Therefore they loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful
warriors, to whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred; by whom in
their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was spared, whose
law was license, and whose mercy was murder. They loved her, these
brutes whose greed was like the tiger's, whose hate was like the
devouring flame; and any who should have harmed a single lock of her
curling hair would have had the spears of the African Mussulmans buried
by the score in his body. They loved her, with the one fond, triumphant
love these vultures of the army ever knew; and to-day they gloried in
her with fierce, passionate delight. To-day she was to her wild wolves
of Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleurs was to her brethren of France. And
today was the crown of her young life.
In the fair, slight, girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a
courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's,
a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by
poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the
blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child
of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die
greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition in the army of her country,
to have her name remembered in the roll-call; to be once shrined in the
love and honor of France, Cigarette--full of the boundless joys of life
that knew no weakness and no pain; strong as the young goat, happy
as the young lamb, careless as the young flower tossing on the summer
breeze--Cigarette would have died contentedly.
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