The people of St Louis who saw them march away may remember their names. But in a few years’ time, who will be able to call them to mind and to say them again?
So the glasses were drained to the memory of those who fell at Mecké and Bobdiarah. But this strange toast was followed by a moment of intense silence and astonishment, and it cast a gloomy veil upon the spahis’ banquet.
Jean, especially—whose eyes had been sparkling with animation at the infectious gaiety of his comrades, and who, as it happened, had been laughing heartily all this evening, Jean relapsed again into his dreamy, serious mood, hardly knowing why.
“Fallen there in the desert!” ...
Without grasping the full meaning of it, the idea of it chilled him, like the sound of a jackal’s voice; it made his flesh creep....
He was still very much of a child, poor Jean, not yet inured to war, not yet a seasoned soldier. Nevertheless he was very brave; he was not afraid, not in the least afraid, of fighting. When there was talk of Boubakar-Ségou, who was prowling with his army through Cayor, almost up to the gates of St Louis, he felt his heart leap. Sometimes he dreamt about it. It seemed to him that it would do him good, that it would rouse him to see shots fired at last, even it they were directed only against a negro chief. There were times when he was dying of impatience....
It was solely with the idea of fighting that he had become a spahi—not in order that he might pass a languid, monotonous existence in a little white house, held spell-bound by a Khassonké girl....
Poor fellows, drinking to the memory of the dead, laugh, sing, be very merry and foolish, and snatch the fleeting moment of joy.... But song and uproar ring false in this land of Senegal, and yonder in the desert there are assuredly places already marked out for some of you.
X
“In Galam” ... who can divine what mysterious echoes these words may awaken deep in the soul of an exiled negro?