Bag and Baggage/Tony’s Drum

TONY'S DRUMSOMEWHERE on the heights of Malplaquet a bugle sang out in the dead exhausted evening. Sergeant Garrow, kneeling in the brushwood below, cursed the whine of it with picturesque vehemence:
"Why don't ye come and give us a haul, ye braying jackass," he panted, "instead of standing up there and boasting of your wind?"
The wail, in its passing, seemed to release the babel of mournful sounds it had for the moment subdued—sobbing of wounded horses, crying of wounded men, all flowing over the lip of the plateau above, and mingling confusedly with the wind in the leaves and the rush of a little river, vocal in the thickets deep below.
It was the evening following that day of dreadful battle which had cost us twenty thousand lives for the gain of a position not worth negotiating. Our troops could boast that they had won his camp from the enemy for the sake of a night's lodging; and there they lay in it, their fires spotting the heath, their anguish testifying to their gain. The woods of Lanière and Taisniere under the hill were spilled full of dead men, and sentries almost as torpid watched the captured entrenchments.
Sergeant Garrow, staggering up the ravine-side with a litt

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