and the
plain.

The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the immense level of
the plateau to witness the presentation of the Cross of the Legion of
Honour.

It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on the deep
sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched east and west, north
and south, formed up in three sides of one vast massive square.

The red white and blue of the standards, the brass of the eagle guidons,
the grey tossed manes of the chargers, the fierce swarthy faces of the
soldiery, the scarlet of the Spahis' cloaks, and the snowy folds of the
Demi-Cavalerie turbans, the shine of the sloped lances, and the glisten
of the carbine barrels, fused together in one sea of blended colour,
flashed into a million of prismatic hues against the sombre bistre
shadow of the sunburnt plains and the clear blue of the skies.

It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had availed
nothing except to drive the Arabs away from some hundred leagues of
useless and profitless soil; hundreds of French soldiers had fallen by
disease, and drought, and dysentery, as well as by shot and sabre, and
were unrecorded save on the books of the bureaus, unlamented save,
perhaps, in some little nestling hamlet among the great green woods of
Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines of
Provence, where some woman toiling till sunset among the fields, or
praying before some wayside saint's stone niche, would give a thought to
the far-off and devouring desert that had drawn down beneath its sands
the head that had used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child's, or
caressed as a lover.

But the drums rolled out their long deep thunder over the wastes; and
the shot-torn standards fluttered gaily in the breeze blowing from the
west, and the clear full music of the French bands echoed away to the
dim distant terrible south, where the desert-scorch and the
desert-thirst had murdered their bravest and best--and the Army was _en
fete_. _En fete_, for it did honour to its darling. Cigarette received
the Cross.

Mounted on her own little bright bay, Etoile-Filante, with tricolour
ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy fringes of his mane,
the Little One rode among her Spahis. A scarlet _kepi_ was set on her
thick silken curls, a tricolour sash was knotted round her waist, her
wine-barrel was slung on her left hip, her pistols thrust in her
_ceinturon_, and a light carbine held