Tournay Is A Large Handsome City And The
Spacious Quais On The Banks Of The Scheld Which Runs Through It Add Much To
The Neatness Of Its Appearance.
It is only ten miles distant from Lille,
but all communication from France is stopped.
We learned that some of the
Hanoverians had been deserting. In return we met with a young French hussar
who had come over to the Allies. He seemed to be an impudent sort of
fellow, and said, with the utmost sang-froid, that the reason he deserted
was that he had not been made an officer as he was promised, and he hoped
that Louis XVIII would be more sensible of his merits than the Emperor
Napoleon. We returned to Leuze to dinner in the afternoon. This morning we
went to assist at a review of General Clinton's division, on a plain called
Le Paturage, about seven miles distant from Leuze. The Light Brigade and
the Hanoverian Brigades form this division. The manoeuvres were performed
with tolerable precision, but they were chiefly confined to advancing in
line, retiring by alternate companies covered by light infantry and change
of position on one of the flanks by echelon. The British troops were
perfect; the Hanoverians not so, they being for the most part new levies.
In one of the echelon movements, when the line was to be formed on the
left company of the left battalion, a Hanoverian battalion, instead of
preserving its parallelism, was making a terrible diversion to its right,
when a thundering voice from the commander of the brigade to the commandant
of the battalion:
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