achieved such a questionable victory. To readers of Erckmann-Chatrian it is unpleasant to be taken thus behind the curtain on which those skilful artists have painted the wars of the early Revolution.
It is one thing to be told how the crusaders of '93 and '94 were received with blessings and banquets by the populations to whom they brought freedom and enlightenment, and quite another to read the journal in which a quiet accurate-minded Scotchman tells us how a pack of tipsy ruffians sat abusing Pitt and George to him, over a fricassee of his own fowls, and among the wreck of his lamps and mirrors which they had smashed as a protest against aristocratic luxury. "There is not a boy among them who has not learnt to accompany the name of Pitt with an execration.
When I went to bed, there was no sleep to be had on account of the sentinels thinking fit to amuse me the whole night through with the revenge they meant to take on him when they got him to Paris.
Next morning I went on board the 'Experiment.' The Commodore and all his officers messed together, and I was admitted among them.
They are truly the poorest-looking people I ever saw.
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