This colonel was not a favorite in the division to which his brigade belonged.  He was a good soldier, but a dull companion.  He was also accused of hauteur and of an unsoldierly reserve with his brother officers.

Some loose-tongued ones even called him a milk-sop, because he was constantly seen conversing with the priest—­he who had nothing to say to an honest soldier.

Others said, “No, hang it, he is not a milk-sop:  he is a tried soldier:  he is a sulky beggar all the same.”  Those under his immediate command were divided in opinion about him.  There was something about him they could not understand.  Why was his sallow face so stern, so sad? and why with all that was his voice so gentle? somehow the few words that did fall from his mouth were prized.  One old soldier used to say, “I would rather have a word from our brigadier than from the commander-in-chief.”  Others thought he must at some part of his career have pillaged a church, taken the altar-piece, and sold it to a picture-dealer in Paris, or whipped the earrings out of the Madonna’s ears, or admitted the female enemy to quarter upon ungenerous conditions:  this, or some such crime to which we poor soldiers are liable:  and now was committing the mistake of remording himself about it.  “Always alongside the chaplain, you see!”

This cold and silent man had won the heart of the most talkative sergeant in the French army.  Sergeant La Croix protested with many oaths that all the best generals of the day had commanded him in turn, and that his present colonel was the first that had succeeded in inspiring him with unlimited confidence.  “He knows every point of war—­this one,” said La Croix, “I heard him beg and pray for leave to storm this thundering bastion before it was armed:  but no, the old muffs would be wiser than our colonel.  So now here we are kept at bay by a place that Julius Caesar and Cannibal wouldn’t have made two bites at apiece; no more would I if I was the old boy out there behind the hill.”  In such terms do sergeants denote commanders-in-chief—­at a distance.  A voluble sergeant has more influence with the men than the minister of war is perhaps aware:  on the whole, the 24th brigade would have followed its gloomy colonel to grim death and a foot farther.  One thing gave these men a touch of superstitious reverence for their commander.  He seemed to them free from physical weakness.  He never sat down to dinner, and seemed never to sleep.  At no hour of the day or night were the sentries safe from his visits.

Very annoying.  But, after awhile, it led to keen watchfulness:  the more so that the sad and gloomy colonel showed by his manner he appreciated it.  Indeed, one night he even opened his marble jaws, and told Sergeant La Croix that a watchful sentry was an important soldier, not to his brigade only, but to the whole army.  Judge whether the maxim and the implied encomium did not circulate next morning, with additions.