Rake flushed a little.
“Mischief’s bred in me, sir; it must come out! It’s just bottled up in me like ale; if I didn’t take the cork out now and then, I should fly apieces!”
“But many a time when you have been close on the reward of your splendid gallantry in the field, you have frustrated your own fortunes and the wishes of your superiors by wantonly proving yourself unfit for the higher grade they were going to raise you to. Why do you do that?”
Rake fidgeted restlessly, and, to avoid the awkwardness of the question, replied, like a Parliamentary orator, by a flow of rhetoric.
“Sir, there’s a many chaps like me. They can’t help nohow busting out when the fit takes ‘em. ‘Tain’t reasonable to blame ‘em for it; they’re just made so, like a chestnut’s made to bust its pod, and a chicken to bust its shell. Well, you see, sir, France, she knows that, and she says to herself, ‘Here are these madcaps; if I keep ‘em tight in hand I shan’t do nothing with ‘em—they’ll turn obstreperous and cram my convict-cells. Now I want soldiers, I don’t want convicts. I can’t let ‘em stay in the Regulars, ‘cause they’ll be for making all the army wildfire like ‘em; I’ll just draft ‘em by theirselves, treat ‘em different, and let ‘em fire away. They’ve got good stuff in ‘em, though too much of the curb riles ‘em.’ Well, sir, she do that; and aren’t the Zephyrs as fine a lot of fellows as any in the service? Of course they are; but if they’d been in England—God bless her, the dear old obstinate soul!—they’d have been drove crazy along o’ pipeclay and razors; she’d never have seed what was in ‘em, her eyes are so bunged up with routine. If a pup riot in the pack, she’s no notion but to double-thong him, and, a-course, in double-quick time, she finds herself obliged to go further and hang him. She don’t ever remember that it may be only just along of his breeding, and that he may make a very good hound elseways let out a bit, though he’ll spoil the whole pack if she will be a fool and try to make a steady line-hunter of him, straight agin his nature.”
Rake stopped, breathless in his rhetoric, which contained more truth in it, as also more roughness, than most rhetoric does.
“You are right. But you wander from my question,” said Cecil gently. “Do you avoid promotion?”
“Yes, sir; I do,” said Rake, something sulkily; for he felt he was being driven “up a corner.” “I do. I ain’t not one bit fitter for an officer than that rioting pup I talk on is fit to lead them crack packs at home. I should be in a strait-waistcoat if I was promoted; and as for the cross—Lord, sir, that would get me into a world o’ trouble! I should pawn it for a toss of wine the first day out, or give it to the first moukiera that winked her black eye for it! The star put on my buttons suits me a deal better; if you’ll believe me, sir, it do.”4
Cecil’s eyes rested on him with a look that said far more than his answer.
“Rake, I know you better than you would let me do, if you had your way. My noble fellow! You reject advancement, and earn yourself an unjust reputation for mutinous conduct, because you are too generous to be given a step above mine in the regiment.”
“Who’s been a-telling you that trash, sir?” retorted Rake, with ferocity.
“No matter who. It is no trash. It is a splendid loyalty of which I am utterly unworthy, and it shall be my care that it is known at the Bureaus, so that henceforth your great merits may be—”
“Stop that, sir!” cried Rake vehemently. “Stow that, if you please! Promoted I won’t be—no, not if the Emperor hisself was to order it, and come across here to see it done! A pretty thing, surely! Me a officer, and you never a one—me a-commanding of you, and you a-saluting of me! By the Lord, sir! we might as well see the camp-scullions a-riding in state, and the Marshals a-scouring out the soup-pots!”
“Not at all. This Army has not a finer soldier than yourself; you have a right to the reward of your services in it. And I assure you you do me a great injustice if you think I would not as willingly go out under your orders as under those of all the Marshals of the Empire.”
The tears rushed into the hardy eyes of the redoubtable “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” though he dashed them away in a fury of eloquence.
“Sir, if you don’t understand as how you’ve given me a power more than all the crosses in the world in saying of them there words, why, you don’t know me much either, that’s all. You’re a gentleman—a right on rare thing that is—and being a gentleman, a-course you’d be too generous and too proud like not to behave well to me, whether I was a-serving you as I’ve always served you, or a-insulting of you by riding over your head in that way as we’re speaking on. But I know my place, sir, and I know yours. If it wasn’t for that ere Black Hawk—damn him!—I can’t help it, sir; I will damn him, if he shoot me for it—you’d been a Chef d’Escadron by now. There ain’t the leastest doubt of it. Ask all the zigs what they think. Well, sir, now you know I’m a man what do as I say. If you don’t let me have my own way, and if you do the littlest thing to get me a step, why, sir, I swear, as I’m a living being, that I’ll draw on Chateauroy the first time I see him afterward, and slit his throat as I’d slit a jackal’s! There—my oath’s took!”
And Cecil saw that it would also be kept. The natural lawlessness and fiery passion inborn in Rake had of course not been cooled by the teaching of African warfare; and his hate was intense against the all-potent Chief of his regiment; as intense as the love he bore to the man whom he had followed out into exile.
Cecil tried vainly to argue with him; all his reasonings fell like hailstones on a cuirass, and made no more impression; he was resolute.
“But listen to one thing,” he urged at last. “Can you not see how you pain me by this self-sacrifice? If I knew that you had attained a higher grade, and wore your epaulettes in this service, can you not fancy I should feel pleasure then (as I feel regret, even remorse, now) that I brought you to Africa through my own follies and misfortunes?”
“Do you sir? There ain’t the least cause for it, then,” returned Rake sturdily. “Lord bless you, sir; why this life’s made a-purpose for me! If ever a round peg went trim and neat into a round hole, it was when I came into this here Army. I never was so happy in all my days before. They’re right on good fellows, and will back you to the death if so be as you’ve allays been share-and-share-alike with ‘em, as a zig should. As a private, sir, I’m happy and I’m safe; as a officer, I should be kicking over the traces and blundering everlastingly. However, there ain’t no need to say a word more about it. I’ve sworn, and you’ve heerd me swear, sir, and you know as how I shall keep my oath if ever I’m provoked to it by being took notice of. I stuck that Spahi just now just by way of a lark, and only ‘cause he come where he’d no business to poke his turbaned old pate; ‘taint likely as I should stop at giving the Hawk two inches of steel if he comes such a insult over us both as to offer a blackguard like me the epaulettes as you ought to be a-wearing!”
And Cecil knew that it was hopeless either to persuade him to his own advantage or to convince him of his disobedience in speaking thus of his supreme, before his con-commissioned, officer. He was himself, moreover, deeply moved by the man’s fidelity.
He stretched his hand out.
“I wish there were more blackguards with hearts like yours. I cannot repay your love, Rake, but I can value it.”
Rake put his own hands behind his back.
“God bless you, sir; you’ve repaid it ten dozen times over. But you shan’t do that, sir. I told you long ago, I’m too much of a scamp! Some day, perhaps, as I said, when I’ve settled scores with myself, and wiped off all the bad ‘uns with a clear sweep, tolerably clean. Not afore, sir!”
And Rake was too sturdily obstinate not to always carry his point.
The love that he bore to Cecil was very much such a wild, chivalric, romantic fidelity as the Cavaliers or the Gentlemen of the North bore to their Stuart idols. That his benefactor had become a soldier of Africa in no way lessened the reverent love of his loyalty, any more than theirs was lessened by the adversities of their royal masters. Like theirs, also, it had beauty in its blindness—the beauty that lies in every pure unselfishness.
Meanwhile, Picpon’s news was correct.
The regiments were ordered out on the march. There was fresh war in the interior; and wherever there was the hottest slaughter, there the Black Hawk always flew down with his falcon-flock. When Cecil left his incorrigible zig, the trumpets were sounding an assembly; there were noise, tumult, eagerness, excitement, delighted zest on every side; a general order was read to the enraptured squadrons; they were to leave the town at the first streak of dawn.
There were before them death, deprivation, long days of famine, long days of drought and thirst; parching, sun-baked roads; bitter, chilly nights; fiery furnace-blasts of sirocco; killing, pitiless, northern winds; hunger, only sharpened by a snatch of raw meat or a handful of maize; and the probabilities, ten to one, of being thrust under the sand to rot, or left to have their skeletons picked clean by the vultures. But what of that! There were also the wild delight of combat, the freedom of lawless warfare, the joy of deep strokes thrust home, the chance of plunder, of wine-skins, of cattle, of women; above all, that lust for slaughter which burns so deep down in the hidden souls of men and gives them such brotherhood with wolf and vulture and tiger, when once its flame bursts forth.
That evening, at the Villa Aioussa, there gathered a courtly assembly, of much higher rank than Algiers can commonly afford, because many of station as lofty as her own had been drawn thither to follow her to what the Princesse Corona called her banishment—an endurable banishment enough under those azure skies, in that clear, elastic air, and with that charming “bonbonniere” in which to dwell, yet still a banishment to the reigning beauty of Paris, to one who had the habits and the commands of a wholly undisputed sovereignty in the royal splendor of her womanhood.
There was a variety of distractions to prevent ennui; there were half a dozen clever Paris actors playing the airiest of vaudevilles in the Bijou theater beyond the drawing-rooms; there were some celebrated Italian singers whom an Imperial Prince had brought over in his yacht; there was the best music; there was wit as well as homage whispered in her ear. Yet she was not altogether amused; she was a little touched with ennui.
“Those men are very stupid. They have not half the talent of that soldier!” she thought once, turning from a Peer of France, an Austrian Archduke, and a Russian diplomatist. And she smiled a little, furling her fan and musing on the horror that the triad of fashionable conquerors near her would feel if they knew that she thought them duller than an African lascar!
But they only told her things of which she had been long weary, specially of her own beauty; he had told her of things totally unknown to her—things real, terrible, vivid, strong, sorrowful—strong as life, sorrowful as death.
“Chateauroy and his Chasseurs have an order de route,” a voice was saying, that moment, behind her chair.
“Indeed?” said another. “The Black Hawk is never so happy as when unhooded. When do they go?”
“To-morrow. At dawn.”
“There is always fighting here, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes! The losses in men are immense; only the journals would get a communique, or worse, if they ventured to say so in France. How delicious La Doche is! She comes in again with the next scene.”
The Princesse Corona listened; and her attention wandered farther from the Archduke, the Peer, and the diplomatist, as from the Vaudeville. She did not find Mme. Doche very charming; and she was absorbed for a time looking at the miniatures on her fan.
At the same moment, through the lighted streets of Algiers, Cigarette, like a union of fairy and of fury, was flying with the news. Cigarette had seen the flame of war at its height, and had danced in the midst of its whitest heat, as young children dance to see the fires leap red in the black winter’s night. Cigarette loved the battle, the charge, the wild music of bugles, the thunder-tramp of battalions, the sirocco-sweep of light squadrons, the mad tarantala of triumph when the slaughter was done, the grand swoop of the Eagles down unto the carnage, the wild hurrah of France.
She loved them with all her heart and soul; and she flew now through the starlit, sultry night, crying, “La guerre! La guerre! La guerre!” and chanting to the enraptured soldiery a “Marseillaise” of her own improvisation, all slang, and doggerel, and barrack grammar; but fire-giving as a torch, and rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it, waving the tricolor high over her head.
CHAPTER XXVI
ZARAILA
The African day was at its noon.
From the first break of dawn the battle had raged; now, at midday, it was at its height. Far in the interior, almost on the edge of the great desert, in that terrible season when air that is flame by day is ice by night, and when the scorch of a blazing sun may be followed in an hour by the blinding fury of a snow-storm, the slaughter had gone on, hour through hour, under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of brass. The Arabs had surprised the French encampment, where it lay in the center of an arid plain that was called Zaraila. Hovering like a cloud of hawks on the entrance of the Sahara, massed together for one mighty, if futile, effort—with all their ancient war-lust, and with a new despair—the tribes who refused the yoke of the alien empire were once again in arms; were once again combined in defense of those limitless kingdoms of drifting sand, of that beloved belt of bare and desolate land so useless to the conqueror, so dear to the nomad. When they had been, as it had been thought, beaten back into the desert wilderness; when, without water and without cattle, it had been calculated that they would, of sheer necessity, bow themselves in submission, or perish of famine and of thirst; they had recovered their ardor, their strength, their resistance, their power to harass without ceasing, if they could never arrest, the enemy. They had cast the torch of war afresh into the land, and here, southward, the flame burned bitterly, and with a merciless tongue devoured the lives of men, licking them up as a forest fire the dry leaves and the touchwood.
Circling, sweeping, silently, swiftly, with that rapid spring, that marvelous whirlwind of force, that is of Africa, and of Africa alone, the tribes had rushed down in the darkness of night, lightly as a kite rushes through the gloom of the dawn. For once the vigilance of the invader served him naught; for once the Frankish camp was surprised off its guard. While the air was still chilly with the breath of the night, while the first gleam of morning had barely broken through the mists of the east, while the picket-fires burned through the dusky gloom, and the sentinels and vedettes paced slowly to and fro, and circled round, hearing nothing worse than the stealthy tread of the jackal, or the muffled flight of a night-bird, afar in the south a great dark cloud had risen, darker than the brooding shadows of the earth and sky.
The cloud swept onward, like a mass of cirrhi, in those shadows shrouded. Fleet as though wind-driven, dense as though thunder-charged, it moved over the plains. As it grew nearer and nearer, it grew grayer, a changing mass of white and black that fused, in the obscurity, into a shadow color; a dense array of men and horses flitting noiselessly like spirits, and as though guided alone by one rein and moved alone by one breath and one will; not a bit champed, not a linen-fold loosened, not a shiver of steel was heard; as silently as the winds of the desert sweep up northward over the plains, so they rode now, host upon host of the warriors of the soil.
The outlying vedettes, the advancing sentinels, had scrutinized so long through the night every wavering shade of cloud and moving form of buffalo in the dim distance, that their sleepless eyes, strained and aching, failed to distinguish this moving mass that was so like the brown plains and starless sky that it could scarce be told from them. The night, too, was bitter; northern cold cut hardly chillier than this that parted the blaze of one hot day from the blaze of another. The sea-winds were blowing cruelly keen, and men who at noon gladly stripped to their shirts, shivered now where they lay under canvas.
Awake while his comrades slept around him, Cecil was stretched, half unharnessed. The foraging duty of the past twenty-four hours had been work harassing and heavy, inglorious and full of fatigue. The country round was bare as a table-rock; the water-courses poor, choked with dust and stones, unfed as yet by the rains or snows of the approaching winter. The horses suffered sorely, the men scarce less. The hay for the former was scant and bad; the rations for the latter often cut off by flying skirmishers of the foe. The campaign, so far as it had gone, had been fruitless, yet had cost largely in human life. The men died rapidly of dysentery, disease, and the chills of the nights, and had severe losses in countless obscure skirmishes, that served no end except to water the African soil with blood.
True, France would fill the gaps up as fast as they occurred, and the “Monitor” would only allude to the present operations when it could give a flourishing line descriptive of the Arabs being driven back, decimated, to the borders of the Sahara. But as the flourish of the “Monitor” would never reach a thousand little way-side huts, and sea-side cabins, and vine-dressers’ sunny nests, where the memory of some lad who had gone forth never to return would leave a deadly shadow athwart the humble threshold—so the knowledge that they were only so many automata in the hands of government, whose loss would merely be noted that it might be efficiently supplied, was not that wine-draught of La Gloire which poured the strength and the daring of gods into the limbs of the men of Jena and of Austerlitz. Still, there was a war-lust in them, and there was the fire of France; they fought not less superbly here, where to be food for jackal and kite was their likeliest doom, than their sires had done under the eagles of the First Empire, when the Conscript hero of to-day was the glittering Marshal of to-morrow.
Cecil had awakened while the camp still slept. Do what he would, force himself into the fullness of this fierce and hard existence as he might, he could not burn out or banish a thing that had many a time haunted him, but never as it did now—the remembrance of a woman. He almost laughed as he lay there on a pile of rotting straw, and wrung the truth out of his own heart, that he—a soldier of these exiled squadrons—was mad enough to love that woman whose deep, proud eyes had dwelt with such serene pity upon him.
Yet his hand clinched on the straw as it had clinched once when the operator’s knife had cut down through the bones of his breast to reach a bullet that, left in his chest, would have been death. If in the sight of men he had only stood in the rank that was his by birthright, he could have striven for—it might be that he could have roused—some answering passion in her. But that chance was lost to him forever. Well, it was but one thing more that was added to all that he had of his own will given up. He was dead; he must be content, as the dead must be, to leave the warmth of kisses, the glow of delight, the possession of a woman’s loveliness, the homage of men’s honor, the gladness of successful desires, to those who still lived in the light he had quitted. He had never allowed himself the emasculating indulgence of regret; he flung it off him now.
Flick-Flack—coiled asleep in his bosom—thrilled, stirred, and growled. He rose, and, with the little dog under his arm, looked out from the canvas. He knew that the most vigilant sentry in the service had not the instinct for a foe afar off that Flick-Flack possessed. He gazed keenly southward, the poodle growling on; that cloud so dim, so distant, caught his sight. Was it a moving herd, a shifting mist, a shadow-play between the night and dawn?
For a moment longer he watched it; then, what it was he knew, or felt by such strong instinct as makes knowledge; and, like the blast of a clarion, his alarm rang over the unarmed and slumbering camp.
An instant, and the hive of men, so still, so motionless, broke into violent movement; and from the tents the half-clothed sleepers poured, wakened, and fresh in wakening as hounds. Perfect discipline did the rest. With marvelous, with matchless swiftness and precision they harnessed and got under arms. They were but fifteen hundred or so in all—a single squadron of Chasseurs, two battalions of Zouaves, half a corps of Tirailleurs, and some Turcos; only a branch of the main body, and without artillery. But they were some of the flower of the army of Algiers, and they roused in a second, with the vivacious ferocity of the bounding tiger, with the glad, eager impatience for the slaughter of the unloosed hawk. Yet, rapid in its wondrous celerity as their united action was, it was not so rapid as the downward sweep of the war-cloud that came so near, with the tossing of white draperies and the shine of countless sabers, now growing clearer and clearer out of the darkness, till, with a whir like the noise of an eagle’s wings, and a swoop like an eagle’s seizure, the Arabs whirled down upon them, met a few yards in advance by the answering charge of the Light Cavalry.
There was a crash as if rock were hurled upon rock, as the Chasseurs, scarce seated in saddle, rushed forward to save the pickets; to encounter the first blind force of attack, and, to give the infantry, further in, more time for harness and defense. Out of the caverns of the night an armed multitude seemed to have suddenly poured. A moment ago they had slept in security; now thousands on thousands, whom they could not number; whom they could but dimly even perceive, were thrown on them in immeasurable hosts, which the encircling cloud of dust served but to render vaster, ghastlier, and more majestic. The Arab line stretched out with wings that seemed to extend on and on without end; the line of the Chasseurs was not one-half its length; they were but a single squadron flung in their stirrups, scarcely clothed, knowing only that the foe was upon them, caring only that their sword-hands were hard on their weapons. With all the elan of France they launched themselves forward to break the rush of the desert horses; they met with a terrible sound, like falling trees, like clashing metal.
The hoofs of the rearing chargers struck each other’s breasts, and these bit and tore at each other’s manes, while their riders reeled down dead. Frank and Arab were blent in one inextricable mass as the charging squadrons encountered. The outer wings of the tribes were spared the shock, and swept on to meet the bayonets of Zouaves and Turcos as, at their swift foot-gallop, the Enfants Perdus of France threw themselves forward from the darkness. The cavalry was enveloped in the overwhelming numbers of the center, and the flanks seemed to cover the Zouaves and Tirailleurs as some great settling mist may cover the cattle who move beneath it.
It was not a battle; it was a frightful tangling of men and brutes. No contest of modern warfare, such as commences and conquers by a duel of artillery, and, sometimes, gives the victory to whosoever has the superiority of ordnance, but a conflict, hand to hand, breast to breast, life for life; a Homeric combat of spear and of sword even while the first volleys of the answering musketry pealed over the plain.
For once the Desert avenged, in like, that terrible inexhaustibility of supply wherewith the Empire so long had crushed them beneath the overwhelming difference of numbers. It was the Day of Mazagran once more, as the light of the morning broke—gray, silvered, beautiful—in the far, dim distance, beyond the tawny seas of reeds. Smoke and sand soon densely rose above the struggle, white, hot, blinding; but out from it the lean, dark Bedouin faces, the snowy haicks, the red burnous, the gleam of the Tunisian muskets, the flash of the silver-hilted yataghans, were seen fused in a mass with the brawny, naked necks of the Zouaves, with the shine of the French bayonets; with the tossing manes and glowing nostrils of the Chasseurs’ horses; with the torn, stained silk of the raised Tricolor, through which the storm of balls flew thick and fast as hail, yet whose folds were never suffered to fall, though again and again the hand that held its staff was cut away or was unloosed in death, yet ever found another to take its charge before the Flag could once have trembled in the enemy’s sight.
The Chasseurs could not charge; they were hemmed in, packed between bodies of horsemen that pressed them together as between iron plates; now and then they could cut their way through, clear enough to reach their comrades of the demi-cavalry, but as often as they did so, so often the overwhelming numbers of the Arabs urged in on them afresh like a flood, and closed upon them, and drove them back.
Every soldier in the squadron that lived kept his life by sheer, breathless, ceaseless, hand-to-hand sword-play, hewing right and left, front and rear, without pause, as, in the great tangled forests of the west, men hew aside branch and brushwood ere they can force one step forward.
The gleam of the dawn spread in one golden glow of morning, and the day rose radiant over the world; they stayed not for its beauty or its peace; the carnage went on, hour upon hour; men began to grow drunk with slaughter as with raki. It was sublimely grand; it was hideously hateful—this wild-beast struggle, this heaving tumult of striving lives, that ever and anon stirred the vast war-cloud of smoke and broke from it as the lightning from the night. The sun laughed in its warmth over a thousand hills and streams, over the blue seas lying northward, and over the yellow sands of the south; but the touch of its heat only made the flame in their blood burn fiercer; the fullness of its light only served to show them clearer where to strike and how to slay.
It was bitter, stifling, cruel work; with their mouths choked with sand, with their throats caked with thirst, with their eyes blind with smoke; cramped as in a vise, scorched with the blaze of powder, covered with blood and with dust; while the steel was thrust through nerve and sinew, or the shot plowed through bone and flesh. The answering fire of the Zouaves and Tirailleurs kept the Arabs further at bay, and mowed them faster down; but in the Chasseurs’ quarter of the field—parted from the rest of their comrades as they had been by the rush of that broken charge with which they had sought to save the camp and arrest the foe—the worst pressure of the attack was felt, and the fiercest of the slaughter fell.
The Chef d’Escadron had been shot dead as they had first swept out to encounter the advance of the desert horsemen; one by one the officers had been cut down, singled out by the keen eyes of their enemies, and throwing themselves into the deadliest of the carnage with the impetuous self-devotion characteristic of their service. At the last there remained but a mere handful out of all the brilliant squadron that had galloped down in the gray of the dawn to meet the whirlwind of Arab fury. At their head was Cecil.
Two horses had been killed under him, and he had thrown himself afresh across unwounded chargers, whose riders had fallen in the melee, and at whose bridles he had caught as he shook himself free of the dead animals’ stirrups. His head was uncovered; his uniform, hurriedly thrown on, had been torn aside, and his chest was bare to the red folds of his sash; he was drenched with blood, not his own, that had rained on him as he fought; and his face and his hands were black with smoke and with powder. He could not see a yard in front of him; he could not tell how the day went anywhere, save in that corner where his own troop was hemmed in. As fast as they beat the Arabs back, and forced themselves some clearer space, so fast the tribes closed in afresh. No orders reached him from the General of the Brigade in command; except for the well-known war-shouts of the Zouaves that ever and again rang above the din, he could not tell whether the French battalions were not cut utterly to pieces under the immense numerical superiority of their foes. All he could see was that every officer of Chasseurs was down, and that, unless he took the vacant place, and rallied them together, the few score troopers that were still left would scatter, confused and demoralized, as the best soldiers will at times when they can see no chief to follow.
He spurred the horse he had just mounted against the dense crowd opposing him, against the hard, black wall of dust, and smoke, and steel, and savage faces, and lean, swarthy arms, which were all that his eyes could see, and that seemed impenetrable as granite, moving and changing though it was. He thrust the gray against it, while he waved his sword above his head.
“En avant, mes freres! France! France! France!”
His voice—well known, well loved—thrilled the hearts of his comrades, and brought them together like a trumpet-call. They had gone with him many a time into the hell of battle, into the jaws of death. They surged about him now; striking, thrusting, forcing, with blows of their sabers or their lances and blows of their beasts’ fore-feet, a passage one to another, until they were reunited once more as one troop, while their shrill shouts, like an oath of vengeance, echoed after him in the defiance that has pealed victorious over so many fields from the soldiery of France. They loved him; he had called them his brethren. They were like lambs for him to lead, like tigers for him to incite.