While there's leaves in the forest and foam on the river,
Macgregor, despite them, shall flourish for ever.
But at others, delivered with fierce emphasis and dramatic fervour, she shrank back with quivering lip and pain on her face:
If they rob us of name and pursue us with beagles,
Give their roofs to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.
When the Adjutant had finished and had sat down, looking a little shame-faced at having allowed his feelings to so carry him away, Madame and the girl spoke rapidly in French for a minute.
Then Madame shook her head. "But no," she said, "I do not like it, this song. It is cru-el, cru-el. How says it—'The roof to the burning, and the bodies, the dead, the flesh, to the birds of prey.' But no, that is the war of savage."
The C.O. tried to explain to her, while the Adjutant did so even more eagerly to the girl, that it was war of the most savage and relentless kind that ran in those far back days in the Highlands of Scotland; but again Madame protested. "It is too cru-el. I do not like it that you make such song and such music now. War, it is no more so. What is it your song says of the burning of la maison?" She made the Adjutant repeat the lines and repeated after him, "Ah, m'sieu, 'Give their roof to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.' That is, burn the shelter of the women and children, and leave the dead unbury. You would not do that; even the Boche that we despise would not do this thing. It is cru-el, cru-el."
Mademoiselle said nothing, but they could all see the shrinking in her eyes as she looked at them, the wonder if, even now, the Écossais could be so savage as to make such war. The Adjutant set himself to remove such an idea of their barbarity from her mind, and with some success apparently, since there was little shrinking and no more than a faint blush of timid friendship when they said good-night and retired.