There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for that
unceremonious slang phrase--a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blas
and the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand and
the wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an
African, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; with
a purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his men
through the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd
over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yet
who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt,
and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on the
loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of
David for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club
life.
There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, with
a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; a
veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdog
his lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; brief
as Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or the
chastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word--"Fire."
There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highest
repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speed
that could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood alone
once the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them
back, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and his
pantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framing
a matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare as
a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden
treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron of
couscoussou to a tom-cat.
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