"At Medeah, Lieutenant."

Ah, Medeah! And drawing their chairs closer together they started a
conversation, regardless of difference in rank. The life of the desert
had become a second nature, for Prosper, where the trumpet was
continually calling them to arms, where a large portion of their time
was spent on horseback, riding out to battle as they would to the
chase, to some grand battue of Arabs. There was just one soup-basin
for every six men, or tribe, as it was called, and each tribe was a
family by itself, one of its members attending to the cooking, another
washing their linen, the others pitching the tent, caring for the
horses, and cleaning the arms. By day they scoured the country beneath
a sun like a ball of blazing copper, loaded down with the burden of
their arms and utensils; at night they built great fires to drive away
the mosquitoes and sat around them, singing the songs of France. Often
it happened that in the luminous darkness of the night, thick set with
stars, they had to rise and restore peace among their four-footed
friends, who, in the balmy softness of the air, had set to biting and
kicking one another, uprooting their pickets and neighing and snorting
furiously. Then there was the delicious coffee, their greatest, indeed
their only, luxury, which they ground by the primitive appliances of a
carbine-butt and a porringer, and afterward strained through a red
woolen sash. But their life was not one of unalloyed enjoyment; there
were dark days, also, when they were far from the abodes of civilized
man with the enemy before them. No more fires, then; no singing, no
good times. There were times when hunger, thirst and want of sleep
caused them horrible suffering, but no matter; they loved that daring,
adventurous life, that war of skirmishes, so propitious for the
display of personal bravery and as interesting as a fairy tale,
enlivened by the _razzias_, which were only public plundering on a