started off, mounted and accoutred and full of fresh dreams of glory,
destined once more to disappointment--a disappointment shared by various
engineer and artillery officers and three Prussians, Messieurs von
Willisen, [Footnote: H. de Willisen, aide-de-camp to the Prince of
Prussia, who afterwards became the Emperor William, was in chief command
of the Holstein army.] von Noville, and Oelrichs, who had arrived too
late to start with the expeditionary force, and, like myself, were
endeavouring to rejoin it. What shall I say about the march of the
column to which I was attached upon Constantine? It lasted over twelve
days of fearful weather, during which no discomfort was spared us.
Torrents of rain, rivers in flood, snowfalls, men dying of cold,
stragglers whose shouts for help only brought us to them to find them
lying headless on the ground, and last of all, a terrible outbreak of
cholera, which one of the regiments in the column brought with it from
France. And we had the mental agony to boot of being kept ever so long
at the foot of a mountain, the Raz el Akbah, which was so sodden that no
gun nor vehicle could get up it, even with triple teams, and listening
to the firing of the attacking batteries before Constantine without
being able to get there.

One day, during this delay, the chief medical officer, by way of
consolation, greeted us with these words at breakfast: "Bad news,
gentlemen; we have just discovered that the cesspools of the hospital (a
miserable hut) have burst, and for the last twenty-four hours they have
been leaking into the spring where we get our drinking water."

"Hang it all, doctor, you really might have kept that to yourself," we
all cried in a breath!

Amid all this suffering and discomfort, physical and moral, the courage,