in that awful flood, but buoyant ever above its darkest waves, catching
ever some ray of sunlight upon her fair young head, and being oftentimes
like a star of hope to those over whom its dreaded waters closed.
Therefore they loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful
warriors, to whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred, by whom in
their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was spared, whose
law was license, and whose mercy was murder. They loved her, these
brutes whose greed was like the tiger's, whose hate was like the
devouring flame; and any who should have harmed a single lock of her
curling hair would have had the spears of the African Mussulmans buried
by the score in his body. They loved her, with the one fond triumphant
love these vultures of the army ever knew; and to-day they gloried in
her with fierce passionate delight. To-day she was to her wild wolves of
Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleurs was to her brethren of France. And
to-day was the crown of her young life. It is given to most, if the
desire of their soul ever become theirs, to possess it only when long
and weary and fainting toil has brought them to its goal; when beholding
the golden fruit so far off, through so dreary a pilgrimage, dulls its
bloom as they approach; when having so long centred all their thoughts
and hopes in the denied possession of that one fair thing, they find but
little beauty in it when that possession is granted to satiate their
love. But thrice happy, and few as happy, are they to whom the dream of
their youth is fulfilled _in_ their youth, to whom their ambition comes
in full sweet fruitage, while yet the colours of glory have not faded to
the young, eager, longing eyes that watch its advent. And of these was
Cigarette.
In the fair, slight, girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a
courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's, a
soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by
poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the
blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child
of the battle and the razzia, the spirit of genius, the desire to live
and to die greatly. It was unreasoned on, it was felt, not thought, it
was often drowned in the gaiety of young laughter, and the ribaldry of
military jest, it was often obscured by noxious influence, and stifled
beneath the fumes of lawless pleasure; but there, ever, in the soul and
the heart of Cigarette, dwelt the germ of a pure ambition--the ambition
to do some noble thing for France, and leave her name upon her soldiers'
lips, a watchword and a rallying-cry for evermore. To be for ever a
beloved tradition in the army of her country, to have her name
remembered in the roll-call as "_Mort sur le champ d'honneur_;" to be
once shrined in the love and honour of France, Cigarette--full of the
boundless joys of life that knew no weakness and no pain, strong as the
young goat, happy as the young lamb, careless as the young flower
tossing on the summer breeze--Cigarette would have died contentedly. And
now, living, some measure of this desire had been fulfilled to her, some
breath of this imperishable glory had passed over her. France had heard
the story of Zaraila; from the throne a message had been passed to her;
what was far beyond all else to her, her own Army of Africa had crowned
her, and thanked her, and adored her as with one voice, and wheresoever
she passed the wild cheers rang through the roar of musketry, as through
the silence of sunny air, and throughout the regiments every sword would
have sprung from its scabbard in her defence if she had but lifted her
hand and said one word--"Zaraila!"
The Army looked on her with delight now. In all that mute, still,
immovable mass that stretched out so far, in such gorgeous array, there
was not one man whose eyes did not turn on her, whose pride did not
centre in her--their Little One who was so wholly theirs, and who had
been under the shadow of their flag ever since the curls, so dark now,
had been yellow as wheat in her infancy. The flag had been her shelter,
her guardian, her plaything, her idol; the flutter of the striped folds
had been the first thing at which her childish eyes had laughed; the
preservation of its colours from the sacrilege of an enemy's touch had
been her religion, a religion whose true following was, in her sight,
salvation of the worst and the most worthless life; and that flag she
had saved, and borne aloft in victory at Zaraila. There was not one in
all those hosts whose eyes did not turn on her with gratitude, and
reverence, and delight in her as their own.
But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to quiver in
impotent impatience through her. The trumpets sounded, the salvoes of
artillery pealed out, the lances and the swords were carried up in
salute; on to the ground rode the Marshal of France, who represented the
imperial will and presence, surrounded by his staff, by generals of
division and brigade, by officers of rank, and by some few civilian
riders. An _aide_ galloped up to her where she stood with the corps of
her Spahis, and gave her his orders. The Little One nodded carelessly,
and touched Etoile-Filante with the prick of the spur. Like lightning
the animal bounded forth from the ranks, rearing and plunging, and
swerving from side to side, while his rider, with exquisite grace and
address, kept her seat like the little semi-Arab that she was, and with
a thousand curves and bounds cantered down the line of the gathered
troops, with the west wind blowing from the far-distant sea, and fanning
her bright cheeks till they wore the soft scarlet flush of the glowing
japonica flower. And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange, longing
murmur went--the buzz of the voices which, but that discipline
suppressed them, would have broken out in worshipping acclamations.
As carelessly as though she reined up before the _café_ door of the _As
de Pique_, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the
impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in the salute, with her
saucy wayward laugh. He was the impersonation of that vast, silent,
awful, irresponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire,
stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of
France down into nameless graves, with the desert sand choking their
mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that might
be present. She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of your
thorough inborn democrat, all the gay _insouciant_ indifference to
station of the really free and untrammelled nature; and, in her sight, a
dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without
a word or a moan, was greater than all Messieurs les Maréchaux
glittering in their stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping
to impress her, with rank--pooh! You might as well have bid the sailing
clouds pause in their floating passage because they came between royalty
and the sun. All the sovereigns of Europe would have awed Cigarette not
one whit more than a gathering of muleteers. "Allied sovereigns--bah!"
she would have said, "what did that mean in '15? A chorus of magpies
chattering over one stricken eagle!"
So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the few great
personages whom Algeria could bring around them, as indifferently as she
had many a time reined up before a knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a
barrack-gate. _He_ was nothing to her; it was her Army that crowned her.
"The Generalissimo is the poppy-head, the men are the wheat; lay every
ear of the wheat low, and of what use is the towering poppy that blazed
so grand in the sun?" Cigarette would say with metaphorical unction,
forgetful, like most allegorists, that her fable was one-sided and
unjust in figure and deduction.
Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart beat fast
under its golden-laced jacket as she reined up Etoile and saluted. In
that hot clear sun all the eyes of that immense host were fastened on
her, and the hour of her longing desire was come at last. France had
recognised that she had done greatly, and France, through the voice of
this, its chief, spoke to her--France, her beloved, and her
guiding-star, for whose sake the young brave soul within her would have
dared and have endured all things. There was a group before her, large
and brilliant, but at them Cigarette never looked; what she saw were the
sunburnt faces of her "children," of men who, in the majority, were old
enough to be her grandsires, who had been with her through so many
darksome hours, and whose black and rugged features lightened and grew
tender whenever they looked upon their Little One. For the moment she
felt giddy with sweet fiery joy; they were here to behold her thanked in
the name of France.
The Marshal, in advance of all his staff, touched his plumed hat and
bowed to his saddle-bow as he faced her. He knew her well by sight, this
pretty child of his Army of Africa, who had, before then, suppressed
mutiny like a veteran, and led the charge like a Murat--this kitten with
a lion's heart, this humming-bird with an eagle's swoop.
"Mademoiselle," he commenced, while his voice, well skilled to such
work, echoed to the farthest end of the long lines of troops, "I have
the honour to discharge to-day the happiest duty of my life. In
conveying to you the expression of the Emperor's approval of your noble
conduct in the present campaign, I express the sentiments of the whole
Army. Your action on the day of Zaraila was as brilliant in conception
as it was great in execution; and the courage you displayed was only
equalled by your patriotism. May the soldiers of many wars remember you
and emulate you. In the name of France, I thank you. In the name of the
Emperor, I bring to you the Cross of the Legion of Honour."
As the brief and soldierly words rolled down the ranks of the listening
regiments, he stooped forward from his saddle and fastened the red
ribbon on her breast; while from the whole gathered mass, watching,
hearing, waiting breathlessly to give their tribute of applause to their
darling also, a great shout rose as with one voice, strong, full,
echoing over and over again across the plains in thunder that joined her
name with the name of France and of Napoleon, and hurled it upward in
fierce tumultuous idolatrous love to those cruel cloudless skies that
shone above the dead. She was their child, their treasure, their idol,
their young leader in war, their young angel in suffering; she was all
their own, knowing with them one common mother--France. Honour to her
was honour to them; they gloried with heart and soul in this bright
young fearless life that had been among them ever since her infant feet
had waded through the blood of slaughter-fields, and her infant lips had
laughed to see the tricolour float in the sun above the smoke of battle.
And as she heard, her face became very pale, her large eyes grew dim and
very soft, her mirthful mouth trembled with the pain of a too intense
joy. She lifted her head, and all the unutterable love she bore her
country and her people thrilled through the music of her voice:
"_Français!--ce n'était rien!_"
That was all she said; in that one first word of their common
nationality, she spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and to the
conscript of the ranks. "Français!" that one title made them all equal
in her sight; whoever claimed it was honoured in her eyes, and was
precious to her heart, and when she answered them that it was nothing,
this thing which they glorified in her, she answered but what seemed the
simple truth in her code. She would have thought it "nothing" to have
perished by shot, or steel, or flame, in day-long torture, for that one
fair sake of France.
Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile and
submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the greatest and
the hardest thing that she could ever do far less than all that she
would willingly have done. And as she looked upon the host whose
thousand and ten thousand voices rang up to the noonday sun in her
homage, and in hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face,
that for once was white and still and very grave;--none who saw her face
then, ever forgot that look.
In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud and pure
ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, in all its
perfect splendour. In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born
of a people's love and of the impossible desires of genius in its youth,
comes to so few human lives--knew that which was known to the young
Napoleon when, in the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed
the Conqueror of Italy.
* * *
She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old
Invalide had done in the '89--a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the
Cannébière who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her
for a woman of his own order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like
scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter, and the
languid lustre of sweet contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her
wrong in silence--she was a daughter of the south and of the populace,
with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced
with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy
mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won,
while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the
people were made drunk at the bridal of their _châtelaine_ in those hot,
ruddy, luscious autumn days.
She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by
the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the
scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the axe fall
down on the proud snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent
there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and
smote the lips his lips had kissed, a cruel blow that blurred their
beauty out, and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and
drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and
over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of
the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the
waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to
make their feast. "_Voilà tes secondes noces!_" she cried where she
stood, and laughed by the side of the gray angry water, watching the
tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed
weed.
* * *
"There is only one thing worth doing--to die greatly!" thought the
aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously returning to the only
end that the genius and the greatness of Greece could find as issue to
the terrible jest, the mysterious despair, of all existence.
* * *
A very old man--one who had been a conscript in the bands of Young
France, and marched from his Pyrenéan village to the battle-tramp of the
Marseillaise, and charged with the Enfans de Paris across the plains of
Gemappes; who had known the passage of the Alps, and lifted the long
curls from the dead brow of Désaix, at Marengo, and seen in the sultry
noonday dust of a glorious summer the Guard march into Paris, while the
people laughed and wept with joy, surging like the mighty sea around one
pale frail form, so young by years, so absolute by genius.
A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with bereavement,
with extreme old age; and by a long course of cruel accidents, alone,
here in Africa, without one left of the friends of his youth, or of the
children of his name, and deprived even of the charities due from his
country to his services--alone save for the little Friend of the Flag,
who, for four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, in
this Moorish attic, tending him herself when in town, taking heed that
he should want for nothing when she was campaigning.
She hid, as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide a sin,
had she chosen to commit one, this compassion which she, the young
_condottiera_ of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier
of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as
the dove, her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her
contemptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar.
In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred the
eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the
breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Kellerman, the
Cuirassiers of Milhaud; sacred the hands which, when nervous with youth,
had borne the standard of the Republic victorious against the gathered
Teuton host in the Thermopylæ of Champagne; sacred the ears which, when
quick to hear, had heard the thunder of Arcola, of Lodi, of Rivoli, and,
above even the tempest of war, the clear, still voice of Napoleon;
sacred the lips which, when their beard was dark in the fulness of
manhood, had quivered, as with a woman's weeping, at the farewell in the
spring night in the moonlit Cour des Adieux.
Cigarette had a religion of her own; and followed it more closely than
most disciples follow other creeds.
* * *
The way was long; the road ill-formed, leading for the most part across
a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness
except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat
was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the
shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the
district, and commenced a more hilly and more picturesque portion of the
country. Cigarette came to the side of the temporary ambulance in which
Cecil was placed. He was asleep--sleeping for once peacefully with
little trace of pain upon his features, as he had slept the previous
night. She saw that his face and chest had not been touched by the
stinging insect-swarm; he was doubly screened by a shirt hung above him
dexterously on some bent sticks.
"Who has done that?" thought Cigarette. As she glanced round she
saw--without any linen to cover him, Zackrist had reared himself up and
leaned slightly forward over against his comrade. The shirt that
protected Cecil was his; and on his own bare shoulders and mighty chest
the tiny armies of the flies and gnats were fastened, doing their will
uninterrupted.
As he caught her glance, a sullen ruddy glow of shame shone through the
black hard skin of his sunburnt visage--shame to which he had been never
touched when discovered in any one of his guilty and barbarous actions.
"_Dame!_" he growled savagely; "he gave me his wine; one must do
something in return. Not that I feel the insects--not I; my skin is
leather, see you; they can't get through it; but his is _peau de
femme_--white and soft--bah! like tissue paper!"
"I see, Zackrist; you are right. A French soldier can never take a
kindness from an English fellow without outrunning him in generosity.
Look--here is some drink for you."
She knew too well the strange nature with which she had to deal to say a
syllable of praise to him for his self-devotion, or to appear to see
that, despite his boast of his leather skin, the stings of the cruel
winged tribes were drawing his blood and causing him alike pain and
irritation which, under that sun, and added to the torment of his
gunshot wound, were a martyrdom as great as the noblest saint ever
endured.
"_Tiens! tiens!_ I did him wrong," murmured Cigarette. "That is what
they are--the children of France--even when they are at their worst,
like that devil, Zackrist. Who dare say they are not the heroes of the
world?"
And all through the march she gave Zackrist a double portion of her
water dashed with red wine, that was so welcome and so precious to the
parched and aching throats; and all through the march Cecil lay asleep,
and the man who had thieved from him, the man whose soul was stained
with murder, and pillage, and rapine, sat erect beside him, letting the
insects suck his veins and pierce his flesh.
It was only when they drew near the camp of the main army that Zackrist
beat off the swarm and drew his old shirt over his head. "You do not
want to say anything to him," he muttered to Cigarette. "I am of
leather, you know; I have not felt it."
She nodded; she understood him. Yet his shoulders and his chest were
well-nigh flayed, despite the tough and horny skin of which he made his
boast.
"_Dieu!_ we are droll!" mused Cigarette. "If we do a good thing, we hide
it as if it were a bit of stolen meat, we are so afraid it should be
found out; but, if they do one in the world there, they bray it at the
tops of their voices from the houses' roofs, and run all down the
streets screaming about it for fear it should be lost. _Dieu!_ we are
droll!"
And she dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off at the height of
her speed into camp--a very city of canvas, buzzing with the hum of
life, regulated with the marvellous skill and precision of French
warfare, yet with the carelessness and the picturesqueness of the
desert-life pervading it.
* * *
Like wave rushing on wave of some tempestuous ocean, the men swept out
to meet her in one great surging tide of life, impetuous, passionate,
idolatrous, exultant, with all the vivid ardour, all the uncontrolled
emotion, of natures south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away from their
mid-day rest as from their military toil, moved as by one swift breath
of fire, and flung themselves out to meet her, the chorus of a thousand
voices ringing in deafening _vivas_ to the skies. She was enveloped in
that vast sea of eager, furious lives, in that dizzy tumult of
vociferous cries, and stretching hands, and upturned faces. As her
soldiers had done the night before, so these did now--kissing her hands,
her dress, her feet, sending her name in thunder through the sunlit air,
lifting her from off her horse, and bearing her, in a score of stalwart
arms, triumphant in their midst.
She was theirs--their own--the Child of the Army, the Little One whose
voice above their dying brethren had the sweetness of an angel's song,
and whose feet, in their hours of revelry, flew like the swift and
dazzling flight of gold-winged orioles. And she had saved the honour of
their Eagles; she had given to them and to France their god of Victory.
They loved her--O God, how they loved her!--with that intense,
breathless, intoxicating love of a multitude which, though it may stone
to-morrow what it adores to-day, has yet for those on whom it has once
been given thus a power no other love can know--a passion unutterably
sad, deliriously strong.
That passion moved her strangely.
As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man breathed among
that tumultuous mass but would have died that moment at her word; not
one mouth moved among that countless host but breathed her name in
pride, and love, and honour.
She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a
child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more
than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette
would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc.
The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable
patriotism, the melancholy of a passionate pity for the concrete and
unnumbered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn,
as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her
now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the
crowded soldiery.
"It was nothing," she answered them; "it was nothing. It was for
France."
For France! They shouted back the beloved word with tenfold joy; and the
great sea of life beneath her tossed to and fro in stormy triumph, in
frantic paradise of victory, ringing her name with that of France upon
the air, in thunder-shouts like spears of steel smiting on shields of
bronze.
But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the
desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.
"Hush!" she said softly, with an accent in her voice that hushed the
riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the lull in a storm.
"Give me no honour while _they_ sleep yonder. With the dead lies the
glory!"
* * *
Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round,
round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they remain
little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest.
* * *