and men who at noon gladly stripped
to their shirts, shivered now where they lay under canvas.

Awake while his comrades slept around him, Cecil was stretched, half
unharnessed. The foraging duty of the past twenty-four hours had been
work harassing and heavy, inglorious and full of fatigue. The country
round was bare as a table-rock; the water-courses poor, choked with
dust and stones, unfed as yet by the rains or snows of the approaching
winter. The horses suffered sorely, the men scarce less. The hay for the
former was scant and bad; the rations for the latter often cut off by
flying skirmishers of the foe. The campaign, so far as it had gone, had
been fruitless, yet had cost largely in human life. The men died rapidly
of dysentery, disease, and the chills of the nights, and had severe
losses in countless obscure skirmishes, that served no end except to
water the African soil with blood.

True, France would fill the gaps up as fast as they occurred, and the
"Monitor" would only allude to the present operations when it could
give a flourishing line descriptive of the Arabs being driven back,
decimated, to the borders of the Sahara. But as the flourish of the
"Monitor" would never reach a thousand little way-side huts, and
sea-side cabins, and vine-dressers' sunny nests, where the memory of
some lad who had gone forth never to return would leave a deadly shadow
athwart the humble threshold--so the knowledge that they were only so
many automata in the hands of government, whose loss would merely be
noted that it might be efficiently supplied, was not that wine-draught
of La Gloire which poured the strength and the daring of gods into the
limbs of the men of Jena and of Austerlitz. Still, there was a war-lust
in them, and there was the fire of France; they fought not less superbly
here, where to be food for jackal and kite was their likeliest doom,
than their sires had done under the eagles of the First Empire, when the
Conscript hero of to-day was the glittering Marshal of to-morrow.

Cecil had awakened while the camp still slept. Do what he would, force
himself into the fullness of this fierce and hard existence as he might,
he could not burn out or banish a thing that had many a time haunted
him, but never as it did now--the remembrance of a woman. He almost
laughed as he lay there on a pile of rotting straw, and wrung the truth
out of his own heart, that he--a soldier of these exiled squadrons--was
mad enough to l