The obsequies of the Imperial favorite had taken place, with all the pomp of military and official state, at the Chapel of the Invalides, at the end of October. The galleries had been packed with tearful ladies in black and bugles.... Ambassadors had held the ends of the pall.... The entire Army had acted as chief mourner.... And a representative of the Emperor had conveyed to Madame la Maréchale the following touching message from his Imperial master:
“I simply transfer to you, Madame, the sentiments I entertained for my departed friend.”
Which noble and touching utterance, for some reason, tickled these Gallic warriors hugely. But he was droll, they said, that fellow Badinguet! Depend upon it, he would presently compose an epitaph which would make everybody laugh like mad.... One of the gossipers suggested that “Morte la bête mort le venin” (which is a polite version of “Dead dogs cannot bite”) would look well in gilt letters upon the memorial tablet dedicated to the virtues of the deceased.
Another quotation occurred to Dunoisse as he stood leaning on the bulwark not far from the chatterers:
“I am taken in mine own toils; I am fallen in the pit I dug for others: Death hath pierced me while I sent forth my swift arrows against the lives of many men.”
Though those men had died, and other men would die, there was no help for it! That was the word brought by those silent ghastly messengers who came drifting down from the seat of War.
As the steamer threaded her way amidst the swirling currents of the Cyclades, their accusing shapes began to start up, in some eddy of water and sunshine, or water and moonlight, under the steamer’s side, and vanish in the flurry of her paddles and reappear in her wake, drifting away....
Sometimes they were animals of draught, and Commissariat and burden, who, despite the bloating of long immersion, had plainly died of want. Or they were shapeless forms, swathed in canvas, of sick or wounded soldiers who had died upon the homeward-bound transports, and had been consigned to the deep, sewn up in hammocks too scantily shotted. Or they came in little knots and groups of red coats and blue coats, consorting and intermingling, parting and drifting on in silent, passionless acquiescence with the will of the winds and tides.
These were the dead, French and Turkish, but chiefly English soldiers who had sailed from Varna in September, and had been thrown overboard during the transit of the Black Sea. They were heralds of the hospital-ships that, packed from stem to stern with unspeakable misery and suffering, would soon be hurrying down the Bosphorus on their way to Scutari.
Young soldiers, raw recruits upon their way to Gallipoli, peeping rosy-gilled or pale-faced through the gun-ports on the troop-decks, would jerk back their heads in consternation as they encountered an eyeless grin of greeting from one of these stark voyagers, of whom the great bossy-mailed turbot, and the giant sturgeon of the Black Sea, grown dainty with full feeding, had merely taken toll, and passed on to the ravenous sharks and the huge rays and octopi of the Ægean, and Ionian, and Mediterranean seas.