He did not look at the newspapers she offered him; but sat gazing out
from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Neapolitan felucca, down the
checkered shadows and the many-colored masses of the little, crooked,
rambling, semi-barbaric alley. He was thinking of the Napoleons in his
sash and of the promise he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would
keep it he was resolved. The few impressive, vivid words of the young
vivandiere had painted before him like a picture the horrors of mutiny
and its hopelessness; rather than that, through him, these should befall
the men who had become his brethren-in-arms, he felt ready to let the
Black Hawk do his worst on his own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness,
he had never known in the excitement of active service came on him,
brought by this sting of insult brought from the fair hand of an
aristocrate.
There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The uttermost that
could ever come to him would be a grade something higher in the army
that now enrolled him; the gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau.
Algerine warfare was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy
or the Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with unerring
omniscience a leader's genius under the kepi of a common trooper. Though
he should show the qualities of a Massena or a Kleber, the chances were
a million to one that he would never get even as much as a lieutenancy;
and the raids on the decimated tribes, the obscure skirmishes of the
interior, though terrible in slaughter and venturesome enough, were not
the fields on which great military successes were won and great military
honors acquired.
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