Under Two Flags (Volume 2); A Novel - Softcover

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1896. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... Filante, and ridden out of the camp without warning or farewell to any: she was as free to come and to go as though she were a bird on the wing. Thus she went, knowing nothing of his fate. And with the sunrise went also the woman whom he loved--in ignorance. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE. The warm transparent light of an African autumnal noon shone down through the white canvas roof of a great tent in the heart of the encamped divisions at the head-quarters of the Army of the South. In the tent there was a densely packed throng--an immense, close, hushed, listening crowd, of which every man wore the uniform of France, of which the mute undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something that was almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness in their eyes and the strained absorption of their countenances; for they were in court, and that court was the Conseil de Guerre of their own southern camp. The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that can be laid against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the many eyes of the military crowd turned on him where he stood surrounded by his guard, his crime against his chief was forgotten, and they only remembered--Zaraila. Many of those present had seen him throughout that day of blood, at the head of his decimated squadron, with the guidon held aloft above every foe; to them that tall, slender form standing there, with a calm, weary dignity, that had nothing of the passion of the mutinous or the consciousness of the criminal in its serene repose, had shed upon it the luster of a heroism that made them ready almost to weep like women that the death of a mutineer should be the sole answer given by France to the savior of her honor...