he was most
closely driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and sheep, but,
with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, fell more and
more backward and southward; drawing the French on and on, farther and
farther across the plains, in the sickliest times of hottest drought.
Re-enforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as they were
thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was a man the less to
their numbers forever, and the lightning-like pursuit began to tell
terribly on them; their herds had fallen into their pursuers' hands, and
famine menaced them. Nevertheless, they were fierce in attack as tigers,
rapid in swoop as vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the
cavalry lost more in this fruitless, worthless work than they would have
done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz.
Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very rare, dysentery
came with the scorch and the toil of this endless charge; the chief in
command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, swore heavily as he saw many of
his best men dropping off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two
hundred napoleons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik's head
or the living beauty of Djelma.
One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few barren,
withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little thread of
brackish water oozed through the yellow earth.
It was high noon; the African sun was at its fiercest; far as the eye
could reach there was only one boundless, burning, unendurable glitter
of parching sand and cloudless sky--brazen beneath, brazen above--till
the desert and the heavens touched, and blent in one tawny, fiery
glow in the measureless distance. The men lay under canvas, dead-beat,
half-naked, without the power to do anything except to fight like
thirst-maddened dogs for a draught at the shallow stream that they and
their breathless horses soon drained dry.
Even Raoul de Chateauroy, though his frame was like an Arab's, and knit
into Arab endurance, was stretched like a great bloodhound, chained
by the sultry oppression. He was ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to
the core, and sharp and swift as steel in his rigor, but he was a fine
soldier, and never spared himself any of the hardships that his regiment
had to endure under him.
Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken; a trumpet-call rang
through the stillness; against the amber transparency of the horizon
line th
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