“V'la ce que c'est la gloire—au grabat!” said Cigarette, now grinding her pretty teeth. She was in her most revolutionary and reckless mood, drumming the rataplan with her spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the corner of old Miou-Matou's mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that title among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat into a stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, being laid up with a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his shoulders, a rib or so broken, and one or two other little trifling casualties.
Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed in the depths of his great, hairy chest. “Dream of glory, and end on a grabat! Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures—to sweep off an Arbico's neck nice and clean—swish!” and he described a circle with his lean, brawny arm with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would listen thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience or Della Quercia work.
“Pleasures! My God! Infinite, endless misery!” murmured a man on her right hand. He was not thirty years of age; with a delicate, dark, beautiful head that might have passed as model to a painter for a St. John. He was dying fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies.
Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him.
“Well! is it not misery that is glory?”
“We think that it is when we are children. God help me!” murmured the man who lay dying of lung-disease.
“Ouf! Then we think rightly! Glory! Is it the cross, the star, the baton? No![*] He who wins those runs his horse up on a hill, out of shot range, and watches through his glass how his troops surge up, wave on wave, in the great sea of blood. It is misery that is glory—the misery that toils with bleeding feet under burning suns without complaint; that lies half-dead through the long night with but one care—to keep the torn flag free from the conqueror's touch; that bears the rain of blows in punishment, rather than break silence and buy release by betrayal of a comrade's trust; that is beaten like the mule, and galled like the horse, and starved like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet does the thing which is right, and the thing which is brave, despite all; that suffers, and endures, and pours out his blood like water to the thirsty sands, whose thirst is never stilled, and goes up in the morning sun to the combat, as though death were paradise that the Arbicos dream; knowing the while, that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoof through the throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over the writhing limb. That is glory. The misery that is heroism because France needs it, because a soldier's honor wills it. That is glory. It is here to-day in the hospital as it never is in the Cour des Princes, where the glittering host of the marshals gather!”
[*] Having received ardent reproaches from field officers
and commanders of divisions for the injustice done their
services by this sentence, I beg to assure them that the
sentiment is Cigarette's—not mine. I should be very sorry
for an instant to seem to depreciate that “genius of
command” without whose guidance an army is but a rabble, or
to underrate that noblest courage which accepts the burden
of arduous responsibilities and of duties as bitter in
anxiety as they are precious in honor.
Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in her bright cheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there was in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world mistily calls genius.
There were men lying in that sick-chamber brutalized, crime-stained, ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and, like them, reared and driven for the slaughter; yet there was not one among them to whom some ray of light failed to come from those words, through whom some thrill failed to pass as they heard them. Out yonder in the free air, in the barrack court, or on the plains, the Little One would rate them furiously, mock them mercilessly, rally them with the fist of a saber, if they were mutinous, and lash them with the most pitiless ironies if they were grumbling; but here, in the hospital, the Little One loved them, and they knew it, and that love gave a flute-like music to the passion of her voice.