And the Chef de Bataillon saluted her once more, and turned away to view the carnage-strewn plain, and number the few who remained out of those who had been wakened by the clash of the Arab arms in the gray of the earliest dawn.

Cigarette’s eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her flushed cheeks grew scarlet.  Since her infancy it had been her dream to have the Cross, to have the Grande Croix to lie above her little lion’s heart; it had been the one longing, the one ambition, the only undying desire of her soul; and lo! she touched its realization!

The wild, frantic, tumultuous cheers and caresses of her soldiery, who could not triumph in her and triumph with her enough to satiate them, recalled her to the actual moment.  She sprang down from her elevation, and turned on them with a rebuke.  “Ah! you are making this fuss about me while hundreds of better soldiers than I lie yonder.  Let us look to them first; we will play the fool afterward.”

And, though she had ridden fifty miles that day, if she had ridden one—­though she had eaten nothing since sunrise, and had only had one draught of bad water—­though she was tired, and stiff, and bruised, and parched with thirst, Cigarette dashed off as lightly as a young goat to look for the wounded and the dying men who strewed the plain far and near.

She remembered one whom she had not seen after that first moment in which she had given the word to the squadrons to charge.

It was a terrible sight—­the arid plain, lying in the scarlet glow of sunset, covered with dead bodies, with mutilated limbs, with horses gasping and writhing, with men raving like mad creatures in the torture of their wounds.  It was a sight which always went to her heart.  She was a true soldier, and, though, she could deal death pitilessly, could, when the delirium of war was over, tend and yield infinite compassion to those who were in suffering.  But such scenes had been familiar to her from the earliest years when, on an infant’s limbs, she had toddled over such battlefields, and wound tiny hands in the hair of some dead trooper who had given her sweetmeats the hour before, vainly trying to awaken him.  And she went through all the intense misery and desolation of the scene now without shrinking, and with that fearless, tender devotion to the wounded which Cigarette showed in common with other soldiers of her nation; being, like them, a young lion in the combat, but a creature unspeakably gentle and full of sympathy when the fury of the fight was over.

She had seen great slaughter often enough, but even she had not seen any struggle more close, more murderous, than this had been.  The dead lay by hundreds; French and Arab locked in one another’s limbs as they had fallen when the ordinary mode of warfare had failed to satiate their violence, and they had wrestled together like wolves fighting and rending each ocher over a disputed carcass.  The bitterness