n the towns they were burning and destroying
God's ministers, and who had thrown themselves into the fray so that
society should not lapse into barbarism.

The common danger, the misery of the interminable marches to deceive
the enemy, the scarcity suffered in the barren fields and on the rough
hilltops on which they took refuge, made them all equals, enthusiasts,
sceptics or rustics. They all felt the same desire to compensate
themselves for their privations, to appease the ravenous beast they
felt inside, awakened and irritated by a life of such sudden changes;
as much by the wild abundance and plundering of a sack as by the
distress endured in the long marches over interminable plains without
ever seeing the slightest sign of life. On entering a town they would
shout, "Long live religion," but on the slightest provocation they
would do this, that and the other in the name of God and all the
saints, not omitting in their filthy oaths to swear by everything most
sacred in that same religion.

Gabriel, who soon became accustomed to this wandering life, ceased
to feel shocked. The former scruples of the seminarist vanished,
smothered under the crust of the fighting man, which became hardened
with war.

The romantic figure of Dona Blanca, the king's sister-in-law passed
before him, like a person in a novel; in her romantic energy this
princess wished to emulate the deeds of the heroines of La Vendee, and
mounted on a small white horse, her pistol in her belt, and the white
scarf tied over her floating tresses, she put herself at the head of
these armed bands, who revived in the centre of the Peninsula
the strife of almost prehistoric times. The flutter of the dark
riding-habit of this heroine served as a standard to the battalions of
Zouaves, to the troop of French, German, and Italian adventurers, the
scum of all the wars on the globe, who found it pleasanter to follow
a woman anxious for fame than to enlist themselves into the foreign
legion of Algeria.

The assault of Cuenca, the sole victory of the campaign, made a deep
impression on Gabriel's memory; the troops of men wearing the scarf,
after they had knocked down the ramparts as weak as mud walls, rushed
like overflowing streams through the streets. The firing from the
windows could not stop them; they rushed in pale, with discoloured
lips and eyes brilliant with homicidal mania, the danger overcome, and
the knowledge that they were at length masters of the pla