Edmund L’Estrange was a man who, because of his daring, his skill in devising, his self-possession, in no matter what situation, the influence he could exercise over his fellow-men, would probably have made a distinguished figure in the world if he pursued an honest and loyal career. Circumstances in a measure, and probably a natural bent toward plotting and duplicity, had made him what he was—a prominent man among the dark and dangerous conspirators who live, and who are ready to die, in the devilish cause of anarchy, and of whose machinations the communities of civilisation may well be more apprehensive than of the most widespread and prolonged war, or any other phase of unquietude with which the future of the world may be pregnant.

Among his ancestors was that Sir Roger L’Estrange who was the earliest of all the vast tribe of British journalists, and whom Macaulay somewhat intolerantly denounced as a “scurrilous pamphleteer.” According to the doctrine of evolution, Sir Roger’s descendant should have been a broad-acred, narrow-minded, and pretentious squire, chief owner of a lucrative, dictatorial, but somewhat obsolete journal, a trimmer in politics, and ready to accept a peerage at the hands of any party caring to concede the dignity. But Edmund L’Estrange was an emphatic traversal of the Darwinian theory. In vigour, resource, and personal courage he harked back to the original L’Estrange who came over with the Conqueror, and who was the progenitor of a long line of gallant warriors. Wellington’s regiments in the Peninsula were fuller of L’Estranges than of Napiers. Guy L’Estrange’s stand with the 31st at Albuera contributed as much to the winning of that bloody battle as did the famous manoeuvre which gained for Hardinge his earliest gleam of fame. Another L’Estrange escaped from the rock-dungeon of Bitche to fight at Orthez and Toulouse, and to meet a soldier’s death on the field of Waterloo.

Edmund L’Estrange’s branch of the family had been long settled in Ireland. It was staunchly loyalist. His grandfather, as colonel of an Irish militia regiment, had been active in the quelling of the Rebellion of ’98, and had smitten his malcontent fellow-countrymen hip and thigh. His father was a conscientious absentee. Edmund, a younger son, had spent his youth on the old L’Estrange demesne in county Clare, and, an Englishman by extraction, had grown up more Irish than the Irish. As a lad of fifteen he had commanded a scratch company of Fenian rapparees, he armed with a shot-gun, his ragged band with pikes. One dark night the dragoons swept on to the moorland where the Fenian drill was in progress. In the stampede fierce old Major Towers, outstripping his squadron, felled young L’Estrange with a blow of his loaded riding-whip, and then savagely rode over the prostrate lad. Edmund, bruised and half-stunned, rolled into a bog-hag, and fainted. When he recovered he staggered to his feet, softly cursed a little—he was not a violent person—then knelt down and swore eternal enmity against England and against all persons, things, enterprises, and devices that were English. After two years spent in hard study of Continental languages, he sold for money down his succession to his dead mother’s property which he was to inherit when of age, and left the country without the ceremony of bidding farewell to his family.

It is for the most part in the poor and proud old families of Scotland wherein generation after generation has been developed that centrifugal force which propels their cadets all over the face of the earth. But this force has been in operation also in many Irish and in some English houses. It had been a characteristic, for instance, of the L’Estranges. Of that race there had been a cadet family in Russia ever since a young L’Estrange had found his way to St. Petersburg along with a Greig, a Barclay, a Ramsay, a Taafe, and a Mackenzie—bent on taking service in the army or the navy of the Empress Catherine—not Carlyle’s infÂme Catin du Nord, but the greater and perhaps more infamous Muscovite sovereign. To General L’Estrange, the chief of the famous Pauloff Grenadiers, his young cousin betook himself and was well received. Tactful, astute, silent, and resourceful, the youngster made his way marvellously. Treskoff the arch-policeman, and Milutin the War Minister, both had uses for this scion of the British Empire who notoriously hated the realm whose fealty he had repudiated. When the Russo-Turkish War began, Ignatieff brought him to Kischeneff and presented him to the Emperor. He and poor Prince Tzeretleff together exploited the Hankioj Pass for Gourko’s troopers. He was with Skobeleff before Plevna and before Constantinople. When, baulked of the fair Queen of the Bosphorus, Alexander determined on the Afghan diversion, young L’Estrange was sent post haste to Samarcand, and rode into Cabul as Stolietoff’s subaltern. When Stolietoff and his Cossacks scrambled back to the Oxus over the craggy pathway by Bamian and Balkh, L’Estrange remained in Afghanistan. It was he, when the Afghan Major courteously enough blocked the entrance of Neville Chamberlain and his mission into the Khyber Pass, who jeered at that grand old soldier as he wheeled his Arab in front of the sungah behind which the Afghan picket lay with fingers on the triggers. He it was, on that gloomy day in the rough valley beyond the Sherpur cantonment, when the jezail-fire staggered the finest Lancer regiment in the British service, from whose rifle sped the bullet that wrought the long agony and final death of the gallant Cleland.

Commissioned always from Russia, L’Estrange was in Joubert’s camp when poor Colley climbed the Majuba to his untimely death. Those who held that it was the futile and garrulous Aylward who gave the Boers the plan of campaign which scared Mr. Gladstone into restoring their independence, were strangely mistaken. L’Estrange prescribed the tactics which prevailed at Laing’s Neck and the Ingogo, and it was he who lured Colley to his disaster by enjoining the removal of the Boer picket which had been wont to occupy the summit of the Majuba. When Herbert Stewart was brought a prisoner into the Boer camp, L’Estrange insulted the captive man as he was being led away from his interview with the studiously courteous Joubert. With a straight one from the shoulder, learnt in the big dormitory of Winchester College, Stewart promptly grassed the renegade, who, as he rose to his feet, muttered with an evil smile that he would “bide his time.”

From the Transvaal restored to independence by Mr. Gladstone, L’Estrange, having made his way to Egypt, stimulated covertly the Nationalist rising in that country; and he it was who was known among our people in the campaign of 1882 as “Arabi’s Englishman.” He supervised the preparation of the fortified position of Tel-el-Kebir, and was the real leader of the Egyptian soldiery in the fight of Kassassin, which came so near being disastrous to Sir Gerald Graham. The shout of “Retire! Retire!” which caused the temporary retirement of the Highland Brigade from the mÊlÉe inside the Egyptian position in the gray morning of the storm of Tel-el-Kebir, and which Sergeant Palmer has persisted in ascribing to a couple of “Glasgow Irishmen” of the Cameron Highlanders, really came from the lips of L’Estrange—a ready-witted ruse on the part of the renegade, which was foiled only by Hamley’s soldier-like precaution. From Egypt, under a safe-conduct and recommendation furnished him by Zebehr, he journeyed southward into the Soudan and joined the Mahdi at El Obeid. It was he who mainly planned and conducted the annihilation of Hicks Pasha’s ill-fated army. In the climax of the massacre he recognised and was recognised by Edmund O’Donovan, the correspondent of the Daily News, whom he had known and admired in his youth-time in Ireland. In an impulse of kindly emotion, he offered to save the life of his brother Irishman. O’Donovan replied with a contemptuous objurgation and a pistol-shot. L’Estrange, wounded in the arm and faint as he was, pulled himself together sufficiently to send a bullet through O’Donovan’s head, and so by the hand of a fellow-countryman was ended a life of singular adventure and vicissitude.

Later, L’Estrange went east to Osman Digna. After the Arab stampede from El Teb, he rallied the spearmen who tried to hinder Herbert Stewart’s gallop in pursuit. Stewart, well mounted and a fine horseman, rode him down, parrying his spear-thrust with his sabre. L’Estrange lay where he fell for a moment, till Barrow came dashing on at the head of the 19th Hussars, when he sprang up, gave Barrow the spear-wound which ultimately caused his death, and then leaped into the bush. L’Estrange it was who later headed the sudden rush of Arab spearmen up from out the khor into the heart of Davis’s square at Tamai, and drove it back in chaotic confusion on the steadfast phalanx of Redvers Buller. His last fight in the Soudan was at Abu Klea. The rush he headed there on the corner manned by the Royal Dragoons was meant by him to open a path for him toward Stewart, for whose blood he had thirsted ever since that knock-down blow in the Boer camp under the Majuba. The rush was baulked, but L’Estrange doggedly maintained his bloodthirsty purpose. When the British column had halted after the fight, he ascended the low elevation commanding the position. He marked down Herbert Stewart through his field-glasses, he judged the distance, and deliberately sighted his rifle accordingly. Then he drew trigger, and as the gallant Stewart first staggered and then dropped on the sand, L’Estrange muttered while he reloaded, “We are quits now—I told him I should ‘bide my time’!”

Journeying from Berber to the coast, he was carried by an Arab dhow across the Red Sea, and at Hodeidah embarked on a British India steamer homeward bound from Kurrachee. Among the passengers in this vessel was an Anarchist leader of dubious and probably complex nationality, named Oronzha, who was returning from a secret mission to India, attended by an East Indian whose name was Shere Ali Beg, and who passed for, and acted as, Oronzha’s travelling servant, but whose relations with his apparent master L’Estrange soon discerned were too intimate for those of a domestic. Oronzha cautiously made some advances to the European gentleman who had embarked from a port so unwonted for Europeans as Hodeidah; with at least equal caution those advances were reciprocated by L’Estrange. At length Oronzha made a covert gesture, the significance of which, and the response to which, L’Estrange had learned among his varied experiences in Russia. He made the answering signal, and at once Oronzha and L’Estrange met on the common ground of anarchical Socialism. There was much matter for mutual communication. Oronzha expressed his conviction to L’Estrange that profound discontent with the English raj existed throughout the population of the Punjaub, and that the head of a Russian column on the Helmund or above the Bamian would be the signal for a universal uprising. He thought it advisable that, in the hope of such an incentive to revolt, Russia should, for the present, be exempted from the active machinations of Socialist propaganda. L’Estrange, in his turn, informed Oronzha that the harvest of Socialism in that empire might be garnered at any period thought fitting, since Nihilism and Socialism were practically synonymous, and since he believed the Russian people, from the very foot of the throne downward, were honeycombed with Nihilism. His old chief Skobeleff and all his dare-devil staff were Nihilists at heart. Ignatieff, at the late Czar’s right hand as he was, had a distinct leaning in the same direction. Nay, he had discerned in the course of his confidential intercourse with that monarch that a warp of Nihilism had been interwoven through the curious and complicated mental texture of Alexander himself.

As the Chybassa steamed languidly against the scorching wind that swept down the Red Sea, those two men—so diverse in birth and upbringing, yet so near akin in sentiment and hatred of the British power—discussed many problems and contrived many schemes, while the supple and astute Shere Ali Beg, conversant with the suppressed yet seething disaffection of all the great Indian cities from Peshawur to Calcutta, and thoroughly versed in the tortuous and fanatical plottings of that widespread Wahabee organisation which covers the East from the Golden Horn to the eastern coasts of the Bay of Bengal, interpolated occasionally a sentence of gloomy and ferocious import.

Oronzha was an arch-plotter, all the more influential and dangerous that he played the great game through instruments, and consistently kept his own personality in the background. His mission to the Punjaub had been a mere incident in the deep and far-reaching scheme he had been furthering for years. He had been in close although unobtrusive touch with every phase of the widespread Socialism of Europe, but his absence in India had thrown him somewhat in arrear regarding its latest developments. Before the Chybassa reached Port Said, he had confided to L’Estrange the commission to visit all the great centres of Continental Socialism, charged to communicate confidentially with the inner conclave at each, and to bring to him in London a report of the general situation. L’Estrange started on his errand, duly fortified with such credentials—a sign, a watchword, an apparently innocent note of introduction—as would insure to him the unreserved confidence of the leaders of the great International organisation which has for its aim the fundamental subversion of the political and social order of things throughout the length and breadth of the Continent.

It might be interesting to narrate in detail the experiences of L’Estrange in the fulfilment of this commission: how from Galatz he visited Lemberg, from Lemberg went on to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Cracow, thence into the chief cities of Hungary, from the Marchfeldt to Vienna, thence into Croatia and Dalmatia, from Trieste to Prague, from Prague through Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, into the teeming operative and mining regions of Westphalia and the more southern Rhine provinces; from Alsace to Lyons and thereabouts, through Paris into Belgium, and so, after the lapse of some months from his parting with Oronzha at Port Said, to the house in a court in Soho which Oronzha had designated as a rendezvous. Met here by this dÉgagÉ-seeming man of many subtle plots, he was bidden, as the best method of furthering the cause, to enlist in that crack English cavalry regiment the Scarlet Hussars, then quartered at Hounslow, with instructions covertly and cautiously to aim at subverting the loyalty of the troopers of that regiment, and to labour to instil mutinous tendencies by dwelling on the materialistically pleasant results, to the appreciation of the private soldier grumbling at scant rations and poor pay, of a fine free-and-easy rÉgime of lawlessness and unlimited drink.

Chapter II

L’Estrange was quite a success in his new character as a Scarlet Hussar. At first, it is true, he incurred suspicion. When, at his first essay in the riding-school, he rode with “stirrups up,” as if he were “demi-corporate with the brave beast”; and when, at his first dismounted drill, he cut the sword exercise with more grace and precision than did the old ranker adjutant himself, his troop sergeant-major promptly set him down as a deserter. That conviction L’Estrange summarily dispelled by confidentially informing the honest old non-com., with the little compliment of a five-pound note, that he had been an officer in the Bengal Cavalry who had come to grief, and that he had enlisted in an assumed name with intent to work up for a commission. Of course the troop sergeant-major divulged this confidence to the regimental, the regimental told it to the adjutant, and soon every officer in the regiment knew it, and L’Estrange’s lines fell in pleasant places. Grim old Sabretasche, the chief, dropped him a bluffly curt word of encouragement. Lord Ebor, the captain of his troop, his courteous and kindly nature moving him, spoke to him as an equal, and expressed the hope that before long he might see him “in the blue coat.” In four months from the day of his enlistment L’Estrange was full corporal; in four months more he was a lance-sergeant.

While still a private, by taking his comrades separately, and talking cautiously but suggestively, he had won over quite a large number of the young soldiers of the regiment. When the three stripes were on his arm, and he had become a member of the sergeants’ mess, it was with great finesse and adroitness that he made his advances among the non-commissioned officers with whom he now lived. With the grand staunch class of old long-service non-commissioned officers L’Estrange would have utterly failed to make way, and would either have been jeered down or reported to superior authority. Of this type, however, there remained in the Scarlet Hussars only two or three veterans, who were all married men, and therefore were not frequenters of the sergeants’ mess. The majority of the non-commissioned officers were flashy young short-service men, “jumped-up non-coms.” in soldier phrase, dissipated, hungry for more means wherewithal to pursue dissipation, discontented and unconscientious. Most of them lent a more or less greedy ear to the subtle poison covertly instilled by L’Estrange, and the result of his machinations was that before he had been in the regiment a twelve-month the Scarlet Hussars, spite of their fine old reputation for every soldierly virtue, were fast ripening for mischief.

In sundry short conversations, when Sergeant L’Estrange took the order-book daily to his captain’s quarters, and after Lord Ebor had read the details of regimental work for the morrow, the former, who had read his officer like a book, from time to time dropped mildly Socialistic seed into his mind, which fell in not unfavourable soil.

Meanwhile Sergeant L’Estrange was indefatigable in his efforts to proselytise among the soldiery of the London garrison outside his own regiment. In this work he had the advantage that his troop had been moved up from Hounslow to Kensington. In the Scarlet Hussars the wearing of “plain clothes”—i.e. civilian attire—by the sergeants was winked at, and L’Estrange could thus when occasion required go about the town and visit places unnoticed, where his uniform might have attracted attention. He met with no success in his attempts to sap the loyalty of the Household Cavalry. Because of his winning address, his fine voice in a song, and his bright talk, he had been made free of the non-commissioned officers’ mess of the “Blues” on his first visit to Regent’s Park Barracks, and he had made himself agreeable with similar result among the Corporals of Horse of the 1st Life Guards in Knightsbridge. But his particular object made no way either in Regent’s Park or in Hyde Park. Because Corporal of Horse Jack Vanhomrigh of the “Blues” was a pariah of society, had been detected and denounced as a card-sharper, had tossed in the smoking-room of a club with a brother reprobate for the possession of a notorious woman whom he had married and then lived on till the poor wretch died of consumption, L’Estrange regarded that scion of a noble family as a person likely to listen to his overtures. He reckoned without his host. Vanhomrigh was on his promotion; he had washed and was now comparatively clean; a few more months of straight conduct would see him on his way to a cattle ranche in Alberta. He had been a blackguard, but he was a Briton. So in perfectly outspoken terms he denounced the Scarlet Hussar to the assembled mess, and told L’Estrange in the frankest manner that he ought to be hanged because shooting was too good for him. The mess president warned L’Estrange against ever showing his face in that company again, and the orderly Corporal of Horse, enjoined by the old Regimental Corporal-Major, escorted him silently to the gate, saw him outside, and then “put his name on the gate”—a measure effectually precluding his readmission into Regent’s Park Barracks. L’Estrange fared no better with the non-commissioned officers of the regiment quartered at Knightsbridge, which barracks he no more attempted to enter after the severe corporal chastisement inflicted on him by a stalwart Corporal of Horse, whom he had approached, learning that he was in financial difficulties, with seditious proposals pointed by the offer of a ten-pound note. He fared no whit better with the tall troopers of either regiment. In vain did he frequent the public-houses of Knightsbridge and Cumberland Market. The strapping dalesmen were willing enough to drink with him at his expense, while he led the jovial chorus and told tales of foreign travel. But L’Estrange had to rein back sharply on the curb when blunt old Trooper Escrick of Dent, his face gnarled like the scarped brow of Ingleborough, broke in on a pretty little outline he was venturing to sketch of the good times Socialism offered to the soldier. “Mon,” quoth honest Escrick, “thou mun be a dom fuil, if nobbut warse. Wi’ your bloody community o’ goods, as thou call’st it, what would happen my feyther, t’oud statesman? Gang to hell oot of this!” Whereupon Escrick threw the quart-pot (empty) at L’Estrange’s head, who abandoned thenceforth the society of the Household Cavalry.

But he had greater success with the infantrymen of the Household troops—a force whose character, as in a measure its physique, has deteriorated since the adoption of the three years’ service system. In the slums of Westminster he gradually corrupted men by beer and blandishments, with such success that in no long time the rank-and-file of one whole battalion were tainted with disaffection, and in a fair way to become dangerous. With all this good fortune, and realising with a lurid gratification that at least one battalion of Her Majesty’s Household troops was now little other than a plastic instrument in his hands, the astute conspirator was well aware that it still behoved him to work warily and to consolidate the plot by further specific guarantees for success. He remembered the sardonic adage whose author was an acute fellow-countryman of his own—that of three Irish conspirators it might be taken for granted that one was an informer. There were not many Irish soldiers in the ranks of the Household Brigade, but there were many men whose fealty to his propaganda, spite of their professions, he instinctively felt was not to be relied on. So long as these propaganda were of a loose and general character, there was not anything very specific for the informer to reveal. But it would be a very different thing were all or any large proportion of his converts to be initiated formally into the membership of the disloyal and anarchical confederacy which he represented. Yet he could not trust the situation as it stood. All experience taught him how backward to assert itself actively was the most disaffected community which lacked the inspiration and initiative of ready and energetic leaders. Out of the mass of grumbling discontented soldiery L’Estrange set himself to select a number of men of strongest character, of fiercest nature, of greatest recklessness of consequences. This winnowing method he carried out both in the Scarlet Hussars and in the Household Infantry, and having recruited to his behests a band of desperadoes in either corps, he had those “select men” sworn by detachments into memberhood of the Regenerators at the obscure branch lodge whose quarters were in the Natty Coster beerhouse up Skin-the-Rabbit Court off the New Cut.

Of all the Socialistic workers and plotters who were now actively furthering the cause in London, only two men, Sergeant L’Estrange and Shere Ali Beg, the Lascar, were aware that its leading fosterer was Oronzha, the apparently dÉgagÉ gentleman who, because of the lavish entertainments he was giving so frequently in his sumptuous house in Bruton Street, and by reason of financial good offices judiciously dispensed among influential people, was rapidly making for himself a position in society. L’Estrange naturally regarded as his chief in the work of the dissemination of anarchy in the metropolis of Great Britain the strange and mysterious man whom he had first met on the Chybassa, and who had proved himself in intimate touch with the Socialist leaders of the Continent. He visited Bruton Street under cover of night, his errand being to report to Oronzha the measure of success which he had reached in his mission to sap the loyalty of the garrison of London.

To his surprise, he found the enigmatical Oronzha strangely indifferent to the tidings brought him; and, what struck him forcibly as still more strange, quite lukewarm in his tone in regard to the enterprise as a whole.

“Thanks,” drawled the swarthy sybarite as he lit a perfumed cigarette; “all that is very interesting, and I’m sure, my dear L’Estrange, you have done wonders—positive wonders. As for the civilian element, it, too, is fairly ripe, and I believe we might give the signal to-morrow. But there are reasons, my dear L’Estrange—I won’t explain them—why the Émeute had better be postponed for a while. Sedition is a commodity that does not spoil by keeping, but rather improves. Don’t let your soldier-fellows get lukewarm, but don’t allow them to come to full-cock for the present—there’s a broken metaphor for you, and an obsolete one to boot! By the way, how about that quixotic Lord Ebor of your regiment? He is your captain, is he not?” “Yes,” replied L’Estrange, restraining his surprise at this abrupt change of subject on Oronzha’s part. “Ebor, born aristocrat as he is, I believe would go almost any length with us, when once thoroughly imbued with the idea that he would be furthering the welfare of humanity at large.”

“He is the man of all others,” said Oronzha musingly, “whom I want to see involved with us up to the hilt. The truth is, L’Estrange,” continued Oronzha, springing to his feet and speaking earnestly—“the truth is, d—n him! I want him ruined socially, utterly and beyond recovery—he has thwarted me in a matter very dear to me. Can you help in this?”

“I think I can succeed in compromising him completely with us, if that is what you aim at,” replied L’Estrange. “It is a result you must not expect all of a sudden. Ebor is an officer and a gentleman. He is a dreamer, and he has what the Scotch call ‘a bee in the bonnet’; but it is a ‘far cry’ from that to being a traitor. However, I have studied his character, and I believe I see my way.”

Oronzha was a shrewd man, but he had formed an erroneous estimate of L’Estrange’s character. He reckoned him simply a serviceable tool, whom he could use for his purposes, and drop when he chose. L’Estrange, in reality, with his Irish mother-wit and the added acumen which his Russian experiences had given him, had seen through Oronzha’s veil of new-born indifference, and had penetrated the purely personal motive actuating that dark schemer.

“This man,” mused L’Estrange, as he walked away from Bruton Street—“this man is now simply playing with Socialism for his own ends. He is not whole-souled in the cause. His real aim—why, I know not, nor do I care—is to bring Lord Ebor to grief. That accomplished, Socialism in London may go hang for him, and the enthusiasts who are working to bring about anarchy he will leave to their fate with a light heart, or indeed will, as like as not, betray them.”

He, L’Estrange, had been content for the time to be the instrument of a powerful man who was sincere in the cause; but he was not the man to be a tool of a wily dissimulator. Two master-motives swayed him—personal ambition and bitter hate against England. As he pondered, he believed that he saw his way to gratify both motives, and that too by a line of action wholly independent of the specious but treacherous Oronzha.

Chapter III

L’Estrange had gained the conviction that the British Army, as a whole, was seething with disaffection, and ready to mutiny in a mass when once the brand of revolt should be waved. He had corrupted his own regiment and a battalion of Household Infantry; he knew that the seeds of taint had been sown in other regiments of the Queen’s service. During a week recently spent at Aldershot he had received assurances from men of every regiment in that garrison, cavalry as well as infantry, that discontent and disaffection were general, and that a leader and an example would promptly be followed. So much for the military element. He had taken some pains to learn the state of feeling among the lower classes of London, and had satisfied himself that they were ready to throw themselves into any vehemence of revolutionary enterprise, if only the encouragement and stiffening of vigorous leadership and armed support were imparted. There opened, then, before this methodical yet reckless desperado the vista of wrecking the Monarchy, the Constitution, the military and social system of that England which he hated so venomously, by kindling a rising in a section of its army, and by marching the mutinied soldiery to rouse and rally the masses of the metropolis. If the result, as he hoped, should be a universal anarchy, he, its instigator and contriver, might “ride the whirlwind and direct the storm”; if failure should be the issue of his desperate devices, he, to do him the miserable justice of owning him reckless of his own life, was ready to perish under the avalanche whose fall he had provoked.

The season of summer drill at Aldershot had come to a close, and Sir Evelyn Wood was dismissing—some with curt but cordial benediction, some with that outspoken objurgation of which he is so great a master—the regiments which were to find winter quarters elsewhere than on the bleak slope of the Hampshire standing camp. Among the departing regiments was that steady old corps the Regal Dragoons, who were bound for Norwich and quietude after three years of scouting and flying column business. The Regals carried no “side,” and were not addicted to cheap swagger, but the grand old regiment was, in military phrase, “all there when it was wanted.” Peterborough had praised it in Spain, Marlborough in the Low Countries and Bavaria, Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. The serried mass of Russian horsemen felt the brunt of it as the heavy squadrons thundered behind Scarlett and Elliot on the morning of Balaclava. Old Guardlex was its chief, the senior colonel on active service in the British Army, for his promotion had been cruelly slow since, the junior cornet of the Regals, he had ridden over the hills to the upland on which were dropping stray cannon-shot from the Tchernaya fight. His moustache was snow-white and his hair grizzled, but the old soldier’s stalwart figure was still straight as a dart, the broad shoulders were carried square, and the strong right arm could make the sabre whistle again in the sword exercise, of his dexterity in which the chief was proud. Colonel Guardlex was very particular in regard to the recruits he accepted for his regiment; but there never was a regiment in the modern British Army which did not contain some bad characters. Probably there were fewer in the Regals than in any other cavalry regiment in the service. This handful of black sheep it was who, when L’Estrange paid his short visit to Aldershot, had deceived him with the assurance that the regiment as a whole was ready to co-operate in any mischief.

At the end of their second day’s march from Aldershot to Norwich, the Regals were to be billeted in Wimbledon and Putney. It occurred to some ardent soldier among the high authorities in Pall Mall that, instead of resuming the route on the following morning, the marching regiment and the Scarlet Hussars from Hounslow and the out-quarters might have a lively brigade field-day on and about Wimbledon Common. The orders for this brigade field-day were read out overnight throughout the troops of the Scarlet Hussars at evening stables, as is the wont in cavalry regiments. Since he happened to be orderly sergeant, L’Estrange had the information a trifle earlier. It came upon him like a flash of inspiration that the morrow would give him the opportunity for which he had been on the alert for weeks. The time was desperately short, it was true, and he had many dispositions to arrange; but the difficulties before him would succumb to method and activity. A man in dead earnest could do much between seven o’clock and midnight. On his way from Kensington to Waterloo, he made a rush into the Wellington Barracks to arrange for simultaneous action on the part of the 6th Battalion of the Welsh Guards—the battalion he knew to be ripe for mutiny. Its order for the morrow was adjutant’s drill, to fall in at eleven; the drill would be over about half-past twelve. He settled with the ringleaders of the battalion that it was then it should declare itself, by which time L’Estrange promised that the Scarlet Hussars and the Regals would be close at hand. At Wimbledon the ardent toiler in an evil cause had what he considered a satisfactory ten minutes with the arch-blackguard of the handful of blackguards of the Regals. By ten o’clock he was in Hounslow Barracks. “Lights out” sounded as he finished his round of the troop-rooms, but he had accomplished what of his task lay to him there. Then he spent a balefully busy half-hour in the sergeants’ mess, and by midnight he was back in Kensington Barracks. What few words had to be said to the squadron quartered there would keep till morning. His Hounslow allies had undertaken to inspire the little contingent from Hampton Court.

It was about nine o’clock on a lovely morning in early September when the brigade formed up aligning on the Kingston Road, its right flank on the park-wall of “The Highlands,” the pleasant residence that used to belong to “Jim” Farquharson of Invercauld, good soldier and good fellow. Each regiment was but three squadrons strong, the Scarlet Hussars because of the usual duty details, the Regals because their fourth squadron was marching by another route. Colonel Guardlex, as the senior officer, took command, and, as his manner was, proceeded to give the brigade a rattling bucketing. Scouts furtively searched to front and flanks, feeling for the foreposts of the extremely imaginary enemy, who in accordance with the “special idea” was assumed to have breakfasted at Esher, and to be now marching on the metropolis with Tarquin’s ravishing strides. Reconnaissances in more or less strength scared the game of the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Dunraven on the hither slopes of Combe Hill, and furnished Lord Archy Campbell with inspiration for a letter to the Times, indignantly demanding to know why there is not a Highland cavalry regiment armed with claymores and attired in philabeg and plaid. A grand decisive charge on either flank of the imaginary enemy, represented for the nonce by the 1000-yards butt, brought the field-day to a close. Colonel Guardlex, with a ceremonious bow to Colonel Sabretasche, and a compliment on the smartness of the Scarlet Hussars, ceased from his temporary brigadiership, and cantered off to his Regals. Before quitting the common, the two regiments, as is the custom, halted for a little time, during which the troopers, having dismounted, glanced round their horse-equipments, lit their pipes, and gave vent to professional criticism highly spiced with profanity. The halted formation of each regiment was in column of squadrons. The front of the Scarlet Hussars faced south-westward, in the direction of the hamlet of Roehampton, its right close to the position of the stand from which Royalty was wont to distribute the prizes in the days when as yet Wimbledon remained undisestablished.

Colonel Sabretasche and most of his officers had dismounted, and were chatting and smoking in a group on the sward in front of the regiment. Lord Ebor was in command of the third—the rear—squadron, and, as his custom was, he had remained with his command instead of joining his brother officers at the front. His lordship was “making much” of his gallant charger when Sergeant L’Estrange strode up to him, halted at “attention,” and spoke thus in a quiet measured tone—

“My Lord, the regiment is about to revolt—in plain language, to mutiny. The whole British Army is with us, and the people as well, determined no longer to endure tyranny and wrong. Lord Ebor, it will be a great and glorious revolution. Take command of us, lead the regiment back to expectant London, and be hailed the deliverer of your native land from oppression.”

For one brief moment it seemed as if Ebor faltered. He drew a long breath, he threw back his fine head, a flush mantled the delicate features, and a wistful radiance flashed in his eyes. Then it was as if a shiver ran through him; but an instant saw him himself again—the nobleman and officer—and he quietly said— “Sergeant L’Estrange, not another word. Go back at once to your troop. I refrain from putting you under arrest on the spot, because I believe you must be crazed. No more of this! Right about face, quick march!”

L’Estrange stood fast.

“Lord Ebor,” said he calmly, “if you will not lead us willingly you shall do so by compulsion.”

“Sergeant-Major Hope,” Ebor called authoritatively, “put Sergeant L’Estrange under arrest, strip his belts, and guard him while I go to the Colonel.”

Sergeant-Major Hope shrugged his broad shoulders with a sneer and did not stir. Lord Ebor put foot in stirrup to ride to the Colonel. Then L’Estrange gave the order—

“Mulligan and Coates, grapple Lord Ebor, throw him down, and gag him!”

Ebor at the word faced about, his face blazing with anger and scorn. The two stalwart troopers laid hold of him on either side. He shook them off with a force that hurled them back, and, grasping his sword-hilt, had the weapon half out of the scabbard.

But L’Estrange was “quicker on the draw.” Before Lord Ebor’s sword was clear of the scabbard, his point was at the other’s breast. The innate savagery of the man was ablaze.

“D—n you, you will have it, then!” he hissed from between his set teeth, as with a strong thrust he sent his sword through Lord Ebor’s throat, who fell in his tracks, to all appearance dead. L’Estrange, with a vicious smile, wiped his sword on the heather, returned it to the scabbard, and then, darting through the second squadron, gave the command—

“Fire on the officers!”

While the regiment had been standing dismounted, a certain number of desperadoes in the front rank of the first squadron had quietly drawn their carbines, had loaded, and were waiting for the word. When it came, the stillness of the air was suddenly broken by a straggling volley, and several of the officers fell.

Old Sabretasche was unhurt. The last bullet of the ragged volley had not whistled by him when he was in the saddle, and facing the regiment he had served in since he was a smooth-faced lad, and which he loved and honoured next to his mother.

“Scarlet Hussars!” he shouted in trumpet tones—and yet there was a break in the voice of him—“in God’s name, what means this? All true men, do your duty, for the credit of the regiment! Seize these accursed mutineers, who are disgracing——”

Sabretasche never finished the sentence. Before his last word had reached the rear squadron he was lying on his back on the sward dead, with three carbine bullets in him or through him. A cheer, in which there was the undernote of a quaver, rose from the disordered ranks of the corps that had been wont to take especial pride in their title of “Queen Victoria’s Own.” Under a straggling fire the officers who remained uninjured, followed by some of the senior non-commissioned officers and by a handful of old soldiers, galloped off to join the adjacent Regal Dragoons.

Chapter IV

That regiment, for its part, had halted and dismounted on the neck which in the Wimbledon days had been the camping-ground of the “Members” and of the “Victorias.” Its formation was identical with that of the Scarlet Hussars—column of squadrons—and its front looked across the undulating plateau in the direction of Colonel Sabretasche’s light-bobs. Colonel Guardlex had allowed his troopers but a short halt, and they had already mounted, and were waiting for the command to return to their billets, when the noise of the first shots fired from out the front rank of the Hussars came down on the soft wind. “Slovenly work, sir,” the Adjutant of the Regals was remarking to his chief, “getting rid of blank ammunition only now.”

Guardlex suddenly started.

“Blank ammunition be ——!” he exclaimed. “You heard the whistle of that bullet—and there’s another—and another! By the living God, the blackguards are shooting down their officers! The Scarlet Hussars have mutinied! Steady there, the Regals!” roared the chief, wheeling his horse and facing his own regiment “Squadrons, eyes centre! Officers, see to the dressing!” Suddenly from near the flank of the right troop of the first squadron shot out a dragoon, bellowing, as he turned in his saddle—

“To h— with the Widow! Down with the officers! Come on, chaps, and join our gallant comrades yonder. On, lads, to liberty and license!”

One or two men moved out half-a-horse’s length, and then halted irresolutely. The captain commanding the right troop drew his sword—he was within three horses’ length of the mutineer.

“Steady, officers and men!” rang out in the deep voice of the chief. “Captain Hurst, return your sword, sir!”

As he gave these commands, Colonel Guardlex was cantering steadily and coolly towards the right, where stood the mutineer. The man did not quail as the Colonel approached, with that grim smile on his weather-beaten face which habitual defaulters knew so well. Nay, the trooper, a desperado to the backbone, drew his sword and confronted the Colonel, throwing up his guard.

It was all over in two seconds. A riderless horse was galloping away. On the sward lay a sword with a severed hand still grasping its hilt, and close by a dead dragoon with a sword-thrust through his heart. Cool and stern, the chief was back in his place, issuing curt rapid orders to his officers. Captain Francis commanded the right troop, Captain Clements the left troop, of the rear squadron. Captain Francis he ordered to take his troop out by a circuit through the broken ground, and so by the back of the butts, till well in rear of the Scarlet Hussars; Captain Clements to move down the hollow on his left, the “Glenalbyn” of the Wimbledon days, and, with a wide bend round the right flank of the Hussars, reunite with Francis in their rear and bar the way of retreat—both movements to be executed at a gallop. To each of his majors he gave a troop of the second squadron, with orders to move out to the right and left front, manoeuvre for the flanks of the Hussars, and ride in on both obliquely. The first squadron he kept in his own hand, moving it straight forward at a trot until within about five hundred paces of the front of the Hussars. Then he halted, kept the front rank in the saddle, dismounted two men in each three of his rear rank, and ordered them to load their carbines and stand fast, hidden by the mounted men in their front.

All these dispositions were made in less than half the time it has taken the reader to peruse the necessarily rather minute detail of them. Meanwhile curiosity, excitement, and a certain involuntary awe had considerably disorganised the Scarlet Hussars. L’Estrange had quietly taken the command, and his non-commissioned accomplices, now acting as officers, were busily reconstituting their respective commands, for the accomplishment of which a few minutes sufficed. L’Estrange had for the moment been otherwise engaged, and no one else in the Hussars had noticed what, if anything, in the Regals had occurred consequent on the first demonstration of mutiny among the Hussars. But L’Estrange had now time to notice the conduct of the Regals. They had not mutinied, that was now certain; and by Heaven, beyond all question, Colonel Guardlex was skilfully preparing to assume the offensive!

Clever fellow as was L’Estrange, his coup d’oeil was defective. What he thought he saw in progress was an extension of front on the part of the Regals. He promptly conformed by ordering up the second squadron of the Scarlet Hussars in line with the first, keeping the third squadron in rear of his centre as a reserve. Then he resolved on the hardy, if not desperate, expedient of taking the initiative. Should he remain passive, he rapidly argued with himself, the Regals would drive the lighter corps, perhaps indeed shatter it. He realised that up till now his coup had been a coup manquÉ; yet all was not lost if only the dashing and nimble Hussars could smite and break the lumbering and clumsy heavies over against him there. So, hardening his heart, he gave the command, “The line will advance! At a trot, march!” he himself galloping out to the front.

L’Estrange had not galloped far, and the squadrons behind him were instinctively preparing to spring from the trot into the gallop, when he noticed for the first time the two troops of the Regals commanded by the majors coming down obliquely, one on either flank of the Hussars. Unconfronted, they would take him en flagrant dÉlit, and roll him up. On the spur of the moment he shouted the order, “First and second squadrons, outwards half wheel!” and he himself rode a little farther to the front, halted, and faced round, to watch the effect of the evolution.

Meanwhile Colonel Guardlex had passed his dismounted men through the still mounted front rank of the squadron he had kept in his own hand, had numbered them off—there were thirty of them—and held them with loaded carbines, waiting for his command to fire. “I can plug that beggar out to the front there, sir,” said Jack Osborne, the champion marksman of the Regals, in a low tone to the Adjutant; “will you ask the Colonel whether I may fire?” Colonel Guardlex overheard the entreaty. “No, my man,” answered the chief; “please God, we’ll take that scoundrel alive. Shooting is too good for him!”

But the aspiration was not to be fulfilled. Rough-riding Sergeant Bob Swash was a historic character in the Regal Dragoons while as yet he was in the regiment. He had been born in it, he had served in it for ever so many years, and he meant to die in it. He was as good a man at fifty-five, he swore, as he had been at twenty-five; he had enlisted “for life or until unfit for further service”; he was still eminently fit for service, and he spurned the acceptance of the pension to which he had been entitled for more than a decade. Generation after generation of recruits had been quaintly objurgated by him in every riding-school in the United Kingdom. Old Bob could neither read nor write, else he would not now have been a “simple sergeant,” but at fifty-five he was still the best horseman and the best swordsman in the Regal Dragoons. He always went on the line of march with the regiment, riding one of the officers’ young horses, to which he taught manners on the journey. He rode about independently, not being tied to any particular position; and it happened that he had been close to the Scarlet Hussars when the mutiny in that regiment burst out. The old man’s glance toward his own regiment told him that Colonel Guardlex was alive to the situation, and did not need any information that he could bring, so he continued in the vicinity of the mutinied regiment, watching for a chance at L’Estrange, whom he had discerned to be the arch-mutineer.

That chance he saw, and grasped, when L’Estrange, alone and well out to the front, halted to watch the outward half-wheel of his first and second squadrons. It was but a snap chance, Swash realised, since the reserve squadron of the Hussars was rapidly advancing to fill up the interval which the outward wheel was creating. But if it had been a worse chance old Bob would have taken it. Shooting past the flank of one of the wheeling squadrons, he galloped furiously on L’Estrange with a great shout of execration. L’Estrange had just time to fire a couple of shots from his revolver, one of which wounded but did not disable Swash, when the big man on the big horse struck the smaller man on the lighter horse with terrific impetus and weight. L’Estrange and his horse were hurled to the ground with a crash; the horse staggered to his feet, but L’Estrange lay stone dead—the dragoon’s sword-point had pierced his heart. Swash galloped on for a few strides, then swayed in the saddle, and fell to the ground. At the moment of impact, L’Estrange’s revolver had sent a bullet through his brain. Old Bob had his wish: he died, as he had been born, in the Regal Dragoons.

The swift sudden death of the man who had been their inspiration and their leader staggered the mutinous Hussars. The squadrons drew rein and lapsed from trot to walk. Colonel Guardlex had his finger on the pulse of events. He gave the word to his marksmen to fire a volley. But he was not bloodthirsty. Ten men only he ordered to take aim; the rest were bidden to fire high. The volley sped: two or three men in each of the three Hussar squadrons went down. The marksmen promptly reloaded, but no more firing was necessary. The Hussar squadrons halted for a moment, then broke up into wild confusion, the troopers crowding independently in toward the centre. All at once the ordered ranks fell into utter chaos. The marksmen of the Regals remounted; Guardlex formed his squadron in rank entire, and galloped in upon the Hussars. The other squadrons of his regiment promptly conformed, and in a few minutes the weltering chaos of Hussars was encircled by a ring of Regal Dragoons. The stentorian commands of Colonel Guardlex dominated the babel of sounds that pulsated within the silent cordon formed by his staunch troopers. The cowed Hussars sullenly obeyed him as he formed them up, dismounted them, stripped their belts and arms, and took away their horses.

The mutinied regiment remained strictly guarded in a “prison-camp” on Wimbledon Common for several days, and was then conveyed by train to Dartmoor Prison, where the court-martial era set in with stern severity, in spite of the vehement and persistent remonstrances of certain members of Parliament who appeared to regard murderous mutiny as rather laudable than otherwise. The Gazette presently promulgated the melancholy intimation that the Scarlet Hussars had been disbanded, and that there was no longer a regiment of that once proud name in the British Army. Colonel Guardlex, having undergone a pro-form trial by court-martial, was acquitted with honour and credit, and his promotion to major-general was announced in the same Gazette in which the Scarlet Hussars were obliterated.

Chapter V

While the Scarlet Hussars were being “rounded up” on Wimbledon Common by the staunch old Regals, another abortive rising was being crushed with equal completeness.

The 6th Welsh Guards was the show battalion of the Household Infantry, and never did it parade in finer form than on the morning after L’Estrange’s hurried visit to Wellington Barracks on his way to concert the mutiny of the Scarlet Hussars, the summary frustration of which has just been described. It happened that some German officers were at this time in London, and they were escorted to the Guards’ parade-ground in Hyde Park by several of the field-officers of the Brigade, anxious to prove to the Teutonic soldiers that elsewhere than in the German armies could perfection of drill be attained by men enlisted for only three years’ service. The Kaiser’s warriors were frank and outspoken beyond their reserved wont as, under the surveillance of the smart and peremptory adjutant, the battalion marched passed in divers formations. This ceremony finished, Captain Falconer marched it across the Row to the more open ground northward. After an hour’s sharp drill, the battalion was halted about three hundred yards to the east of the low elevation on which stand the police-station and the guardhouse. Its halted formation was in open column of companies, the front of the column directly facing the interval between the two buildings just named.

During the brief “stand at ease”—the hour was just noon—there was to be seen riding to and fro in the interval between the front of the battalion and the rise crowned by the police-station and the guardhouse a keen-eyed elderly gentleman, who, although in civilian attire, could not be mistaken for any other than a soldier. The men in the ranks recognised him at a glance as the General commanding the Home District; and a Cockney lance-corporal remarked, “Hif hold Phil don’t cut his lucky, we’ll give him ‘what for’ by and by!”

“Hold Phil” evinced no symptoms of an intention to “cut his lucky.” He quietly beckoned the adjutant to him, said a few words, and then glanced sharply toward where, in the interval between the two buildings on the ridge, there stood an officer in the uniform of the Horse Artillery. Then he nodded to the adjutant of the battalion.

That officer in a loud voice gave the consecutive commands—

“Attention!”

“Shoulder arms!”

“The battalion will return to barracks!”

Save for the colour-sergeants and sergeants, the battalion remained at the “stand at ease,” and a jeering laugh ran along the ranks.

“Once again, Captain Falconer,” said the General with a composure in which there was something ominous.

Captain Falconer called the battalion to “Attention!” a second time. This time he was hooted, and a man pointed his rifle at him, but the weapon was struck up by a sergeant. The battalion broke out into oaths and shouts.

The General bade Captain Falconer order the non-commissioned officers to fall out to the flanks; and then he raised aloft his right arm and shouted, “Major Hippesley!”

Major Hippesley was the horse-gunner on the ridge. That officer did not so much as turn his head, but the command he gave carried half-way across the Park, so loud was it. And the sense of the command was as truculent as was Hippesley’s tone—

“By hand, run out the guns! Action front!”

With a bicker and a rush there shot from out the police-station yard gun after gun, whirled by stalwart artillerymen, till in a few seconds six pieces filled the interval between the police-station and the guardhouse, their sullen mouths pointed straight down on the dense mass of guardsmen.

Major Hippesley glanced at the General, and saw that his right arm was again in the air. At this signal, he bellowed—

“With case, load!”

A tremor agitated the ranks of the Foot Guard battalion. And at the moment from the right and from the left came through the still air the muffled noise of the hoof-beat on the sward of many horses galloping furiously. From Cumberland Gate and from Victoria Gate the Blues were racing on the battalion’s right flank; from Knightsbridge the Life Guards were heading at a straining gallop towards its left. Clearly there was to be no paltering. The swords of the massive troopers were out and flashing in the sunshine. Destruction and death lay panting in the dark cruel throats of the cannon up there, where the gunners stood ready for the word to fire. And there was no ruth in the stern face of the gray chief out on the left front clear of the line of fire, grimly waiting for the “psychological moment.”

The battalion was writhing and heaving, a prey to the emotions of terror, fury, and the sense of having been betrayed. On it, thus agitated, fell like a sedative the General’s calm, firm command—

“Battalion, pile arms!”

The battalion confessed its mutiny abortive in its prompt obedience to the order. Escorted by cavalry and artillery, the disarmed guardsmen were marched straight into the great inner yards of Millbank Prison, where they remained encamped until their fate was decreed. A brief Act temporarily permitting the use of the lash was passed in a single day almost without opposition. It followed that, when the battalion sailed for Aden, with out-stations at Perim and Socotra, it left few prisoners behind, but took with it many men who were unable to wear their knapsacks during the journey by river from Millbank to the Albert Docks. It is needless to add that the revelations of an informer had enabled the General to make the dispositions which were so quietly effectual; they would have taken a wider range but that the informer was not cognisant of the arrangement for a simultaneous rising between the Scarlet Hussars and the Guards battalion.