“I know; I know. I have gone days on a handful of barley-ears. M. le Colonel has his marmitons, and his fricassees, and his fine cuisine where he camps—ho!—but we soldiers have nothing but a hunch of baked chaff. Well, we win battles on it!”
Which was one of the impromptu proverbs that Cigarette was wont to manufacture and bring into her discourse with an air of authority as of one who quotes from profound scholastic lore. It was received with a howl of applause and of ratification. The entrails often gnaw with bitter pangs of famine in the Army of Algiers, and they knew well how sharp an edge hunger gives to the steel.
Nevertheless, the sullen, angry roar of famished men, that is so closely, so terribly like the roar of wild beasts, did not cease.
“Where is Biribi?” they growled. “Biribi never keeps us waiting. Those are Biribi's beasts.”
“Right,” said Cigarette laconically, with a crack of her mule-whip on to the arm of a Zouave who was attempting to make free with her convoy and purloin a loaf off the load.
“Where is Biribi, then?” they roared in concert, a crowd of eager, wolfish, ravenous, impatient men, hungry as camp fasting could make them, and half inclined even to tear their darling in pieces, since she kept them thus from the stores.
Cigarette uncovered her head with a certain serious grace very rare in her.
“Biribi had made a good end.”
Her assailants grew very quiet.
“Shot?” they asked briefly. Biribi was a Tringlo well beloved in all the battalions.