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Fix Bay'nets, by George Manville Fenn
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Title: Fix Bay'nets The Regiment in the Hills
Author: George Manville Fenn
Illustrator: W.H.C. Groome
Release Date: January 27, 2009 [EBook #27908]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIX BAY'NETS ***
Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
Fix Bay'nets, by George Manville Fenn.
CHAPTER ONE.
ON THE MARCH.
Trrt--trrt--trrt. Just that little sound, as the sticks flirted with the drumheads to keep the men in step; for Her Majesty's 404th Fusiliers were marching "easy." So it was called; and it meant with the men smoking, and carrying their rifles as they pleased--shouldered, at the trail, slung muzzle up or muzzle down. But, all the same, it was a miserable fiction to call it marching easy, for it was impossible to make that march anything but hard. Why? Because of the road.
No; that is a fiction, too. It is absurd to call that stony shelf of rock, encumbered with stones of all sizes, full of cracks and holes, a road. It was almost in its natural state, with a smooth place here and there where it had been polished in bygone ages by avalanches of ice or stones.
But the sun shone brightly; the scenery was glorious, and grew in place