The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the immense level of
the plateau to witness the presentation of the Cross of the Legion of
Honor.
It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on the deep,
sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched east and west, north
and south, formed up in three sides of one vast, massive square.
The battalions of Zouaves and of Zephyrs; the brigade of Chasseurs
d'Afrique; the squadrons of Spahis; the regiments of Tirailleurs and
Turcos; the batteries of Flying Artillery, were all massed there,
reassembled from the various camps and stations of the southern
provinces to do honor to the day--to do honor in especial to one by whom
the glory of the Tricolor had been saved unstained.
The red, white, and blue of the standards, the brass of the eagle
guidons; the gray, tossed manes of the chargers; the fierce, swarthy
faces of the soldiery; the scarlet of the Spahis' cloaks, and the snowy
folds of the Demi-Cavalry turbans; the shine of the sloped lances, and
the glisten of the carbine barrels, fused together in one sea of blended
color, flashed into a million prismatic hues against the somber shadow
of the sunburned plains and the clear blue of the skies.
It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had availed
nothing, except to drive the Arabs away from some hundred leagues of
useless and profitless soil; hundreds of French soldiers had fallen by
disease, and drought, and dysentery, as well as by shot and saber, and
were unrecorded save on the books of the bureaus; unlamented, save,
perhaps, in some little nestling hamlet among the great, green woods of
Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines of Provence,
where some woman, toiling till sunset among the fields, or praying
before some wayside saint's stone niche, would give a thought to the
far-off and devouring desert that had drawn down beneath its sands the
head that used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child's, or caressed
as a lover's.
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