The Three Musketeers (short story)
"The Three Musketeers" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling which introduces three fictional British soldiers serving in India in the later nineteenth century: the privates Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris. These characters appear in many early Kipling stories.[1] "The Three Musketeers" was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette on 11 March 1887. It appeared in book form in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).
Narrated by the three privates—mostly Mulvaney, the loquacious Irishman, and Ortheris —The Three Musketeers tells the story of how the three contrive not only to 'protest' (like the junior officers) against a proposed special parade requested by a visiting grandee, Lord Benira Trigg, but to have it cancelled and humiliate the Lord and receive a five-pound note apiece from him, for being "a honour to the British Harmy".[citation needed]
Trigg is a distinguished tourist, a peer on a 'fact-finding mission' (as we might now say) to write a book. "His particular vice—because he was a Radical, men said - was having garrisons turned out for his inspection ... He turned out troops once too often"—he asked for an inspection "On - a - Thursday" (the horror is that Thursday is understood to be the troops 'make and mend' day, or half-day holiday). Learoyd raises a subscription from the troops to have it cancelled, which is spent on suborning an
Notes
- ^ For example, his second collection is called Soldiers Three (1888)
- Macmillan & Co. in 1899. The text is that of the third edition (1890), and the original author of this article has used his own copy of the 1923 reprint. A version may be found at http://www.online-literature.com/kipling/3792/. Further comment, including page-by-page notes, can be found on the Kipling Society's website.