Under Two Flags Part 56

"You are sons of the Old Guard; die like them."

They answered with a pealing cry, terrible as the cry of the lion in the hush of night, but a shout that had in it a.s.sent, triumph, fealty, victory, even as they obeyed him and drew up to die, while in their front was the young brow of Pet.i.t Picpon turned upward to the glare of the skies.

There was nothing for them but to draw up thus, and await their butchery, defending the Eagle to the last; looking till the last toward that "woman's face of their leader," as they had often termed it, that was to them now as the face of Napoleon was to the soldiers who loved him.

There was a pause, brief as is the pause of the lungs to take a fuller breath. The Arabs honored these men, who alone and in the midst of the hostile force, held their ground and prepared thus to be slaughtered one by one, till of all the squadron that had ridden out in the darkness of the dawn there should be only a black, huddled, stiffened heap of dead men and of dead beasts. The chief who led them pressed them back, withholding them from the end that was so near to their hands when they should stretch that single ring of hors.e.m.e.n all lifeless in the dust.

"You are great warriors," he cried, in the Sabir tongue; "surrender; we will spare!"

Cecil looked back once more on the fragment of his troop, and raised the Eagle higher aloft where the wings should glisten in the fuller day.

Half naked, scorched, blinded; with an open gash in his shoulder where the lance had struck, and with his brow wet with the great dews of the noon-heat and the breathless toil; his eyes were clear as they flashed with the light of the sun in them; his mouth smiled as he answered:

"Have we shown ourselves cowards, that you think we shall yield?"

A hurrah of wild delight from the Cha.s.seurs he led greeted and ratified the choice. "On meurt--on ne se rend pas!" they shouted in the words which, even if they be but legendary, are too true to the spirit of the soldiers of France not to be as truth in their sight. Then, with their swords above their heads, they waited for the collision of the terrible attack which would fall on them upon every side, and strike all the sentient life out of them before the sun should be one point higher in the heavens. It came; with a yell as of wild beasts in their famine, the Arabs threw themselves forward, the chief himself singling out the "fair Frank" with the violence of a lion flinging himself on a leopard. One instant longer, one flash of time, and the tribes pressing on them would have ma.s.sacred them like cattle driven into the pens of slaughter. Ere it could be done, a voice like the ring of a silver trumpet echoed over the field:

"En avant! En avant! Tue, tue, tue!"

Above the din, the shouts, the tumult, the echoing of the distant musketry, that silvery cadence rung; down into the midst, with the Tricolor waving above her head, the bridle of her fiery mare between her teeth, the raven of the dead Zouave flying above her head, and her pistol leveled in deadly aim, rode Cigarette.

The lightning fire of the crossing swords played round her, the glitter of the lances dazzled her eyes, the reek of smoke and of carnage was round her; but she dashed down into the heart of the conflict as gayly as though she rode at a review--laughing, shouting, waving the torn colors that she grasped, with her curls blowing back in the breeze, and her bright young face set in the warrior's l.u.s.t. Behind her, by scarcely a length, galloped three squadrons of Cha.s.seurs and Spahis; trampling headlong over the corpse-strewn field, and breaking through the ma.s.ses of the Arabs as though they were seas of corn.

She wheeled her mare round by Cecil's side at the moment when, with six swift pa.s.ses of his blade, he had warded off the Chief's blows and sent his own sword down through the chest-bones of the Bedouin's mighty form.

"Well struck! The day is turned! Charge!"

She gave the order as though she were a Marshal of the Empire, the sun-blaze full on her where she sat on the rearing, fretting, half-bred gray, with the Tricolor folds above her head, and her teeth tight gripped on the chain-bridle, and her face all glowing and warm and full of the fierce fire of war--a little Amazon in scarlet and blue and gold; a young Jeanne d'Arc, with the crimson fez in lieu of the silvered casque, and the gay broideries of her fantastic dress instead of the breastplate of steel. And with the Flag of her idolatry, the Flag that was as her religion, floating back as she went, she spurred her mare straight against the Arabs, straight over the lifeless forms of the hundreds slain; and after her poured the fresh squadrons of cavalry, the ruby burnous of the Spahis streaming on the wind as their darling led them on to retrieve the day for France.

Not a bullet struck, not a saber grazed her; but there, in the heat and the press of the worst of the slaughter, Cigarette rode hither and thither, to and fro, her voice ringing like a bird's song over the field, in command, in applause, in encouragement, in delight; bearing her standard aloft and untouched; das.h.i.+ng heedless through a storm of blows; cheering on her "children" to the charge again and again; and all the while with the sunlight full on her radiant, spirited head, and with the grim, gray raven flying above her, shrieking shrilly its "Tue, tue, tue!" The Army believed with superst.i.tious faith in the potent spell of that veteran bird, and the story ran that, whenever he flew above a combat, France was victor before the sun set. The echo of the raven's cry, and the presence of the child who, they knew, would have a thousand musket-b.a.l.l.s fired in her fair young breast rather than live to see them defeated, made the fresh squadrons sweep in like a whirlwind, bearing down all before them.

Cigarette saved the day.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE LOVE OF THE AMAZON.

Before the sun had declined from his zenith the French were masters of the field, and pursued the retreat of the Arabs till, for miles along the plain, the line of their flight was marked with horses that had dropped dead in the strain, and with the motionless forms of their desert-riders, their cold hands clinched in the loose, hot sands, and their stern faces turned upward to the cloudless scorch of their native skies, under whose freedom they would never again ride forth to the joyous clash of the cymbals and the fierce embrace of the death-grapple.

When at length she returned, coming in with her ruthless Spahis, whose terrible pa.s.sions she feared no more than Vergil's Volscian huntress feared the beasts of the forest and plain, the raven still hovered above her exhausted mare, the torn flag was still in her left hand; and the bright laughter, the flash of ecstatic triumph, was still in her face as she sang the last lines of her own war-chant. The leopard nature was roused in her. She was a soldier; death had been about her from her birth; she neither feared to give nor to receive it; she was proud as ever was young Pompeius flushed with the glories of his first eastern conquests; she was happy as such elastic, sun-lit, dauntless youth as hers alone can be, returning in the reddening after-glow, at the head of her comrades, to the camp that she had saved.

She could be cruel--women are, when roused, as many a revolution has shown; she could be heroic--she would have died a hundred deaths for France; she was vain with a vivacious, childlike vanity; she was brave with a bravery beside which many a man's high courage paled. Cruelty, heroism, vanity, and bravery were all on fire, and all fed to their uttermost, most eager, most ardent flame, now that she came back at the head of her Spahis; while all who remained of the soldiers who, but for her, would have been ma.s.sacred long ere then, without one spared among them, threw themselves forward, crowded round her, caressed, and laughed, and wept, and shouted with all the changes of their intense mercurial temperaments; kissed her boots, her sash, her mare's drooping neck, and, lifting her, with wild vivas that rent the sky, on to the shoulders of the two tallest men among them, bore her to the presence of the only officer of high rank who had survived the terrors of the day, a Chef de Bataillon of the Zouaves.

And he, a grave and n.o.ble-looking veteran, uncovered his head and bowed before her as courtiers bow before their queens.

"Mademoiselle, you saved the honor of France. In the name of France, I thank you."

The tears rushed swift and hot into Cigarette's bright eyes--tears of joy, tears of pride. She was but a child still in much, and she could be moved by the name of France as other children by the name of their mothers.

"Chut! I did nothing," she said rapidly. "I only rode fast."

The frenzied hurrahs of the men who heard her drowned her words. They loved her for what she had done; they loved her better still because she set no count on it.

"The Empire will think otherwise," said the Major of the Zouaves. "Tell me, my Little One, how did you do this thing?"

Cigarette, balancing herself with a foot on either shoulder of her supporters, gave the salute, and answered:

"Simply, mon Commandant--very simply. I was alone, riding midway between you and the main army--three leagues, say, from each. I was all alone; only Vole-qui-veut flying with me for fun. I met a colon. I knew the man. For the matter of that, I did him once a service--saved his geese and his fowls from burning, one winter's day, in their house, while he wrung his hands and looked on. Well, he was full of terror, and told me there was fighting yonder--here he meant--so I rode nearer to see.

That was just upon sunrise. I dismounted, and ran up a palm there." And Cigarette pointed to a far-off slope crowned with the remains of a once mighty palm forest. "I got up very high. I could see miles round. I saw how things were with you. For the moment I was coming straight to you.

Then I thought I should do more service if I let the main army know, and brought you a re-enforcement. I rode fast. Dieu! I rode fast. My horse dropped under me twice; but I reached them at last, and I went at once to the General. He guessed at a glance how things were, and I told him to give me my Spahis and let me go. So he did. I got on the mare of his own staff, and away we came. It was a near thing. If we had been a minute later, it had been all up with you."

"True, indeed," muttered the Zouave in his beard. "A superb action, my Little One. But did you meet no Arab scouts to stop you?"

Cigarette laughed.

"Did I not? Met them by dozens. Some had a shot at me; some had a shot from me. One fellow nearly winged me; but I got through them all somehow. Sapristi! I galloped so fast I was very hard to hit flying.

These things only require a little judgment; but some men, pardi! always are creeping when they should fly, and always are scampering when they should saunter; and then they wonder when they make fiasco! Bah!"

And Cigarette laughed again. Men were such bunglers--ouf!

"Mademoiselle, if all soldiers were like you," answered the Major of Zouaves curtly, "to command a battalion would be paradise!"

"All soldiers would do anything I have done," retorted Cigarette, who never took a compliment at the expense of her "children." "They do not all get the opportunity, look you. Opportunity is a little angel; some catch him as he goes, some let him pa.s.s by forever. You must be quick with him, for he is like an eel to wriggle away. If you want a good soldier, take that aristocrat of the Cha.s.se-Marais--that beau Victor.

Pouf! All his officers were down; and how splendidly he led the troop!

He was going to die with them rather than surrender. Napoleon"--and Cigarette uncovered her curly head reverentially as at the name of a deity--"Napoleon would have given him his brigade ere this. If you had seen him kill the chief!"

"He will have justice done him, never fear. And for you--the Cross shall be on your breast, Cigarette, if I live over to-night to write my dispatches."

And the Chef de Bataillon saluted her once more, and turned away to view the carnage-strewn plain, and number the few who remained out of those who had been wakened by the clash of the Arab arms in the gray of the earliest dawn.

Cigarette's eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her flushed cheeks grew scarlet. Since her infancy it had been her dream to have the Cross, to have the Grande Croix to lie above her little lion's heart; it had been the one longing, the one ambition, the only undying desire of her soul; and lo! she touched its realization!

The wild, frantic, tumultuous cheers and caresses of her soldiery, who could not triumph in her and triumph with her enough to satiate them, recalled her to the actual moment. She sprang down from her elevation, and turned on them with a rebuke. "Ah! you are making this fuss about me while hundreds of better soldiers than I lie yonder. Let us look to them first; we will play the fool afterward."

And, though she had ridden fifty miles that day, if she had ridden one--though she had eaten nothing since sunrise, and had only had one draught of bad water--though she was tired, and stiff, and bruised, and parched with thirst, Cigarette dashed off as lightly as a young goat to look for the wounded and the dying men who strewed the plain far and near.

She remembered one whom she had not seen after that first moment in which she had given the word to the squadrons to charge.

It was a terrible sight--the arid plain, lying in the scarlet glow of sunset, covered with dead bodies, with mutilated limbs, with horses gasping and writhing, with men raving like mad creatures in the torture of their wounds. It was a sight which always went to her heart. She was a true soldier, and, though, she could deal death pitilessly, could, when the delirium of war was over, tend and yield infinite compa.s.sion to those who were in suffering. But such scenes had been familiar to her from the earliest years when, on an infant's limbs, she had toddled over such battlefields, and wound tiny hands in the hair of some dead trooper who had given her sweetmeats the hour before, vainly trying to awaken him. And she went through all the intense misery and desolation of the scene now without shrinking, and with that fearless, tender devotion to the wounded which Cigarette showed in common with other soldiers of her nation; being, like them, a young lion in the combat, but a creature unspeakably gentle and full of sympathy when the fury of the fight was over.

She had seen great slaughter often enough, but even she had not seen any struggle more close, more murderous, than this had been. The dead lay by hundreds; French and Arab locked in one another's limbs as they had fallen when the ordinary mode of warfare had failed to satiate their violence, and they had wrestled together like wolves fighting and rending each ocher over a disputed carca.s.s. The bitterness and the hatred of the contest were shown in the fact that there were very few merely wounded or disabled; almost all the numbers that strewed the plain were dead. It had been a battle-royal, and, but for her arrival with the fresh squadrons, not one among her countrymen would have lived to tell the story of this terrible duello which had been as magnificent in heroism as any Austerlitz or Gemappes, but which would pa.s.s unhonored, almost unnamed, among the futile, fruitless heroisms of Algerian warfare.

"Is he killed? Is he killed?" she thought, as she bent over each knot of motionless bodies, where, here and there, some faint, stifled breath, or some moan of agony, told that life still lingered beneath the huddled, stiffening heap. And a tightness came at her heart, an aching fear made her shrink, as she raised each hidden face, that she had never known before. "What if he be?" she said fiercely to herself. "It is nothing to me. I hate him, the cold aristocrat! I ought to be glad if I see him lie here."

But, despite her hatred for him, she could not banish that hot, feverish hope, that cold, suffocating fear, which, turn by turn, quickened and slackened the bright flow of her warm, young blood as she searched among the slain.

"Ah! le pauvre Picpon!" she said softly, as she reached at last the place where the young Cha.s.seur lay, and lifted the black curls off his forehead. The hoofs of the charging cavalry had cruelly struck and trampled his frame; the back had been broken, and the body had been mashed as in a mortar under the thundering gallop of the Horse; but the face was still uninjured, and had a strange, pathetic beauty, a calm and smiling courage on it. It was ashen pale; but the great black eyes that had glistened in such malicious mirth, and sparkled in such malignant mischief during life, were open, and had a mournful, pitiful serenity in their look as if from their depths the soul still gazed--that soul which had been neglected and cursed, and left to wander among evil ways, yet which, through all its darkness, all its ignorance, had reached, unguided, to love and to n.o.bility.