Under Two Flags

O >> Ouida [Louise de la Ramee] >> Under Two Flags




CHAPTER XXIX.

BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE.

"Hold!" cried Cigarette, interrupting herself in her chant in honor of
the attributes of war, as the Tringlo's mules which she was driving,
some three weeks after the fray of Zaraila, stopped, by sheer force of
old habit, in the middle of a green plateau on the outskirts of a camp
pitched in its center, and overlooked by brown, rugged scarps of rock,
with stunted bushes on their summits, and here and there a maritime
pine clinging to their naked slopes. At sight of the food-laden little
beasts, and the well-known form behind them, the Tirailleurs, Indigenes,
and the Zouaves, on whose side of the encampment she had approached,
rushed toward her with frantic shouts, and wild delight, and vehement
hurrahs in a tempest of vociferous welcome that might have stunned any
ears less used, and startled any nerves less steeled, to military life
than the Friend of the Flag. She signed back the shouting, disorderly
crowd with her mule-whip, as superbly as though she were a Marshal of
France signing back a whole army's mutiny.

"What children you are! You push, and scramble, and tear, like a set of
monkeys over a nut. Get out of my way, or I swear you shall none of you
have so much as a morsel of black bread--do you hear!"

It was amusing to see how they minded her contemptuous orders; how these
black-bearded fire-eaters, the terror of the country, each one of whom
could have crushed her in his grasp as a wolf crushes a lamb, slunk
back, silenced and obedient, before the imperious bidding of the little
vivandiere. They had heeded her and let her rule over them almost as
much when she had been seven years old, and her curls, now so dark, had
been yellow as corn in the sun.

"Ouf!" growled only one insubordinate, "if you had been a day and night
eating nothing but a bit of moist clay, you might be hungry too."

The humiliated supplication of the reply appeased their autocratic
sovereign. She nodded her head in assent.

"I know; I know. I have gone days on a handful of barley-ears. M. le
Colonel has his marmitons, and his fricassees, and his fine cuisine
where he camps--ho!--but we soldiers have nothing but a hunch of baked
chaff. Well, we win battles on it!"

Which was one of the impromptu proverbs that Cigarette was wont to
manufacture and bring into her discourse with an air of authority as
of one who quotes from profound scholastic lore. It was received with
a howl of applause and of ratification. The entrails often gnaw with
bitter pangs of famine in the Army of Algiers, and they knew well how
sharp an edge hunger gives to the steel.

Nevertheless, the sullen, angry roar of famished men, that is so
closely, so terribly like the roar of wild beasts, did not cease.

"Where is Biribi?" they growled. "Biribi never keeps us waiting. Those
are Biribi's beasts."

"Right," said Cigarette laconically, with a crack of her mule-whip on to
the arm of a Zouave who was attempting to make free with her convoy and
purloin a loaf off the load.

"Where is Biribi, then?" they roared in concert, a crowd of eager,
wolfish, ravenous, impatient men, hungry as camp fasting could make
them, and half inclined even to tear their darling in pieces, since she
kept them thus from the stores.

Cigarette uncovered her head with a certain serious grace very rare in
her.

"Biribi had made a good end."

Her assailants grew very quiet.

"Shot?" they asked briefly. Biribi was a Tringlo well beloved in all the
battalions.

Cigarette nodded, with a gesture outward to the solitary country. She
was accustomed to these incidents of war; she thought of them no more
than a girl of civilized life thinks of the grouse or the partridges
that are killed by her lovers and brothers.

"I was out yonder, two leagues or more away. I was riding; I was on my
own horse; Etoile-Filante. Well I heard shots; of course I made for the
place by my ear. Before I got up I saw what was the mischief. There
were the mules in a gorge, and Biribi in front of them, fighting, mon
Dieu!--fighting like the devil--with three Arbis on him. They were
trying to stop the convoys, and Biribi was beating them back with all
his might. I was too far off to do much good; but I shouted and dashed
down to them. The Arbis heard, Biribi heard; he flew on to them like a
tiger, that little Tringlo. It was wonderful! Two fell dead under him;
the third took fright and fled. When I got up, Biribi lay above the dead
brutes with a dozen wounds in him, if there were one. He looked up, and
knew me. 'Is it thee, Cigarette?' he asked; and he could hardly speak
for the blood in his throat. 'Do not wait with me; I am dead already.
Drive the mules into camp as quick as thou canst; the men will be
thinking me late.'"

"Biribi was always bon enfant," muttered the listening throng; they
forgot their hunger as they heard.

"Ah! he thought more of you than you deserve, you jackals! I drew him
aside into a hole in the rocks out of the heat. He was dead; he was
right. No man could live, slashed about like that. The Arbicos had set
on him as he went singing along; if he would have given up the brutes
and the stores, they would not have harmed him; but that was not Biribi.
I did all I could for him. Dame! It was no good. He lay very still
for some minutes with his head on my lap; then he moved restlessly and
tossed about. 'They will think me so late--so late,' he muttered; 'and
they are famished by this. There is that letter, too, from his mother
for Petit-Pot-de-Terre; there is all that news from France; I have so
much for them, and I shall be so late--so late!' All he thought was that
he should be so late into camp. Well, it was all over very soon. I do
not think he suffered; but he was so afraid you should not have the
food. I left him in the cave, and drove the mules on as he asked.
Etoile-Filante had galloped away; have you seen him home?"

There broke once more from the hearkening throng a roar that shook the
echoes from the rocks; but it was not now the rage of famished longing,
but the rage of the lust for vengeance, and the grief of passionate
hearts blent together. Quick as the lightning flashes, their swords
leaped from their scabbards and shook in the sun-lighted air.

"We will avenge him!" they shouted as with one throat, the hoarse
cry rolling down the valley like a swell of thunder. If the bonds of
discipline had loosed them, they would have rushed forth on the search
and to the slaughter, forgetful of hunger, of heat, of sun-stroke, of
self-pity, of all things, save the dead Tringlo, whose only fear in
death had been lest they should want and suffer through him.

Their adjutants, alarmed by the tumult, hurried to the spot, fearing
a bread riot; for the camp was far from supplies, and had been ill
victualed for several days. They asked rapidly what was the matter.

"Biribi had been killed," some soldier answered.

"Ah! and the bread not come."

"Yes, mon adjutant; the bread is there, and Cigarette too."

"There is no need for me, then," muttered the adjutant of Zouaves; "the
Little One will keep order."

The Little One had before now quelled a mutiny with her pistol at the
ringleader's forehead, and her brave, scornful words scourging the
insubordinates for their dishonor to their arms, for their treason to
the Tricolor; and she was equal to the occasion now. She lifted her
right hand.

"We will avenge him. That is of course. The Flag of France never hangs
idly when there is a brave life's loss to be reckoned for; I shall know
again the cur that fled. Trust to me, and now be silent. You bawl out
your oath of vengeance, oh, yes! But you bawled as loud a minute ago for
bread. Biribi loved you better than you deserved. You deserve nothing;
you are hounds, ready to tear for offal to eat as to rend the foe of
your dead friend. Bah!"

The roar of the voices sank somewhat; Cigarette had sprung aloft on a
gun-carriage, and as the sun shone on her face it was brilliant with the
scorn that lashed them like whips.

"Sang de Dieu!" fiercely swore a Zouave. "Hounds, indeed! If it were
anyone but you! When one has had nothing but a snatch of raw bullock's
meat, and a taste of coffee black with mud, for a week through, is one a
hound because one hungers?"

"No," said the orator from her elevation, and her eyes softened
wonderfully. In her heart she loved them so well, these wild, barbaric
warriors that she censured--"no, one is not a hound because one hungers;
but one is not a soldier if one complains. Well! Biribi loved you; and
I am here to do his will, to do his work. He came laden; his back was
loaded heavier than the mules'. To the front, all of you, as I name you!
Petit-Pot-de-Terre, there is your old mother's letter. If she knew as
much as I do about you, scapegrace, she would never trouble herself
whether you were dead or alive! Fagotin! Here is a bundle of Paris
newspapers for you; they are quite new--only nine months old! Potele!
Some woman has sent you a love-scrawl and some tobacco; I suppose she
knew your passions all ended in smoke! Rafle! Here is a little money
come for you from France; it has not been stolen, so it will have no
spice for you! Racoleur! Here is a love-billet from some simpleton,
with a knife as a souvenir; sharpen it on the Arbicos. Poupard,
Loup-terrible, Jean Pagnote, Pince-Maille, Louis Magot, Jules
Goupil--here! There are your letters, your papers, your commissions.
Biribi forgot nothing. As if you deserved to be worked for, or thought
of!"

With which reproach Cigarette relieved herself of the certain pain that
was left on her by the death of Biribi; she always found that to work
yourself into a passion with somebody is the very best way in the world
to banish an unwelcome emotion.

The men summoned by their camp-sobriquets, which were so familiar that
they had, many of them, fairly forgotten their original names, rallied
around her to receive the various packets with which a Tringlo is
commonly charged by friends in the towns, or relatives away in France,
for the soldiers of African brigades, and which, as well as his convoy
of food and his budget of news, render him so precious and so welcome an
arrival at an encampment. The dead Biribi had been one of the lightest,
brightest, cheeriest, and sauciest of the gay, kindly, industrious
wanderers of his branch of the service; always willing to lead; always
ready to help; always smoking, singing, laughing, chattering; treating
his three mules as an indulgent mother her children; calling them Plick,
Plack, et Plock, and thinking of Plick, Plack, et Plock far beyond
himself at all times; a merry, busy, smiling, tender-hearted soul, who
was always happy, trudging along the sunburned road, and caroling in
his joyous voice chansonnettes and gaudrioles to the African flocks and
herds, amid the African solitudes. If there were a man they loved, it
was Biribi; Biribi, whose advent in camp had always been the signal
for such laughter, such abundance, such showers of newspapers, such
quantities of intelligence from that France for tidings of which the
hardest-featured veteran among them would ask with a pang at the heart,
with a thrill in the words. And they had sworn, and would keep what they
had sworn in bitter intensity, to avenge him to the uttermost point of
vengeance. Yet five minutes afterward when the provisions Plick, Plack,
et Plock had brought were divided and given out, they were shouting,
eating, singing, devouring, with as eager a zest, and as hearty an
enjoyment, as though Biribi were among them, and did not lie dead two
leagues away, with a dozen wounds slashed on his stiffening frame.

"What heartless brutes! Are they always like that?" muttered a gentleman
painter who, traveling through the interior to get military sketches,
had obtained permission to take up quarters in the camp.

"If they were not like that they could not live a day," a voice answered
curtly, behind him. "Do you know what this service is, that you venture
to judge them? Men who meet death in the face every five minutes they
breathe cannot afford the space for sentimentalism which those who
saunter at ease and in safety can do. They laugh when we are dead,
perhaps, but they are true as steel to us while we live--it is the
reverse of the practice of the world!"

The tourist started, turned, and looked aghast at the man who had
reproved him; it was a Chasseur d'Afrique, who, having spoken, was
already some way onward, moving through the press and tumult of the camp
to his own regiment's portion of it.

Cigarette, standing by to see that Plick, Plack, and Plock were property
baited on the greenest forage to be found, heard, and her eyes flashed
with a deep delight.

"Dame!" she thought, "I could not have answered better myself! He is a
true soldier, that." And she forgave Cecil all his sins to her with the
quick, impetuous, generous pardon of her warm little Gallic heart.

Cigarette believed that she could hate very bitterly; indeed, her power
of resentment she rated high among her grandest qualities. Had the
little leopard been told that she could not resent to the death what
offended her, she would have held herself most infamously insulted.
Yet hate was, in truth, foreign to her frank, vivacious nature; its
deadliness never belonged to her, if its passion might; and at a trait
akin to her, at a flash of sympathetic spirit in the object of her
displeasure, Cigarette changed from wrath to friendship with the true
instinct of her little heart of gold. A heart which, though it had been
tossed about on a sea of blood, and had never been graven with so much
as one tender word or one moral principle from the teachings of any
creature, was still gold, despite all; no matter the bruises and the
stains and the furnace-heats that had done their best to harden it into
bronze, to debase it into brass.

The camp was large, and a splendid picture of color, movement,
picturesque combination, and wonderful light and shadow, as the sun-glow
died out and the fires were lighted; for the nights were now intensely
cold--cold with the cutting, icy, withering bise, and clear above as an
Antarctic night, though the days were still hot and dry as flame.

On the left were the Tirailleurs, the Zouaves, the Zephyrs; on the right
were the Cavalry and the Artillery; in the center of all was the tent
of the chief. Everywhere, as evening fell, the red warmth of fires rose;
the caldron of soup or of coffee simmered, gypsy-like, above; the men
lounged around, talking, laughing, cooking, story-telling at their
pleasure; after the semi-starvation of the last week, the abundance of
stores that had come in with other Tringlos besides poor Biribi caused
a universal hilarity. The glitter of accouterments, the contents of open
knapsacks, the skins of animals just killed for the marmite, the boughs
of pines broken for firewood, strewed the ground. Tethered horses,
stands of arms, great drums and eagle-guidons, the looming darkness of
huge cannon, the blackness, like dromedaries couched, of caissons and
ambulance-wagons, the whiteness of the canvas tents, the incessant
movement as the crowds of soldiery stirred, and chattered, and worked,
and sang--all these, on the green level of the plain, framed in by the
towering masses of the rugged rocks, made a picture of marvelous effect
and beauty.

Cecil, looking at it, thought so; though the harsh and bitter misery
which he knew that glittering scene enfolded, and which he had suffered
so many years himself--misery of hunger, of cold, of shot-wounds, of
racking bodily pains--stole from it, in his eyes, that poetry and that
picturesque brilliancy which it bore to the sight of the artist and the
amateur. He knew the naked terrors of war, the agony, the travail,
the icy chills, the sirocco heats, the grinding routine, the pitiless
chastisements of its reality; to those who do, it can no longer be a
spectacle dressed in the splendid array of romance. It is a fearful
tragedy and farce woven close one in another; and its sole joy is in
that blood-thirst which men so lustfully share with the tiger, and yet
shudder from when they have sated it.

It was this knowledge of war, in its bitter and deadly truth, which
had made him give the answer that had charmed Cigarette, to the casual
visitor of the encampment.

He sat now, having recovered from the effects of the day of Zaraila,
within a little distance of the fire at which his men were stewing some
soup in the great simmering copper bowl. They had eaten nothing for nigh
a week, except some moldy bread, with the chance of a stray cat or a
shot bird to flavor it. Hunger was a common thorn in Algerian warfare,
since not even the matchless intendance of France could regularly
supply the troops across those interminable breadths of arid land, those
sun-scorched plains, swept by Arab foragers.

"Beau Victor! You took their parts well," said a voice behind him, as
Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and stood in the glow of the
fire, with a little pipe in her pretty rosebud mouth and her cap set
daintily on one side of her curls.

He looked up, and smiled.

"Not so well as your own clever tongue would have done. Words are not my
weapons."

"No! You are as silent as the grave commonly; but when you do speak,
you speak well," said the vivandiere condescendingly. "I hate silence
myself! Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round,
round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they
keep little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest."

With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into the night air,
looking the prettiest little genre picture in the ruddy firelight that
ever was painted on such a background of wavering shadow and undulating
flame.

"Will your allegory hold good, petite?" smiled Cecil, thinking but
little of his answer or of his companion, of whose service to him he
remained utterly ignorant. "I fancy speech is the chaff most generally,
little better. So, they talk of you for the Cross? No soldier ever, of a
surety, more greatly deserved it."

Her eyes gleamed with a luster like the African planets above her; her
face caught all the fire, the light, the illumination of the flames
flashing near her.

"I did nothing," she said curtly. "Any man on the field would have done
the same."

"That is easy to say; not so easy to prove. In all great events there
may be the same strength, courage, and desire to act greatly in those
who follow as in the one that leads; but it is only in that one that
there is also the daring to originate, the genius to seize aright the
moment of action and of success."

Cigarette was a little hero; she was, moreover, a little desperado;
but she was a child in years and a woman at heart, valiant and ruthless
young soldier though she might be. She colored all over her mignonne
face at the words of eulogy from this man whom she had told herself she
hated; her eyes filled; her lips trembled.

"It was nothing" she said softly, under her breath. "I would die twenty
deaths for France."

He looked at her, and for the hour understood her aright; he saw that
there was the love for her country and the power of sacrifice in this
gay-plumaged and capricious little hawk of the desert.

"You have a noble nature, Cigarette," he said, with an earnest regard at
her. "My poor child, if only----" He paused. He was thinking what it
was hard to say to her--if only the accidents of her life had been
different, what beauty, race, and genius might have been developed out
of the untamed, untutored, inconsequent, but glorious nature of the
child-warrior.

As by a fate, unconsciously his pity embittered all the delight his
praise had given, and this implied regret for her stung her as the rend
of the spur a young Arab colt--stung her inwardly into cruel wrath and
pain; outwardly into irony, deviltry, and contemptuous retort.

"Oh! Child, indeed! Was I a child the other day, my good fellow, when I
saved your squadron from being cut to pieces like grass with a scythe?
As for nobility? Pouf! Not much of that in me. I love France--yes. A
soldier always loves his country. She is so brave, too, and so fair, and
so gay. Not like your Albion--if it is yours--who is a great gobemouche
stuffed full of cotton, steaming with fog, clutching gold with one hand
and the Bible with the other, that she may swell her money-bags, and
seem a saint all the same; never laughing, never learning, always
growling, always shuffling, who is like this spider--look!--a tiny body
and huge, hairy legs--pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her
little English body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like
to know what size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell
and to strut?"

Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with all the supreme
disdain she could impel into that gesture. Cigarette, though she knew
not her A B C, and could not have written her name to save her own life,
had a certain bright intelligence of her own that caught up political
tidings, and grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone
will not bestow. One way and another she had heard most of the floating
opinions of the day, and stored them up in her fertile brain as a bee
stores honey into his hive by much as nature-given and unconscious an
instinct as the bee's own.

Cecil listened, amused.

"You little Anglophobist! You have the tongue of a Voltaire!"

"Voltaire?" questioned Cigarette. "Voltaire! Let me see. I know that
name. He was the man who championed Calas? Who had a fowl in the pot for
every poor wretch that passed his house? Who was taken to the Pantheon
by the people in the Revolution?"

"Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still to call without a
heart or a God!"

"Chut! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged. Better than pattering
Paters, that!" said Cigarette, who thought a midnight mass at Notre Dame
or a Salutation at the Madeleine a pretty coup de theatre enough, but
who had for all churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce
disdain. "Go to the grandams and the children!" she would say, with a
shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris
attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for
persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the
ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little
Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his
rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the
sarcastic artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries.

"Hola!" she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her fancy. "We talk
of Albion--there is one of her sons. I detest your country, but I must
confess she breeds uncommonly handsome men."

She was a dilettante in handsome men; she nodded her head now to where,
some yards off, at another of the camp-fires, stood, with some officers
of the regiment, one of the tourists; a very tall, very fair man, with
a gallant bearing, and a tawny beard that glittered to gold in the light
of the flames.

Cecil's glance followed Cigarette's. With a great cry he sprang to his
feet and stood entranced, gazing at the stranger. She saw the startled
amaze, the longing love, the agony of recognition, in his eyes; she saw
the impulse in him to spring forward, and the shuddering effort with
which the impulse was controlled. He turned to her almost fiercely.

"He must not see me! Keep him away--away, for God's sake!"

He could not have leave his men; he was fettered there where his
squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from the flame-light
into the shadow, and thrust himself among the tethered horses. Cigarette
asked nothing; comprehended at a glance with all the tact of her nation;
and sauntered forward to meet the officers of the regiment as they came
up to the picket-fire with the yellow-haired English stranger. She knew
how charming a picture there, with her hands lightly resting on her
hips, and her bright face danced on by the ruddy fire-glow, she made;
she knew she could hold thus the attention of a whole brigade. The eyes
of the stranger lighted on her, and his voice laughed in mellow music to
his companions and ciceroni.

"Your intendance is perfect; your ambulance is perfect; your
camp-cookery is perfect, messieurs; and here you have even perfect
beauty, too! Truly, campaigning must be pleasant work in Algeria!"

Then he turned to her with compliments frank and gay, and full of a
debonair grace that made her doubt he could be of Albion.

Retort was always ready to her; and she kept the circle of officers in
full laughter round the fire with a shower of repartee that would
have made her fortune on the stage. And every now and then her glance
wandered to the shadow where the horses were tethered.

Bah! why was she always doing him service? She could not have told.

Still she went on--and did it.

It was a fantastic picture by the bright scarlet light of the camp-fire,
with the Little One in her full glory of mirth and mischief, and her
circle of officers laughing on her with admiring eyes; nearest her the
towering height of the English stranger, with the gleam of the flame in
the waves of his leonine beard.