2
" Four piles of dead were heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like carrion; the ground was broken up into great pools of blood, black and noisome; troops of flies were swarming like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still conscious, crowding over the festering wounds (for these men had lain there since Saturday at noon!), buzzing their death-rattle in ears already maddened with torture. That was what we saw in the Malakoff, what we saw a little later in the Great Redan, where among cookhouses, brimful of human blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell embrace, petrified by death; where the British lay in heaps, mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or scorched and blackened by the recent explosions; and where — how strange they looked there! — there stood outside the entrance of one of the houses, a vase of flowers, and a little canary! "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
3
" Don’t you remember my degree was given me this year because I am a Peer’s son?” asked Curly, reprovingly. “See what it is to be a Goth, without a classical education! You should have gone to Granta, De Vigne, you’d have been Stroke of the Cambridge Eight, not a doubt of it There’s muscle gone to waste! It’s very jolly, you see, being an Honourable, though I never knew it; one gets credit for brains whether one has them or not What an inestimable blessing to some of the pillars of the aristocracy, isn’t it? I suppose the House of Lords was instituted on that principle; and its members are no more required to know why they pass their bills, than we, their sons and heirs, are required to know why we pass our examinations, eh? "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
5
" ALADYN and Devno! — those green stretching meadows, those rich dense forests, catching the golden glow of the sunshine of the East — those sloping hill-sides, with the clematis, and acacia, and wild vine clinging to them, and the laughing waters of lake and stream sleeping at their base — who could believe that horrible pestilential vapour stole up from them, like a murderer in the dark, and breathing fever, ague, and dysentery into the tents of a slumbering Army, stabbed the sleepers while they lay, unconscious of the assassin’s hand that was draining away their life and strength! "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
8
" But when I think of them all, my dead friends, whose bodies lie thick where the sweet wild lavender is blowing over the barren steppes of the Chersonese this summer’s day, I remember, wrathfully, how civilians, by their own warm hearths, sat and dictated measures by which whole regiments, starving with cold, sickened and died; and how Indian officers, used to the luxurious style of Eastern warfare and travel, asserted those privations to be “nothing,” which they were not called to bear; and I fear — I fear — that England may one day live to want such sons of hers as she let suffer and rot on the barren plains of the Crimea, in such misery as she would shudder to entail on a pauper or a convict Few of us will ever forget our first bivouac on the Chersonese soil — that pitiless drenching down-pour of sheets of ink-black water! "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
10
" He laughed again. “Well, I’ve seen life — I told you young fellows at Frestonhills, I trusted to my sauce piquante; and I must say it has used me very well hitherto, and I dare say always will as long as I keep away from the Jews. While a man has plenty of tin, all the world offers him the choicest dinner; though, when he has overdrawn at Coutts’s, his friends wouldn’t give him dry bread to keep him out of the union! Be able to dine en prince at home, and you’ll be invited out every night of your life; be hungry au troisième, and you must not lick the crumbs from under your sworn allies’ tables, those jolly good fellows, who have surfeited themselves at yours many a time! Oh yes, I enjoy life; a man always can as long as he can pay for it! "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
12
" There was every type of the genus sporting man; stout, square farmers, with honest bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very suspicious of brandy; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread; the courteous, cordial aristocratic M.F.H., with the men of his class, the county gentry; rough, ill-looking cads, awkward at all things save crossing country; no end of pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into everybody’s way; and last, but in our eyes not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds throw off. "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
14
" Our turn was near at hand. An hour after we received the order to advance on the Russian guns. With the blame, on whomsoever it may lie of that rash order, I have nothing to do. That vexatious question can never be settled, since he on whose shoulders they place it lies in the valley of Balaklava, the first who fell, and cannot raise his voice to reply, or give the lie, if it be a lie, to his calumniators. If Louis Nolan were to blame, his love for our Arm, and his jealousy over its honour, his belief that Light Cavalry would do the work of demigods, and his irritation that hitherto we had not been given the opportunity we might have had, must plead his excuse; and I think his brilliant courage, and the memory of that joyous cheer which ended in the wild death-cry which none who heard can ever forget, might silence the angry jar and jangle of contention above his grave, and set the seals of oblivion upon his error! "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
16
" No, I can fancy your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, I can understand how you drink your poison one hour because you liked its flavour, and drink more the next hour to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it at all. That my own solitude and imagination are only peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed in vice, what would circumstance and surroundings have made me! Oh, I think, instead of the Pharisee’s presumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ our thanksgiving should be, ‘I thank God that I have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should forgive, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose temptations, either from their own nature or from the outer world, have been so much greater than our own. "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
17
" Sell yourself?” repeated the peeress. Fine ladies are not often fond of hearing things called by their proper names, “Yes, sell myself,” repeated Violet, bitterly, leaning against the mantelpiece, with a painful smile upon her lips. “Would you not put me up to auction, knock me down to the highest bidder? Marriage is the mart, mothers the auctioneers, and he who bids the highest wins. Women are like racers, brought up only to run for Cups, and win handicaps for their owners.” “Nonsense!” said her mother, impatiently. “You have lost your senses, I think. There is no question of ‘selling,’ as you term it. Marriage is a social compact, of course, where alliances suitable in position, birth, and wealth, are studied. Why should you pretend to be wiser than all the rest of the world? Most amiable and excellent women have married without thinking love a necessary ingredient Why should you object to a good alliance if it be a mariage de convenance? "
― Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)
