IN THE MIDST OF HER ARMY.
There was a line of light in the eastern sky. The camp was very still.
It was the hour for the mounting of the guard, and, as the light spread
higher and higher, whiter and whiter, as the morning came, a score of
men advanced slowly and in silence to a broad strip of land screened
from the great encampment by the rise and fall of the ground, and
stretching far and even, with only here and there a single palm to
break its surface, over which the immense arc of the sky bent, gray and
serene, with only the one colorless gleam eastward that was changing
imperceptibly into the warm, red flush of opening day.
Sunrise and solitude: they were alike chosen, lest the army that
honored, the comrades that loved him, should rise to his rescue; casting
off the yoke of discipline, and remembering only that tyranny and
that wretchedness under which they had seen him patient and unmoved
throughout so many years of servitude.
He stood tranquil beside the coffin within which his broken limbs and
shot-pierced corpse would so soon be laid forever. There was a deep
sadness on his face, but it was perfectly serene. To the words of the
priest who approached him he listened with respect, though he gently
declined the services of the Church. He had spoken but very little since
his arrest; he was led out of the camp in silence and waited in silence
now, looking across the plains to where the dawn was growing richer and
brighter with every moment that the numbered seconds of his life drifted
slowly and surely away.
When they came near to bind the covering over his eyes, he motioned them
away, taking the bandage from their hands and casting it far from him.
“Did I ever fear to look down the depths of my enemies' muskets?”
It was the single outbreak, the single reproach, that escaped from
him--the single utterance by which he ever quoted his services to
France. Not one who heard him dared again force on him that indignity
which would have blinded his sight, as though he had ever dreaded to
meet death.
That one protest having escaped from him, he was once more still and
calm, as though the vacant grave yawning at his feet had been but a
couch of down to rest his tired limbs. His eyes watched the daylight
deepen, and widen, and grow into one sheet of glowing roseate warmth;
but there was no regret in the gaze; there was a fixed, fathomless
resignation that moved with a vague sense of awe those who had come to
slay him, and who had been so used to slaughter that they fired their
volley into their comrade's breast as callously as into the ranks of
their antagonists.
“It is best thus,” he thought, “if only she never knows----”
Over the slope of brown and barren earth that screened the camp from
view there came, at the very moment that the ramrods were drawn out with
a shrill, sharp ring from the carbine-barrels, a single figure--tall,
stalwart, lithe, with the spring of the deerstalker in its rapid step,
and the sinew of the northern races in its mold.
Cecil never saw it; he was looking at the east, at the deepening of the
morning flush that was the signal of his slaughter, and his head was
turned away.
The newcomer went straight to the adjutant in command, and addressed him
with brief preface, hurriedly and low.
“Your prisoner is Victor of the Chasseurs?--he is to be shot this
morning?”
The officer assented; he suffered the interruption, recognizing the rank
of the speaker.
“I heard of it yesterday; I rode all night from Oran. I feel great pity
for this man, though he is unknown to me,” the stranger pursued, in
rapid, whispered words. “His crime was--”
“A blow to his colonel, monsieur.”
“And there is no possibility of a reprieve?”
“None.”
“May I speak with him an instant? I have heard it said that he is of my
country, and of a rank above his standing in his regiment here.”
“You may address him, M. le Duc; but be brief. Time presses.”
He thanked the officer for the unusual permission, and turned to
approach the prisoner. At that moment Cecil turned also, and their eyes
met. A great, shuddering cry broke from them both; his head sank as
though the bullet had already pierced his breast, and the man who
believed him dead stood gazing at him, paralyzed with horror.
For a moment there was an awful silence. Then the Seraph's voice rang
out with a terror in it that thrilled through the careless, callous
hearts of the watching soldiery.
“Who is that man? He died--he died so long ago! And yet----”
Cecil's head was sunk on his chest; he never spoke, he never moved; he
knew the helpless, hopeless misery that waited for the one who found
him living only to find him also standing before his open grave. He
saw nothing; he only felt the crushing force of his friend's arms flung
round him, as though seizing him to learn whether he were a living man
or a spector dreamed of in delirium.
“Who are you? Answer me, for pity's sake!”
As the swift, hoarse, incredulous words poured on his ear, he, not
seeking to unloose the other's hold, lifted his head and looked full
in the eyes that had not met his own for twelve long years. In that one
look all was uttered; the strained, eager, doubting eyes that read their
answer in it needed no other.
“You live still! Oh! thank God--thank God!”
And as the thanksgiving escaped him, he forgot all save the breathless
joy of this resurrection; forgot that at their feet the yawning grave
was open and unfilled. Then, and only then, under that recognition of
the friendship that had never failed and never doubted, the courage
of the condemned gave way, and his limbs shook with a great shiver of
intolerable torture; and at the look that came upon his face, the
look of death, brute-like anguish, the man who loved him remembered
all--remembered that he stood there in the morning light only to be
shot down like a beast of prey. Holding him there still with that strong
pressure of his sinewy hands, he swore a great oath that rolled like
thunder down the hard, keen air.
“You! perishing here! If they send their shots through you, they shall
reach me first in their passage! O Heaven! Why have you lived like this?
Why have you been lost to me, if you were dead to all the world beside?”
They were the words that his sister had spoken. Cecil's white lips
quivered as he heard them; his voice was scarcely audible as it panted
through them.
“I was accused--”
“Aye! But by whom? Not by me! Never by me!”
Cecil's eyes filled with slow, blinding tears; tears sweet as a woman's
in her joy, bitter as a man's in his agony. He knew that in this one
heart at least no base suspicion ever had harbored; he knew that this
love, at least, had cleaved to him through all shame and against all
evil.
“God reward you!” he murmured. “You have never doubted?”
“Doubted? Was your honor not as my own?”
“I can die at peace then; you know me guiltless--”
“Great God! Death shall not touch you. As I stand here not a hair of
your head shall be harmed--”
“Hush! Justice must take its course. One thing only--has she heard?”
“Nothing. She has left Africa. But you can be saved; you shall be saved!
They do not know what they do!”
“Yes! They but follow the sentence of the law. Do not regret it. It is
best thus.”
“Best!--that you should be slaughtered in cold blood!” His voice was
hoarse with the horror which, despite his words, possessed him. He knew
what the demands of discipline exacted, he knew what the inexorable
tyranny of the army enforced, he knew that he had found the life lost
to him for so long only to stand by and see it struck down like a shot
stag's.
Cecil's eyes looked at him with a regard in which all the sacrifice, all
the patience, all the martyrdom of his life spoke.
“Best, because a lie I could never speak to you, and the truth I can
never tell to you. Do not let her know; it might give her pain. I have
loved her; that is useless, like all the rest. Give me your hand once
more, and then--let them do their duty. Turn your head away; it will
soon be over!”
Almost ere he asked it, his friend's hands closed upon both is own,
keeping the promise made so long before in the old years gone; great,
tearless sobs heaved the depths of his broad chest; those gentle, weary
words had rent his very soul, and he knew that he was powerless here;
he knew that he could no more stay this doom of death than he could stay
the rising of the sun up over the eastern heavens. The clear voice of
the officer in command rang shrilly through the stillness.
“Monsieur, make your farewell. I can wait no longer.”
The Seraph started, and flung himself round with the grand challenge of
a lion, struck by a puny spear. His face flushed crimson; his words were
choked in his throbbing throat.
“As I live, you shall not fire! I forbid you! I swear by my honor and
the honor of England that he shall not die like a dog. He is of my
country; he is of my Order. I will appeal to your Emperor; he will
accord me his life the instant I ask it. Give me only an hour's
reprieve--a few moments' space to speak to your chiefs, to seek out your
general--”
“It is impossible, monsieur.”
The curt, calm answer was inflexible; against the sentence and its
execution there could be no appeal.
Cecil laid his hand upon his old friend's shoulders.
“It will be useless,” he murmured. “Let them act; the quicker the
better.”
“What! you think I would look on and see you die?”
“Would to Heaven you had never known I lived----”
The officer made a gesture to the guard to separate them.
“Monsieur, submit to the execution of the law, or I must arrest you.”
Lyonnesse flung off the detaining hand of the guard, and swung round so
that his agonized eyes gazed close into the adjutant's immovable face,
which before that gaze lost its coldness and its rigor, and changed to
a great pity for this stranger who had found the friend of his youth in
the man who stood condemned to perish there.
“An hour's reprieve; for mercy's sake, grant that!”
“I have said, it is impossible.”
“But you do not dream who is--”
“It matters not.”
“He is an English noble, I tell you--”
“He is a soldier who has broken the law; that suffices.”
“O Heaven! have you no humanity?”
“We have justice.”
“Justice! If you have justice, let your chiefs hear his story; let
his name be made known; give me an hour's space to plead for him. Your
Emperor would grant me his life, were he here; yield me an hour--a half
hour--anything that will give me time to serve him--”
“It is out of the question; I must obey my orders. I regret you should
have this pain; but if you do not cease to interfere, my soldiers must
make you.”
Where the guards held him, Cecil saw and heard. His voice rose with all
its old strength and sweetness.
“My friend, do not plead for me. For the sake of our common country and
our old love, let us both meet this with silence and with courage.”
“You are a madman!” cried the man, whose heart felt breaking under this
doom he could neither avert nor share. “You think that they shall kill
you before my eyes!--you think I shall stand by to see you murdered!
What crime have you done? None, I dare swear, save being moved, under
insult, to act as the men of your race ever acted! Ah, God! why have
lived as you have done? Why not have trusted my faith and my love?
If you had believed in my faith as I believed in your innocence, this
misery never had come to us!”
“Hush! hush! or you will make me die like a coward.”
He dreaded lest he should do so; this ordeal was greater than his
power to bear it. With the mere sound of this man's voice a longing, so
intense in its despairing desire, came on him for this life which they
were about to kill in him forever.
The words stung his hearer well-nigh to madness; he turned on the
soldiers with all the fury of his race that slumbered so long, but when
it awoke was like the lion's rage. Invective, entreaty, conjuration,
command, imploring prayer, and ungoverned passion poured in tumultuous
words, in agonized eloquence, from his lips; all answer was a quick sign
of the hand, and, ere he saw them, a dozen soldiers were round him, his
arms were seized, his splendid frame was held as powerless as a lassoed
bull; for a moment there was a horrible struggle, then a score of
ruthless hands locked him as in iron gyves, and forced his mouth to
silence and his eyes to blindness. This was all the mercy they could
give--to spare him the sight of his friend's slaughter.
Cecil's eyes strained in him with one last, longing look; then he raised
his hand and gave the signal for his own death-shot.
The leveled carbines covered him; he stood erect with his face full
toward the sun. Ere they could fire, a shrill cry pierced the air.
“Wait! In the name of France.”
Dismounted, breathless, staggering, with her arms flung upward, and her
face bloodless with fear, Cigarette appeared upon the ridge of rising
ground.
The cry of command pealed out upon the silence in the voice that the
Army of Africa loved as the voice of their Little One. And the cry came
too late; the volley was fired, the crash of sound thrilled across the
words that bade them pause, the heavy smoke rolled out upon the air; the
death that was doomed was dealt.
But beyond the smoke-cloud he staggered slightly, and then stood erect
still, almost unharmed, grazed only by some few of the balls. The flash
of fire was not so fleet as the swiftness of her love; and on his breast
she threw herself, and flung her arms about him, and turned her head
backward with her old, dauntless, sunlit smile as the balls pierced her
bosom, and broke her limbs, and were turned away by the shield of warm
young life from him.
Her arms were gliding from about his neck, and her shot limbs were
sinking to the earth as he caught her up where she dropped to his feet.
“O God! my child! They have killed you!”
He suffered more, as the cry broke from him, than if the bullets had
brought him that death which he saw at one glance had stricken down
forever all the glory of her childhood, all the gladness of her youth.
She laughed--all the clear, imperious, arch laughter of her sunniest
hours unchanged.
“Chut! It is the powder and ball of France! That does not hurt. If it
was an Arbico's bullet now! But wait! Here is the Marshal's order.
He suspends your sentence; I have told him all. You are safe!--do you
hear?--you are safe! How he looks! Is he grieved to live? Mes Francais!
Tell him clearer than I can tell--here is the order. The General must
have it. No--not out of my hand till the General sees it. Fetch him,
some of you--fetch him to me.”
“Great Heavens! You have given your life for mine!”
The words broke from him in an agony as he held her upward against his
heart, himself so blind, so stunned, with the sudden recall from death
to life, and with the sacrifice whereby life was thus brought to him,
that he could scarce see her face, scarce hear her voice, but only
dimly, incredulously, terribly knew, in some vague sense, that she was
dying, and dying thus for him.
She smiled up in his eyes, while even in that moment, when her life was
broken down like a wounded bird's, and the shots had pierced through
from her shoulder to her bosom, a hot, scarlet flush came over her
cheeks as she felt his touch, and rested on his heart.
“A life! what is it to give? We hold it in our hands every hour, we
soldiers, and toss it in change for a draught of wine. Lay me down on
the ground--at your feet--so! I shall live longest that way, and I have
much to tell. How they crowd around me! Mes soldats, do not make that
grief and that rage over me. They are sorry they fired; that is foolish.
They were only doing their duty, and they could not hear me in time.”
But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of
the Tricolor; they flung their carbines away, they beat their breasts,
they cursed themselves and the mother who had borne them; the silent,
rigid, motionless phalanx that had stood there in the dawn to see
death dealt in the inexorable penalty of the law was broken up into a
tumultuous, breathless, heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with
remorse, convulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on
the cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, laying her
down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden him, hung over her,
leaning her head against his arm, and watching in paralyzed horror
the helplessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood
beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart so soon would
beat no more.
“Oh, my child, my child!” he moaned, as the full might and meaning of
this devotion which had saved him at such cost rushed on him. “What am
I worth that you should perish for me? Better a thousand times have left
me to my fate! Such nobility, such sacrifice, such love!”
The hot color flushed her face once more; she was strong to the last to
conceal that passion for which she was still content to perish in her
youth.
“Chut! We are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would do the same for
any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard of your arrest till I heard,
too, of your sentence----”
She paused a moment, and her features grew white and quivered with pain
and with the oppression that seemed to lie like lead upon her chest. But
she forced herself to be stronger than the anguish which assailed her
strength; and she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while
her voice still should serve her.
“They will tell you how I did it--I have not time. The Marshal gave his
word you shall be saved; there is no fear. That is your friend who bends
over me here?--is it not? A fair face, a brave face! You will go back to
your land--you will live among your own people--and she, she will love
you now--now she knows you are of her Order!”
Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate quivered through
the words, but the purer nobler nature vanquished it; she smiled up in
his eyes, heedless of the tumult round them.
“You will be happy. That is well. Look you--it is nothing that I did.
I would have done it for any one of my soldiers. And for this”--she
touched the blood flowing from her side with the old, bright, brave
smile--“it was an accident; they must not grieve for it. My men are good
to me; they will feel much regret and remorse; but do not let them. I am
glad to die.”
The words were unwavering and heroic; but for one moment a convulsion
went over her face; the young life was so strong in her, the young
spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so new, so fresh, so bright,
so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. She loved life; the darkness, the
loneliness, the annihilation of death were horrible to her as the
blackness and the solitude of night to a young child. Death, like night,
can be welcome only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the
earth that bore her buoyant steps; the suns, the winds, the delights of
the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own laughter, the
mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of the blue sky above her
head, were all so sweet to her. Her welcome of her death-shot was the
only untruth that had ever soiled her fearless lips. Death was terrible;
yet she was content--content to have come to it for his sake.
There was a ghastly, stricken silence round her. The order she had
brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most
callous there than the heroism of her act, than the martyrdom of her
death.
The color was fast passing from her lips, and a mortal pallor settling
there in the stead of that rich, bright hue, once warm as the scarlet
heart of the pomegranate. Her head leaned back on Cecil's breast and she
felt the great burning tears fall, one by one, upon her brow as he
hung speechless over her; she put her hand upward and touched his eyes
softly.
“Chut! What is it to die--just to die? You have lived your martyrdom;
I could not have done that. Listen, just one moment. You will be rich.
Take care of the old man--he will not trouble long--and of Vole-qui-veut
and Etoile, and Boule Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you?
They will show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers. I should not
like to think that they would starve.”
She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find voice to
utter; and she thanked him with that old child-like smile that had lost
nothing of its light.
“That is good; they will be happy with you. And see here--that Arab must
have back his white horse; he alone saved you. Have heed that they spare
him. And make my grave somewhere where my army passes; where I can hear
the trumpets, and the arms, and the passage of the troops--O God! I
forgot! I shall not wake when the bugles sound. It will all end now;
will it not? That is horrible, horrible!”
A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense that all her
glowing, redundant, sunlit, passionate life was crushed out forever from
its place upon the earth forced itself on and overwhelmed her. But she
was of too brave a mold to suffer any foe--even the foe that conquers
kings--to have power to appall her. She raised herself, and looked at
the soldiery around her, among them the men whose carbines had killed
her, whose anguish was like the heart-rending anguish of women.
“Mes Francais! That was a foolish word of mine. How many of my bravest
have fallen in death; and shall I be afraid of what they welcomed? Do
not grieve like that. You could not help it; you were doing your duty.
If the shots had not come to me, they would have gone to him; and he has
been unhappy so long, and borne wrong so patiently, he has earned the
right to live and enjoy. Now I--I have been happy all my days, like a
bird, like a kitten, like a foal, just from being young and taking no
thought. I should have had to suffer if I had lived. It is much best as
it is----”
Her voice failed her when she had spoken the heroic words; loss of blood
was fast draining all strength from her, and she quivered in a torture
she could not wholly conceal. He for whom she perished hung over her in
an agony greater far than hers. It seemed a hideous dream to him that
this child lay dying in his stead.
“Can nothing save her?” he cried aloud. “O God! that you had fired one
moment sooner!”
She heard; and looked up at him with a look in which all the passionate,
hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted and concealed so long spoke
with an intensity she never dreamed.
“She is content,” she whispered softly. “You did not understand her
rightly; that was all.”
“All! O God, how I have wronged you!”
The full strength, and nobility, and devotion of this passion he had
disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met her eyes; for the
first time he saw her as she was; for the first time he saw all of which
the splendid heroism of this untrained nature would have been capable
under a different fate. And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a
blow; it filled him with a passion of remorse.
“My darling! my darling! what have I done to be worthy of such love?”
he murmured while the tears fell from his blinded eyes, and his head
drooped until his lips met hers. At the first utterance of that word
between them, at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the
anguish of a farewell in them, the color suddenly flushed all over her
blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great, shivering sigh ran
through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what
its sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her
eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses without
consciousness.
“Hush!” she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. “Keep those
kisses for Milady. She will have the right to love you; she is of your
'aristocrats,' she is not 'unsexed.' As for me--I am only a little
trooper who has saved my comrade! My soldiers, come round me one
instant; I shall not long find words.”
Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and coldness passed
over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, and the resolute courage
in her conquered; her eyes opened and rested on the war-worn faces of
her “children”--rested in a long, last look of unspeakable wistfulness
and tenderness.
“I cannot speak as I would,” she said at length, while her voice grew
very faint. “But I have loved you. All is said!”
All was uttered in those four brief words. “She had loved them.” The
whole story of her young life was told in the single phrase. And the
gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless veterans of Africa who heard
her could have turned their weapons against their own breasts, and
sheathed them there, rather than have looked on to see their darling
die.
“I have been too quick in anger sometimes--forgive it,” she said gently.
“And do not fight and curse among yourselves; it is bad amid brethren.
Bury my Cross with me, if they will let you; and let the colors be over
my grave, if you can. Think of me when you go into battle; and tell them
in France----”
For the first time her eyes filled with great tears as the name of her
beloved land paused upon her lips. She stretched her arms out with a
gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child that vainly seeks its
mother.
“If I could only see France once more! France----”
It was the last word upon her utterance; her eyes met Cecil's in one
fleeting, upward glance of unutterable tenderness, then, with her hands
still stretched out westward to where her country was, and with the
dauntless heroism of her smile upon her face like light, she gave a
tired sigh as of a child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her
Army of Africa the Little One lay dead.
In the shadow of his tent, at midnight he whom she had rescued stood
looking down at a bowed, stricken form before him with an exceeding,
yearning pity in his gaze.
The words had at length been spoken that had lifted from him the burden
of another's guilt; the hour at last had come in which his eyes had
met the eyes of his friend, without a hidden thought between them. The
sacrifice was ended, the martyrdom was over; henceforth this doom of
exile and of wretchedness would be but as a hideous dream; henceforth
his name would be stainless among men, and the desire of his heart would
be given him. And in this hour of release the strongest feeling in him
was the sadness of an infinite compassion; and where his brother was
stretched prostrate in shame before him, Cecil stooped and raised him
tenderly.
“Say no more,” he murmured. “It has been well for me that I have
suffered these things. For yourself--if you do indeed repent, and feel
that you owe me any debt, atone for it, and pay it, by letting your own
life be strong in truth and fair in honor.”
And it seemed to him that he himself had done no great or righteous
thing in that servitude for another's sake, whose yoke was now lifted
off him for evermore. But, looking out over the sleeping camp where one
young child alone lay in a slumber that never would be broken, his
heart ached with the sense of some great, priceless gift received, and
undeserved, and cast aside; even while in the dreams of passion that
now knew its fruition possible, and the sweetness of communion with the
friend whose faith had never forsaken him, he retraced the years of his
exile, and thanked God that it was thus with him at the end.
CHAPTER THE LAST.
AT REST.
Under the green, springtide leafage of English woodlands, made musical
with the movement and the song of innumerable birds that had their nests
among the hawthorn boughs and deep, cool foliage of elm and beech, an
old horse stood at pasture. Sleeping--with the sun on his gray, silken
skin, and the flies driven off with a dreamy switch of his tail, and
the grasses odorous about his hoofs, with dog-violets, and cowslips, and
wild thyme--sleeping, yet not so surely but at one voice he started,
and raised his head with all the eager grace of his youth, and gave a
murmuring noise of welcome and delight. He had known that voice in an
instant, though for so many years his ear had never thrilled to it;
Forest King had never forgotten. Now, scarce a day passed but what it
spoke to him some word of greeting or of affection, and his black, soft
eyes would gleam with their old fire, because its tone brought back
a thousand memories of bygone victory--only memories now, when Forest
King, in the years of age, dreamed out his happy life under the fragrant
shade of the forest wealth of Royallieu.
With his arm over the horse's neck, the exile, who had returned to his
birthright, stood silent a while, gazing out over the land on which
his eyes never wearied of resting; the glad, cool, green, dew-freshened
earth that was so sweet and full of peace, after the scorched and
blood-stained plains, whose sun was as flame, and whose breath was as
pestilence. Then his glance came back and dwelt upon the face beside
him, the proud and splendid woman's face that had learned its softness
and its passion from him alone.
“It was worth banishment to return,” he murmured to her. “It was worth
the trials that I bore to learn the love that I have known----”
She, looking upward at him with those deep, lustrous, imperial eyes that
had first met his own in the glare of the African noon, passed her hand
over his lips with a gesture of tenderness far more eloquent from her
than from women less proud and less prone to weakness.
“Ah, hush! when I think of what her love was, how worthless looks my
own! How little worthy of the fate it finds! What have I done that every
joy should become mine, when she----”
Her mouth trembled, and the phrase died unfinished; strong as her love
had grown, it looked to her unproven and without desert, beside that
which had chose to perish for his sake. And where they stood with the
future as fair before them as the light of the day around them, he bowed
his head, as before some sacred thing, at the whisper of the child who
had died for him. The memories of both went back to a place in a desert
land where the folds of the Tricolor drooped over one little grave
turned westward toward the shores of France--a grave made where the
beat of drum, and the sound of moving squadrons, and the ring of the
trumpet-call, and the noise of the assembling battalions could be
heard by night and day; a grave where the troops, as they passed it by,
saluted and lowered their arms in tender reverence, in faithful, unasked
homage, because beneath the Flag they honored there was carved in the
white stone one name that spoke to every heart within the army she had
loved, one name on which the Arab sun streamed as with a martyr's glory:
“CIGARETTE,
“ENFANT DE L'ARMEE, SOLDAT DE LA FRANCE.”
End of Project Gutenberg's Under Two Flags, by Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]