“Hail, comrade! Soon shall you be as I am, food for Death the Insatiable!” the silent one would say, and with the wave of a rigid arm, pass on. And the recruit, with a sick heart under his coarse red jacket, would crack a brutal jest, or the older man would comment, spitting into the oily water:
“Poor beggar, he do look bad, surely! Well, War or Peace, that’s what we all will come to at the last!”
Whilst the Zouave or Voltigeur would shrug, pipe in mouth, and say, grimacing at the foul exhalations of corruption, and the fœtid odors of the sludge:
“He stinks, our friend there, sacred name of a pig! and he is not quite so handsome as when his sweetheart last embraced him, but what of that? It’s the Fortune of War! Our Army of France has been pruned; ten thousand out of seventy-five thousand brave fellows have spit up their souls of cholera and dysentery. Saperlipopette! it’s the Fortune of War!”
And the wheeling cloud of gulls that came with and followed the visitors would scream as though in derision, and settle again to their feast in the transport’s wake. And the Voltigeur, or Chasseur, or Zouave would toss off a glass of Cognac and return to the game of dice or cards. But Dunoisse leaned upon the taffrail of the steamer, and stared at the floating dead men with eyes that were full of horror. It seemed to him that the empty sockets glared at him, that the stark hands pointed at him, that the lipless mouths cried to him: “Thou art Cain!”
Had he not been going to her he could not have borne it.... He said to himself that, of all women living, Ada Merling alone would pity and understand.
Said a ruddy-haired, high-colored, handsome young British giant to another, graver, older man, and both were officers of a crack Dragoon Regiment going out to fill up Balaklava chinks in Redlett’s Heavy Brigade:
“That white-haired polyglotter in the shabby togs, who answers you and me in English, and talks Parisian French with the French fellows, and Greek with the Cypriote currant-merchant who makes such a hog of himself at the cabin table d’hôte—and is civil in Spanish to the opera-dancer and her aunt from Madrid whenever he can’t avoid ’em—and swops Turkish with the Osmanli Bey who’s been Consul for the Porte at Marseilles—is a queer kind of chap, uncommonly! Do you know, I’ve seen him looking at those floating soger-men as if he’d killed ’em all!”
Answered the speaker’s senior officer, lighting a large cheroot: