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The absence of wine, women, and, for the most part, song, with added complete lack of comfortable bedding, clean facilities, warm weather, sunshine, and food, oftentimes were causing him some concern about his chosen path in Life.
Granted, he could attribute the lack of sunshine to the fact that they tended to move at night, under cover of darkness, as it were, and slept during the hours he might hope to catch a glimpse of the sun.
And there was no end of adventure, that was for sure. If you counted walking down dusty, dark, quiet roads as adventurous. And they sometimes were, the roads being none too well cared for and rather prone to having large, gaping holes in them. And wild boars. Which seemed somehow more irritable than the wild boars at home.

That was another point, France was considerably different than County Armagh. And darker, if his marching habits were anything to judge it by. And, give it a few hundred years and it would have a high speed rail service running along the very spot he was now walking, something Armagh couldn't quite put claim to. Unless you squinted extremely hard when the buses went by. And then exaggerated their speed by quite a bit.
This wasn't a terribly helpful thought, less so in that he wasn't having it, instead dwelling upon his feet and his right ankle in particular, which he'd just twisted mildly in another of the less road-like holes he'd managed to find whilst thinking of a woman from Armagh or a waitress at the tavern they'd stopped at one afternoon or one he'd made up along the way, a composite, if you will. His great skill in finding the holes while thinking of other things gained him the privilege of travelling up front. His strong ankles allowed him to retain the position.
The woman he was thinking of, it would turn out, was a composite of a woman from Armagh and the woman from the tavern, as tends to happen, once you've bounced out the door, out upon a dark road with a few people in the group attempting to sing, poorly (the attempt and the result), and the stubborn refusal to sleep in the possible comforts the tavern's associated lodgings offered still burns slightly at your conscience, better sense, and sense of comfort, a poorly focused state of grumblings and the sort of cold walking along a dodgy road in the middle of the night tends to engender.
If someone had pointed out to him the hitherto largely neglected thought that a high speed rail between London and Paris would someday exist in the very spot over which they now walked he might enquire after how quickly it could get him from London to Paris, and if they couldn't get something like that in Armagh, as well, as that's all he ever wanted, anyway.
That and maybe the woman from the tavern.

disclaimer:

Dedicated to Mildred Hanlon.