Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/164
his coffin; a few minutes’ pause was now given, while they prayed.
A firing party of twenty-four men stood ready with levelled carbines. The commanding officer, who had his sword drawn, waved it through some cuts of the sword-exeroise till he reached the downward stroke, whereat the firing party discharged their volley. The two victims fell, one upon his face across his coffin, the other backward.
As the volley resounded there arose a shriek from the wall of Dr, Grove’s garden, and some one fell down inside ; but nobody among the spectators without noticed it at the time. The two executed hussars were Matthius Tina and his friend Christoph. The soldiers on guard placed the bodies in the coffins almost instantly ; but the colonel of the regiment, an Englishman, rode up and exclaimed, in a stern voice, “Turn them out—as an example to tha men !”
The coffins were lifted endwise, and the dead Germans flung out upon their faces on the grass. Then all the regiments wheeled in sections and marched past the spot in slow time. When the survey was over the corpses were again coffined and borne away.
Meanwhile Dr. Grove, attracted by the noise of the volley, had rushed ont into his garden, where he saw his wretched daughter lying motionless against the wall. She was taken in-doors, but it was long before she recovered consciousness, and for weeks they despaired of her reason.
It transpired that the luckless deserters from the York Hussars had cut the boat from her moorings in the adjacent harbor, according to their plan, and, with two other comrades, who were smarting under ill-treatment from their colonel, had gailed in safety across the Channel; but mistaking their bearings, they steered into Jersey, thinking that island the