To Most People There Is Nothing More Subtle Or Pleasing In A
Powder-Magazine Than In A Reservoir.
They are both much the same in
the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides
and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors.
But, for my
part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with
two very good feelings - - laughter and companionship. For it was my
good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two
men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been
some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots - and for
the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the
anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty
cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous
noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the
over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two
friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a
loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders
to challenge once and then to fire.
Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a
conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
a growing tree.
This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
explain it. It was a good gun in its time - now they have the
seventy-five that doesn't recoil - _requiescat), _and of how they were
longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.
Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
went down the road.
Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.
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