The Three Musketeers (Kipling)

"This page is about the short story by Rudyard Kipling collected in Plain Tales from the Hills. For other uses, such as the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, see The Three Musketeers (disambiguation).

This "The Three Musketeers" is a story by Rudyard Kipling which introduces his three fictional British soldiers serving in India in the later nineteenth century: Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd. These appear in many early stories; Kipling's second collection is called "Soldiers Three" (1888). "The Three Musketeers" was first published in the "Civil and Military Gazette" on March 11th 1887, and in book form in Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888.

"The Three Musketeers" tells the story (narrated by the three - mostly Mulvaney, the loquacious Irishman, and Ortheris) 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 - along with humiliating the Lord AND receiving a five pound note apiece from him, for being "a "h"onour to the British Harmy".

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 a "ekka" driver to take Trigg to Padsahi "jhil", a large swampy tract of flooded land, about two miles off. They improve the operation by paying Buldoo, a "knowin' little divil" attached to the Artillery, to take the place of the "ekka" driver, and to mount a simulated abduction. Once the "ekka" is capsized into the "jhil" and Buldoo's three accomplices are banging sticks all over it, Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris 'rescue' the Lord from "about forty" "dacoits". He has to recover the next day in hospital, so the parade is cancelled. Trigg is grateful to 'The Three Musketeers' (to the tune of three fivers), and the Colonel of the regiment is suspicious: but Mulvaney believes he would not have charged them with it had he known, as the cancellation of the Parade is welcome to all members of the regiment.

:All quotations in this article have been taken from the "Uniform Edition" of "Plain Tales from the Hills" published by Macmillan & Co., Limited in London in 1899. The text is that of the third edition (1890), and the author of the 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, at [http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_musketeers1.htm] .