Ch. 15: The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney

Wohl auf, my bully cavaliers,
We ride to church to-day,
The man that hasn't got a horse
Must steal one straight away.

Be reverent, men, remember
This is a Gottes haus.
Du, Conrad, cut along der aisle
And schenck der whiskey aus.
HANS BREITMANN'S RIDE TO CHURCH.

Once upon a time, very far from England, there lived three men who loved
each other so greatly that neither man nor woman could come between
them. They were in no sense refined, nor to be admitted to the outer-
door mats of decent folk, because they happened to be private soldiers
in Her Majesty's Army; and private soldiers of our service have small
time for self-culture. Their duty is to keep themselves and their
accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain from getting drunk more
often than is necessary, to obey their superiors, and to pray for a war.
All these things my friends accomplished; and of their own motion threw
in some fighting-work for which the Army Regulations did not call. Their
fate sent them to serve in India, which is not a golden country, though
poets have sung otherwise. There men die with great swiftness, and those
who live suffer many and curious things. I do not think that my friends
concerned themselves much with the social or political aspects of the
East. They attended a not unimportant war on the northern frontier,
another one on our western boundary, and a third in Upper Burma. Then
their regiment sat still to recruit, and the boundless monotony of
cantonment life was their portion. They were drilled morning and evening
on the same dusty parade-ground. They wandered up and down the same
stretch of dusty white road, attended the same church and the same grog-
shop, and slept in the same lime-washed barn of a barrack for two long
years. There was Mulvaney, the father in the craft, who had served with
various regiments from Bermuda to Halifax, old in war, scarred,
reckless, resourceful, and in his pious hours an unequalled soldier. To
him turned for help and comfort six and a half feet of slow-moving,
heavy-footed Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred in the dales, and
educated chiefly among the carriers' carts at the back of York railway-
station. His name was Learoyd, and his chief virtue an unmitigated
patience which helped him to win fights. How Ortheris, a fox-terrier of
a Cockney, ever came to be one of the trio, is a mystery which even to-
day I cannot explain. 'There was always three av us,' Mulvaney used to
say. 'An' by the grace av God, so long as our service lasts, three av us
they'll always be. 'Tis betther so.'

They desired no companionship beyond their own, and it was evil for any
man of the regiment who attempted dispute with them. Physical argument
was out of the question