you've always got to have the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or
it's all up with you; you're that tormented about little things that you
get riled and kick the traces before the great 'uns come to try you.
There's a lot of lads would be game as game could be in battle, ay, and
good lads to boot, doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to
anything like war, that are clean druv' out of the service in time o'
peace, along with all them petty persecutions that worry a man's skin
like mosquito-bites. Now here they know that, and Lord! what soldiers
they do make through knowing of it! It's tight enough and stern enough
in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all
through the campaigning; but that don't grate on a fellow; if he's worth
his salt he's sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a
fight, and that he's to go to hell at double-quick march, and mute as a
mouse, if his officers see fit to send him. _That's_ all right, but they
don't fidget you here about the little fal-lals; you may stick your
pipe in your mouth, you may have your lark, you may do as you like, you
may spend your _décompte_ how you choose, you may settle your little
duel as you will, you may shout and sing and jump and riot on the march,
so long as you _march on_; you may lounge about half dressed in any
style as suits you best, so long as you're up to time when the trumpets
sound for you; and that's what a man likes. He's ready to be a machine
when the machine's wanted in working trim, but when it's run off the
line and the steam all let off, he do like to oil his own wheels, and
lie a bit in the sun at his fancy. There aren't better stuff to make
soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, God bless 'em, but they're
badgered, they're horribly badgered, and that's why the service don't
take over there, let alone the way the country grudge 'em every bit of
pay. In England you go in the ranks--well, they all just tell you you're
a blackguard, and there's the lash, and you'd better behave yourself or
you'll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you're a bad lot or you
wouldn't be there, and in course you're riled and go to the bad
according, seeing that it's what's expected of you. Here, contrariwise,
you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests
with yourself whether you won't be a fine fellow or not; and just along
of feelin' that you're pricked to show the best metal you're made on,
and not to let nobody else beat you out of the race like. Ah! it makes a
wonderful difference to a fellow--a wonderful difference--whether the
service he's come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothin'
_but_ a scamp, or as a rascal that's maybe got in him, all rascal though
he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. It makes a wonderful difference,
this 'ere, whether you're looked at as stuff that's only fit to be
shovelled into the sand after a battle; or as stuff that'll belike churn
into a great man. And it's just that difference, sir, that France has
found out, and England hasn't--God bless her all the same.
With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had
won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to
refill his Corporal's chibouque.
"A army's just a machine, sir, in course," he concluded, as he rammed in
the Turkish tobacco. "But then it's a live machine for all that; and
each little bit of it feels for itself like the joints in an eel's body.
Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole crittur goes
wrong--there's the mischief."
* * *
It makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!
* * *
She had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck
at him she changed--she became a woman and a martyr.
And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had done through
the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the keen instinct of a
trooper, her hand always on the butt of her belt pistol. For she knew
well what the danger was of these lonely, unguarded, untravelled leagues
that yawned in so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs,
beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those
plains with the old guerilla skill, the old marvellous rapidity. She
knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reeling from
her saddle, that with every moment she might be surrounded by some
desperate band who would spare neither her sex nor her youth. But that
intoxication of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from her infancy,
was all which sustained her in that race with death. It filled her veins
with their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with
their old matchless courage: but for it she would have dropped,
heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done; under
it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained
force, and the supernatural strength of some young hunted animal. They
might slay her so that she left perforce her mission unaccomplished; but
no dread of such a fate had even an instant's power to appal her or
arrest her. While there should be breath in her, she would go on to the
end.
There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swiftest pace her
horse could make; and she was already worn by the leagues already
traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time
flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim solitary
barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now
and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the
weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and
succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand as she had passed
through the fortress gates a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab
fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed
over her herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be
veiled by clouds. With that single starry gleam aslant on a level with
her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains,
now flooded with lustre as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as
the stormy western winds drove the cirri over it. But neither darkness
nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk
with strong wine, and she had but one dread--that the power of her horse
would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she would
reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen for
ever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise _fall_.
Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver
under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he
strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the
racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell, and
beat him down despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would have
killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving her own
life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this thing, to
save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun. She did
not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing, to fulfil
the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate blindness
of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern blood. If to
spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would have given the
word for their destruction without a moment's pause.
Once from some screen of gaunt and barren rock a shot was fired at her,
and flew within a hair's-breadth of her brain; she never even looked
around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab prowler
of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled lantern
passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And as she felt
the hours steal on--so fast, so hideously fast--with that horrible
relentlessness, "ohne Hast, ohne Rast," which tarries for no despair, as
it hastens for no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to
the roof of her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her
brain.
What she dreaded came.
Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed,
the animal strained with hard-drawn panting gasps to answer the demand
made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded
onward. In the lantern-light she saw his head stretched out in the
racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and
blood, his heaving flanks that seem bursting with every throb that his
heart gave; she knew that half a league more forced from him, he would
drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon
the poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill
wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the cry
of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all; the breathing of the rosy,
golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the few
picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the levelled carbines
gleaming in the first rays of the sun.... She had seen it so many
times--seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the
morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.
That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her gave to the
abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. With that one
cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself:
she knew that action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward
and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which
she could get aid. If there were none, the horse must drop down to die,
and with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun would
rise.
Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and there by
fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance of some yet
darker thing moving rapidly--a large cloud skimming the earth. She let
the horse, which had paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck,
stand still awhile, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud till,
with the marvellous surety of her desert-trained vision, she
disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering shadows, and
recognised it, as it was, a band of Arabs.
If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength of her
horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from their pursuit,
or even from their perception, for they were coming straightly and
swiftly across the plain. If she were seen by them she was certain of
her fate; they could only be the desperate remnant of the decimated
tribes, the foraging raiders of starving and desperate men, hunted from
refuge to refuge, and carrying fire and sword in their vengeance
wherever an unprotected caravan or a defenceless settlement gave them
the power of plunder and of slaughter, that spared neither age nor sex.
She was known throughout the length and the breadth of the land to the
Arabs: she was neither child nor woman to them; she was but the soldier
who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe
who had seen them defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their
pursuit in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful
days. Some among them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful
death if ever they made her captive, for they held her in superstitious
awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish successes would be broken if
she were slain. She knew that; yet, knowing it, she looked at their
advancing band one moment, then turned her horse's head and rode
straight toward them.
"They will kill me, but that may save him," she thought. "Any other way
he is lost."
So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed their front,
and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, with the cloth
torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full about her, as she
held it above her head. In an instant they knew her. They were the
remnant who had escaped from the carnage of Zaraila; they knew her with
all the rapid unerring surety of hate. They gave the shrill wild
war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted
figures with their weapons whirling round their heads enclosed her: a
cloud of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks upon
one young silvery-plumed gerfalcon.
She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that flashed above
her: there was no fear upon her face, only a calm resolute proud beauty,
very pale, very still in the light that gleamed on it from the lantern
rays.
"I surrender," she said briefly. She had never thought to say these
words of submission to her scorned foes; she would not have been brought
to utter them to spare her own existence. Their answer was a yell of
furious delight, and their bare blades smote each other with a clash of
brutal joy: they had her, the Frankish child who had brought shame and
destruction on them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their steel
across the fair young throat, to plunge their lances into the bright
bare bosom, to twine her hair round their spear handles, to rend her
delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the antelope, to torture, to
outrage, to wreak their vengeance on her. Their chief, only, motioned
their violence back from her, and bade them leave her untouched. At him
she looked, still with the same fixed, serene, scornful resolve: she had
encountered these men so often in battle, she knew so well how rich a
prize she was to him. But she had one thought alone with her; and for it
she subdued contempt, and hate, and pride, and every passion in her.
"I surrender," she said, with the same tranquillity. "I have heard that
you have sworn by your God and your Prophet to tear me limb from limb
because that I--a child, and a woman-child--brought you to shame and to
grief on the day of Zaraila. Well, I am here; do it. You can slake your
will on me. But that you are brave men, and that I have ever met you in
fair fight, let me speak one word with you first."
Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the yelling of
starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear brave tones reached
the ear of the chief in the lingua-sabir that she used. He was a young
man, and his ear was caught by that tuneful voice, his eyes by that
youthful face. He signed upward the swords of his followers, and
motioned them back as their arms were stretched to seize her, and their
shouts clamoured for her slaughter.
"Speak on," he said briefly to her.
"You have sworn to take my body, sawn in two, to Ben-Ihreddin?" she
pursued, naming the Arab leader whom her Spahis had driven off the field
of Zaraila. "Well, here it is; you can take it to him; and you will
receive the piastres, and the horse, and the arms that he has promised
to whosoever shall slay me. I have surrendered; I am yours. But you are
bold men, and the bold are never mean; therefore I will ask one thing of
you. There is a man yonder, in my camp, condemned to death with the
dawn. He is innocent. I have ridden from Algiers to-day with the order
of his release. If it is not there by sunrise, he will be shot; and he
is guiltless as a child unborn. My horse is worn out; he could not go
another half-league. I knew that, since he had failed, my comrade must
die, unless I found a fresh beast or a messenger to go in my stead. I
saw your band come across the plain. I knew that you would kill me,
because of your oath and of your Emir's bribe; but I thought that you
would have greatness enough in you to save this man who is condemned,
without crime, and who must perish unless you, his foes, have pity on
him. Therefore I came. Take the paper that frees him; send your fleetest
and surest with it, under a flag of truce, into our camp by the dawn;
let him tell them there that I, Cigarette, gave it him--he must say no
word of what you have done to me, or his white flag will not protect him
from the vengeance of my army--and then receive your reward from your
chief, Ben-Ihreddin, when you lay my head down for his horse's hoofs to
trample into the dust. Answer me--is the compact fair? Ride on with this
paper northward, and then kill me with what torments you choose."
She spoke with calm unwavering resolve, meaning that which she uttered
to its very uttermost letter. She knew that these men had thirsted for
her blood; she offered it to be shed to gain for him that messenger on
whose speed his life was hanging; she knew that a price was set upon her
head, but she delivered herself over to the hands of her enemies so that
thereby she might purchase his redemption.
As they heard, silence fell upon the brutal clamorous herd around--the
silence of amaze and of respect. The young chief listened gravely; by
the glistening of his keen black eyes, he was surprised and moved,
though, true to his teaching, he showed neither emotion as he answered
her:
"Who is this Frank for whom you do this thing?"
"He is the warrior to whom you offered life on the field of Zaraila,
because his courage was as the courage of gods."
She knew the qualities of the desert character; knew how to appeal to
its reverence and to its chivalry.
"And for what does he perish?" he asked.
"Because he forgot for once that he was a slave; and because he has
borne the burden of a guilt that was not his own."
They were quite still now, closed around her; these ferocious
plunderers, who had been thirsty a moment before to sheathe their
weapons in her body, were spell-bound by the sympathy of courageous
souls, by some vague perception that there was a greatness in this
little tigress of France, whom they had sworn to hunt down and
slaughter, which surpassed all they had known or dreamed.
"And you have given yourself up to us that by your death you may
purchase a messenger from us for this errand?" pursued their leader. He
had been reared as a boy in the high tenets and the pure chivalries of
the school of Abd-el-Kader; and they were not lost in him despite the
crimes and the desperation of his life.
She held the paper out to him with a passionate entreaty breaking
through the enforced calm of despair with which she had hitherto spoken.
"Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save _him_, as you
are brave men, as you are generous foes!"
With a single sign of his hand, their leader waved them back where they
crowded around her, and leaped down from his saddle, and led the horse
he had dismounted to her.
"Maiden," he said gently, "we are Arabs, but we are not brutes. We swore
to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are not vile enough to accept a
martyrdom. Take my horse--he is the swiftest of my troop--and go you on
your errand; you are safe from me."
She looked at him in stupor; the sense of his words was not tangible to
her; she had had no hope, no thought, that they would ever deal thus
with her; all she had ever dreamed of was so to touch their hearts and
their generosity that they would spare one from among their troop to do
the errand of mercy she had begged of them.
"You play with me;" she murmured, while her lips grew whiter and her
great eyes larger in the intensity of her emotion. "Ah! for pity's
sake, make haste and kill me, so that this only may reach him!"
The chief, standing by her, lifted her up in his sinewy arms, on to the
saddle of his charger. His voice was very solemn, his glance was very
gentle; all the nobility of the highest Arab nature was aroused in him
at the heroism of a child, a girl, an infidel--one, in his sight,
abandoned and shameful among her sex.
"Go in peace," he said simply; "it is not with such as thee that we
war."
Then, and then only, as she felt the fresh reins placed in her hands,
and saw the ruthless horde around her fall back and leave her free, did
she understand his meaning, did she comprehend that he gave her back
both liberty and life, and, with the surrender of the horse he loved,
the noblest and most precious gift that the Arab ever bestows or ever
receives. The unutterable joy seemed to blind her, and gleam upon her
face like the blazing light of noon, as she turned her burning eyes full
on him.
"Ah! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally with Christians!
If I live, thou shalt see me back ere another night; if I die, France
will know how to thank thee!"
"We do not do the thing that is right for the sake that men may
recompense us," he answered her gently. "Fly to thy friend, and
hereafter do not judge that those who are in arms against thee must
needs be as the brutes that seek out whom they shall devour."
Then, with one word in his own tongue, he bade the horse bear her
southward, and, as swiftly as a spear launched from his hand, the animal
obeyed him and flew across the plains. He looked after her awhile,
through the dim tremulous darkness that seemed cleft by the rush of the
gallop as the clouds are cleft by lightning, while his tribe sat silent
on their horses in moody unwilling consent, savage in that they had
been deprived of prey, moved in that they were sensible of this
martyrdom which had been offered to them.
"Verily the courage of a woman has put the best among us unto shame," he
said, rather to himself than them, as he mounted the stallion brought
him from the rear and rode slowly northward, unconscious that the thing
he had done was great, because conscious only that it was just.
And, borne by the fleetness of the desert-bred beast, she went away
through the heavy bronze-hued dulness of the night. Her brain had no
sense, her hands had no feeling, her eyes had no sight; the rushing as
of waters was loud on her ears, the giddiness of fasting and of fatigue
sent the gloom eddying round and round like a whirlpool of shadow. Yet
she had remembrance enough left to ride on, and on, and on without once
flinching from the agonies that racked her cramped limbs and throbbed in
her beating temples; she had remembrance enough to strain her blind eyes
toward the east and murmur, in her terror of that white dawn, that must
soon break, the only prayer that had been ever uttered by the lips no
mother's kiss had ever touched:
"_O God! keep the day back!_"
* * *
One of the most brilliant of Algerian autumnal days shone over the great
camp in the south. The war was almost at an end for a time; the Arabs
were defeated and driven desertwards; hostilities irksome, harassing,
and annoying, like all guerilla warfare, would long continue, but peace
was virtually established, and Zaraila had been the chief glory that had
been added by the campaign to the flag of Imperial France. The kites
and the vultures had left the bare bones by thousands to bleach upon the
sands, and the hillocks of brown earth rose in crowds where those more
cared for in death had been hastily thrust beneath the brown crust of
the earth. The dead had received their portion of reward--in the
jackall's teeth, in the crow's beak, in the worm's caress. And the
living received theirs in this glorious rose-flecked glittering autumn
morning, when the breath of winter made the air crisp and cool, but the
ardent noon still lighted with its furnace glow the hillside and the
plain.
The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the immense level of
the plateau to witness the presentation of the Cross of the Legion of
Honour.
It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on the deep
sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched east and west, north
and south, formed up in three sides of one vast massive square.
The red white and blue of the standards, the brass of the eagle guidons,
the grey tossed manes of the chargers, the fierce swarthy faces of the
soldiery, the scarlet of the Spahis' cloaks, and the snowy folds of the
Demi-Cavalerie turbans, the shine of the sloped lances, and the glisten
of the carbine barrels, fused together in one sea of blended colour,
flashed into a million of prismatic hues against the sombre bistre
shadow of the sunburnt plains and the clear blue of the skies.
It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had availed
nothing except to drive the Arabs away from some hundred leagues of
useless and profitless soil; hundreds of French soldiers had fallen by
disease, and drought, and dysentery, as well as by shot and sabre, and
were unrecorded save on the books of the bureaus, unlamented save,
perhaps, in some little nestling hamlet among the great green woods of
Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines of
Provence, where some woman toiling till sunset among the fields, or
praying before some wayside saint's stone niche, would give a thought to
the far-off and devouring desert that had drawn down beneath its sands
the head that had used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child's, or
caressed as a lover.
But the drums rolled out their long deep thunder over the wastes; and
the shot-torn standards fluttered gaily in the breeze blowing from the
west, and the clear full music of the French bands echoed away to the
dim distant terrible south, where the desert-scorch and the
desert-thirst had murdered their bravest and best--and the Army was _en
fête_. _En fête_, for it did honour to its darling. Cigarette received
the Cross.
Mounted on her own little bright bay, Etoile-Filante, with tricolour
ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy fringes of his mane,
the Little One rode among her Spahis. A scarlet _képi_ was set on her
thick silken curls, a tricolour sash was knotted round her waist, her
wine-barrel was slung on her left hip, her pistols thrust in her
_ceinturon_, and a light carbine held in her hand with the butt-end
resting on her foot. With the sun on her child-like brunette face, her
eyes flashing like brown diamonds in the light, and her marvellous
horsemanship, showing its skill in a hundred _désinvoltures_ and daring
tricks, the little Friend of the Flag had come hither among her
half-savage warriors, whose red robes surrounded her like a sea of
blood.