bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that the
Friend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, were
gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest blackguard prostrate
there; but they never smiled, they never took the dying heart of a man
back with one glance to the days of his childhood, they never gave a
sweet, wild snatch of song like a bird's on a spring-blossoming bough
that thrilled through half-dead senses, with a thousand voices from
a thousand buried hours. "But the Little One," as said a gaunt,
gray-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealing
slowly up his jagged, torn frame--"the Little One--do you see--she is
youth, she is life; she is all we have lost. That is her charm! The
Sisters are good women, they are very good; but they only pity us. The
Little One, she loves us. That is the difference; do you see?"

It was all the difference--a wide difference; she loved them all, with
the warmth and fire of her young heart, for the sake of France and of
their common Flag. And though she was but a wild, wayward, mischievous
gamin,--a gamin all over, though in a girl's form,--men would tell in
camp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their brown, scarred
cheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated
foreheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long nights of
torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or pawned as
soon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how in their delirium
the sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regiment would soothe them,
singing above their wretched beds some carol or chant of their own
native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for,
were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song
of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of
Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri--Cigarette
knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every
soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's
cradle-song and of his first love's lips. And there had been times when
those songs, suddenly breaking through the darkness of night, suddenly
lulling the fiery anguish of wounds, had made the men who one hour
before had been like mad dogs, like goaded tigers--men full of the
lusts of slaughter and the lust of the senses, and chained powerless and
blaspheming to a bed of agony--