With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal's pipe.
"An army's just a machine, sir, in course," he concluded, as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. "But then it's a live machine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel's body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature goes wrong--there's the mischief."
Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung full-length on the skins.
"I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when--when I was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what you say. Yet--fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible blackguards!"
"In course they are, sir; they wouldn't be such larky company unless they was. But what I say is that they're scamps who're told they may be great men, if they like; not scamps who're told that, because they've once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the difference in life."
"Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!"
The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.
"Won't there never be no hope, sir?" he whispered, while his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.
The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.
"Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny."
"No, sir," said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice. "You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----"
He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.
The other moved with a certain impatience.
"How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France?--forget as I have forgotten it!"