General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1879 Original Publisher: W. Blackwood and Sons Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 53 CHAPTER III. AN EPISODE IN THE WAR. Before the winter of that year, 1854, Captain du Lys, like many another British soldier, had acquired a new set of ideas, sentiments, and habits. A few months of camp-life on active service had driven into the shade, and almost out of thought, tastes, desires, wants, pursuits, which he had thought to be inseparable from himself, necessary to his identity; and had raised in his mind new ambitions, stirred him to new efforts, and accustomed him to a new routine and new privations. He knew, by some testimony which was superior to the facts of his daily life, that he was himself; but he quite wondered at his retaining that certainty – such a weight of evidence was against his doing so. Not to have any time to kill, was a revolution in itself; and to live a life of hard work instead of amusement, was a change not less notable. But, onthe whole, to like the hard life and the hard work, was what, perhaps, astonished most of all. There had been a good deal of excitement at the beginning of the war – the mustering of armies, the sights of foreign lands, the embarkations and disembarkations, and the sharp actions with which the campaign commenced. Acquaintance had to be made with the horrors as well as the habits of war. Tall fellows knocked over in scores, wounds, exhausting marches, the effects of the cruel elements, were things that were becoming familiar by this time. It was well that there were a few rapid changes at first; because a siege, until its latter operations are arrived at, is very dull warfare. There are some s…