I was with my regiment in all
Wellesley's brilliant campaigns; then taking dawk, I travelled across
the country north-eastward, and had the honor of fighting by the side of
Lord Lake at Laswaree, Deeg, Furruckabad, Futtyghur, and Bhurtpore:
but I will not boast of my actions--the military man knows them, MY
SOVEREIGN appreciates them. If asked who was the bravest man of the
Indian army, there is not an officer belonging to it who would not cry
at once, GAHAGAN. The fact is, I was desperate: I cared not for life,
deprived of Julia Jowler.
With Julia's stony looks ever before my eyes, her father's stern refusal
in my ears, I did not care, at the close of the campaign, again to seek
her company or to press my suit. We were eighteen months on service,
marching and countermarching, and fighting almost every other day: to
the world I did not seem altered; but the world only saw the face, and
not the seared and blighted heart within me. My valor, always
desperate, now reached to a pitch of cruelty; I tortured my grooms and
grass-cutters for the most trifling offence or error,--I never in action
spared a man,--I sheared off three hundred and nine heads in the course
of that single campaign.
Some influence, equally melancholy, seemed to have fallen upon poor old
Jowler.
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