smiting on shields of
bronze.

But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the
desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.

"Hush!" she said softly, with an accent in her voice that hushed the
riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the lull in a storm.
"Give me no honour while _they_ sleep yonder. With the dead lies the
glory!"

* * *

Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round,
round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they remain
little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest.

* * *

Love was all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had always reckoned; a
chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to
flavour an idle moment. "_Vin et Venus_" she had always been accustomed
to see worshipped together, as became their alliterative; it was a bit
of fun--that was all. A passion that had pain in it had never touched
the Little One; she had disdained it with lightest, airiest contumely.
"If your sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, eat the sugar, and throw
the almond away, you goose! that is simple enough, isn't it? Bah! I
don't pity the people who eat the bitter almond; not I--_ce sont bien
betes, ces gens!_" she had said once, when arguing with an officer on
the absurdity of a melancholy love which possessed him, and whose
sadness she rallied most unmercifully. Now, for once in her young life,
the Child of France found that it was remotely possible to meet with
almonds so bitter that the taste will remain and taint all things, do
what philosophy may to throw its acridity aside.

* * *

There were before them death, deprivation, long days of famine, long
days of drought and thirst; parching sun-baked roads; bitter chilly
nights; fiery furnace-blasts of sirocco; killing, pitiless, northern
winds; hunger, only sharpened by a snatch of raw meat or a handful of
maize; and the probabilities, ten to one, of being thrust under the sand
to rot, or left to have their skeletons picked clean by the vultures.
But what of that? There were also the wild delight of combat, the
freedom of lawless warfare, the joy of deep strokes thrust home, the
chance of plunder, of wine-skins, of cattle, of women; above all, that
lust for slaughter which burns so deep down in the hidden souls of men,
and gives them such brotherhood with wolf and vulture, and tiger,