The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer — Volume 3 — Inside the Classic

DETACHMENT DUTY--AN ASSIZE TOWN.

As there appeared to be but little prospect of poor Fitzgerald ever requiring any explanation from me as to the events of that morning, for he feared to venture from his room, lest he might be recognised and prosecuted for abduction, I thought it better to keep my own secret also; and it was therefore with a feeling of any thing but regret, that I received an order which, under other circumstances, would have rendered me miserable--to march on detachment duty. To any one at all conversant with the life we lead in the army, I need not say how unpleasant such a change usually is. To surrender your capital mess, with all its well-appointed equipments--your jovial brother officers--hourly flirtations with the whole female population--never a deficient one in a garrison town--not to speak of your matches at trotting, coursing, and pigeon-shooting, and a hundred other delectable modes of getting over the ground through life, till it please your ungrateful country and the Horse Guards to make you a major-general--to surrender all these, I say, for the noise, dust, and damp disagreeables of a country inn, with bacon to eat, whiskey to drink, and the priest, or the constabulary chief, to get drunk with--I speak of Ireland here--and your only affair, par amours, being the occasional ogling of the apothecary's daughter opposite, as often as she visits the shop, in the soi disant occupation of measuring out garden seeds and senna. These are indeed, the exchanges with a difference, for which there is no compensation; and, for my own part, I never went upon such duty, that I did not exclaim with the honest Irishman, when the mail went over him, "Oh, Lord! what is this for?"--firmly believing that in the earthly purgatory of such duties, I was reaping the heavy retribution attendant on past offences.

Besides, from being rather a crack man in my corps, I thought it somewhat hard that my turn for such duty should come round about twice as often as that of my brother officers; but so it is--I never knew a fellow a little smarter than his neighbours, that was not pounced upon by his colonel for a victim. Now, however, I looked at these matters in a very different light. To leave head-quarters was to escape being questioned; while there was scarcely any post to which I could be sent, where something strange or adventurous might not turn up, and serve me to erase the memory of the past, and turn the attention of my companions in any quarter rather than towards myself.

My orders on the present occasion were to march to Clonmel; from whence I was to proceed a short distance to the house of a magistrate, upon whose information, transmitted to the Chief Secretary, the present assistance of a military party had been obtained; and not without every appearance of reason. The assizes of the town were about to be held, and many capital offences stood for trial in the calendar; and as it was strongly rumoured that, in the event of certain convictions being obtained, a rescue would be attempted, a general attack upon the town seemed a too natural consequence; and if so, the house of so obnoxious a person as him I have alluded to, would be equally certain of being assailed. Such, at least, is too frequently the history of such scenes, beginning with no one definite object: sometimes a slight one--more ample views and wider conceptions of mischief follow; and what has begun in a drunken riot--a casual rencontre--may terminate in the slaughter of a family, or the burning of a village. The finest peasantry--God bless them--are a vif people, and quicker at taking a hint than most others, and have, withal, a natural taste for fighting, that no acquired habits of other nations can pretend to vie with.