In all garrison towns, guard-calls, and reveilles, and such like, make a fine romantic interlude in civic business.  Bugles, and drums, and fifes, are of themselves most excellent things in nature; and when they carry the mind to marching armies, and the picturesque vicissitudes of war, they stir up something proud in the heart.  But in a shadow of a town like Landrecies, with little else moving, these points of war made a proportionate commotion.  Indeed, they were the only things to remember.  It was just the place to hear the round going by at night in the darkness, with the solid tramp of men marching, and the startling reverberations of the drum.  It reminded you, that even this place was a point in the great warfaring system of Europe, and might on some future day be ringed about with cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a name among strong towns.

The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological effect, nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape, stands alone among the instruments of noise.  And if it be true, as I have heard it said, that drums are covered with asses’ skin, what a picturesque irony is there in that!  As if this long-suffering animal’s hide had not been sufficiently belaboured during life, now by Lyonnese costermongers, now by presumptuous Hebrew prophets, it must be stripped from his poor hinder quarters after death, stretched on a drum, and beaten night after night round the streets of every garrison town in Europe.  And up the heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades, batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys.

Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this trick of bastinadoing asses’ hide.  We know what effect it has in life, and how your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.  But in this state of mummy and melancholy survival of itself, when the hollow skin reverberates to the drummer’s wrist, and each dub-a-dub goes direct to a man’s heart, and puts madness there, and that disposition of the pulses which we, in our big way of talking, nickname Heroism:- is there not something in the nature of a revenge upon the donkey’s persecutors?  Of old, he might say, you drubbed me up hill and down dale, and I must endure; but now that I am dead, those dull thwacks that were scarcely audible in country lanes, have become stirring music in front of the brigade; and for every blow that you lay on my old greatcoat, you will see a comrade stumble and fall.

Not long after the drums had passed the cafe, the Cigarette and the Arethusa began to grow sleepy, and set out for the hotel, which was only a door or two away.  But although we had been somewhat indifferent to Landrecies, Landrecies had not been indifferent to us.  All day, we learned, people had been running out between the squalls to visit our two boats.  Hundreds of persons, so said report, although it fitted ill with our idea of the town—­hundreds of persons had inspected them where they lay in a coal-shed.  We were becoming lions in Landrecies, who had been only pedlars the night before in Pont.