ith wine; hours of
horrible, unsuccored suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his
throat and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh,
while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal; hours
of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was given to slay and
yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent
rocks, the doomed were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in
the warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the
sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to
aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative left, as the
challenging eyes of "Zephir" or "Chasse-Marais" flashed death across the
barriere, in a combat where only one might live, though the root of the
quarrel had been nothing more than a toss too much of brandy, a puff of
tobacco smoke construed into insult, or a fille de joie's maliciously
cast fire-brand of taunt or laugh. Hours of severe discipline, of
relentless routine, of bitter deprivation, of campaigns hard as steel
in the endurance they needed, in the miseries they entailed; of military
subjection, stern and unbending, a yoke of iron that a personal and
pitiless tyranny weighted with persecution that was scarce else than
hatred; of an implicit obedience that required every instinct of
liberty, every habit of early life, every impulse of pride and manhood
and freedom to be choked down like crimes, and buried as though they had
never been. Hours again that repaid these in full, when the long line
of Horse swept out to the attack, with the sun on the points of their
weapons; when the wheeling clouds of Arab riders poured like the clouds
of the simoon on a thinned, devoted troop that rallied and fought as
hawks fight herons, and saved the day as the sky was flushed with that
day's decline; when some soft-eyed captive, with limbs of free mountain
grace, and the warm veins flushing under the clear olive of her cheeks,
was first wild as a young fettered falcon, and then, like the falcon,
quickly learned to tremble at a touch, and grow tame under a caress, and
love nothing so well as the hand that had captured her. Hours of all the
chanceful fortunes of a soldier's life, in hill-wars and desert raids,
passed in memory through his thoughts now where he was stretched;
looking dreamily through the film of his smoke at the city of tents, and
the reclining forms of camels, and the t