The Robertson court-martial, of which I was an eyewitness, also created a stir in the long-ago sixties. The colonel of the 4th Dragoon Guards was at the time one Bentinck, who, despite his heirship to the Dukedom of Portland, was about as uncouth a being as can well be conceived. As field officer of the day, no matter how late, he never missed dismounting and walking through the officers’ guard room without a word, as if he were inspecting the married quarters, and it was this amiable creature who eventually prosecuted, in conjunction with Adjutant Harran, as harmless an individual as ever posed as a sabreur. Captain Robertson was the son of a Highland laird, and, if I remember rightly, had a very handsome wife. What it was all about I have long since forgotten, though the cloud of witnesses that radiated towards the Royal barracks is in many ways impressed on my memory. Captain Owen—an important witness as he described himself—was an officer of militia, and, more military than the military, he revelled in things military. His staple conversation was military; a sort of peakless cap his everyday head-dress; his very dressing-gown was frogged like a light dragoon’s frock coat; for gloves he affected the buckskin class, and carried glove-trees and pipeclay, at least whilst in Dublin. These peculiarities were grafted on my memory by his having doubled up for six weeks in my solitary room in Dublin. I had spoken to him on one occasion, and in a weak moment invited him to mess. How it all came about I have no recollection beyond finding him located on me; having every meal at my expense, and incurring a mess bill of over £8, which I eventually had to pay. “D— it, old man,” he often said, “this is like old times” (when the annual training was on, presumably); “I can’t tear myself away from the bugles.” And he didn’t, till peremptorily requested to go.
Other witnesses of a more desirable type also swarmed for weeks at our mess. Ginger Durant, who had never been out of London since he left the 12th Lancers, was daily to be heard bellowing “To the rag, to the rag” to the tune of “Dixey’s Land,” and General Dickson, a grand old warrior (happily still as fresh as paint) who commanded the Turkish contingent in the Crimea, champed his bit and cursed the necessity that detained him in Dublin.