286 STAG-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



being eliminated subsequently, often after many years' 

 service.' 



In the English army it is always taken for granted that 

 the major will know how to ride. Thus some of the mounted 

 officers of an Infantry Brigade at Aldershot, or rather the 

 vagaries of their seats and of their chargers, are often exceed- 

 ingly diverting. I remember occasions when they have 

 made quite tolerable the interminable pauses and contra- 

 dictions of a review in the Long Valley or a field-day on 

 the Fox Hills. We were often grateful to these eccentric 

 horsemen. Nothing is taken for granted about riding, or 

 indeed about anything else in France. A mounted officer 

 must know how to ride his horse. The French cut of booted 

 over-all rather smothers a plain saddle, and their short- 

 waisted many-buttoned tunic seems to cock a man too much 

 up on his horse. Indeed, with the exception of the long 

 undress frock-coat and close over-all of our own hussars, no 

 uniform looks really well with civilian saddlery. But I have 

 no hesitation in saying that the forty or fifty officers I saw 

 out with Monsieur Lebaudy's hounds rode quite as well 

 as, mutatis mutandis, the corresponding contingent from 

 Aldershot do with Mr. Garth or the Queen's. 



But to return to my captains and colonels and subalterns 

 and the glades of Fontainebleau. Uniform out hunting was 

 not unfamiliar to me. In the old days ' mon capitaine ' or 

 ' mon colonel ' occasionally came out hunting, but his punctilio 

 was tremendous. I am not at all sure he did not always wear 

 his sword. At all events he maintained throughout a strictly 

 barrack-square demeanour, or at the best seemed to be bent 

 on a reconnaissance. When we encountered this image of 

 war, at a carrefour, ' le brave Isidore,' as he was honourably 

 dubbed at ' Le Cheval Noir ' and other houses of call, used 

 instinctively to pull himself together, straighten his leg, drop 

 his heel and right arm, and coerce into an extra curve his left 



