Karlstadt – The Return Excerpt 9

Karlstadt – The Return Excerpt 9

  We halted, in the early evening whilst it was still light, I erected the tent while Jock collected wood for the fire. We fed and watered the horses, then began to cook ourselves a meal.

It bought back some fond memories of when we were on campaign and had to rough it. We laughed over shared memories, we could afford too, we were survivors, some other’s weren’t so lucky.

We had an uneventful night and the following day after we had breakfasted and saddled the horses and reloaded the pack – horse, We struck camp and continued on our way. Up till now, we were both enjoying our trek through the Carpathians, neither of us had ridden horses on a regular basis. We were Infantrymen and as such relied on our feet, marching from place to place, it was quite a luxury to be carried there, we both felt quite spoilt.

We continued on like this until the fifth day. On that day we fell foul of some brigands, or rather they fell foul of us. We had both spotted the three men trailing us and the obsolete muskets they carried. At the next fork in the road Jock peeled off so that he could get behind them.

I, sensing some kind of confrontation carried my rifle cradled in my arms with my finger on the trigger, we had been in these sort of situations before in our military service, I guessed there would be more of them ahead of me.

(C) Damian Grange 2019

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