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Are you all mad?" demanded a wrathful subaltern, plunging round the traverse to where Snapper mouth-organed the "Marseillaise," 'Enery Irving lustily intoned his anthem of the Blind Mice, and Corporal Flannigan passed from the deep lowing of a cow to the clarion calls of the farmyard rooster.
Certainly they only asked for service; it was not their fault, after all, if one had not confidence in them, and if they were not sent to the front as soon as they reached the fortifications. While crossing the drawbridge they had sung the Marseillaise like men ready to be shot down.
"'That's all rigmarole that somebody hands you when you've won the Wooden Cross and a little garden growing over your tummy, is the way they put it in their argot. 'The Marseillaise, the Chant du Depart are all right for the youngsters, and the reviews and let me tell you, the reviews take a lot of furbishing and make a lot of dust. That's all they really amount to.
"Now, listen to this," added M. Belly, enthusiastically, as he went to a piano which I was surprised to find, standing in a recruiting office; and seating himself at the instrument, he played for my especial benefit the stirring strains of a new, specially-commissioned battle-song, which, said he, "we intend to call the Marseillaise of the Paris Amazons!"
She put on no airs, and she made no pretences. She turned everything she could find into scrambled eggs, and played the "Marseillaise" on her blow-hole. She did herself up into knots to break whalebone, and untied them like a pop of a cork. She was no more female than she was science. She was wrath and earthquakes and the day of judgment.
It happened, naturally enough, that the particular national anthem chosen by the energetic and patriotic man who led the band at the piano was "The Marseillaise." The incessant chatter and laughter went on as usual. The music had no more effect upon the closely filled room than a hackneyed ragtime.
He would have much liked to sing had he been able, but he had no voice, though this did not prevent his humming now and then pieces which struck his fancy; and as these little reminiscences usually recurred to him in the mornings, he regaled me with them while he was being dressed. The air that I have heard him thus mutilate most frequently was that of The Marseillaise.
When as they came slowly in on the full tide, with that rose sunset back of them, the bands on their decks playing across the waters, and five thousand boys on the first boat singing "Keep the Home Fires Burning," then the "Marseillaise," and finally "The Star-Spangled Banner," in which the crowd on the shore joined, there was a Silhouette of the Sea that burned its way into our souls.
It sang the Marseillaise for thee, and thou didst kiss the plume that fell from its wing: it came in the lustre of Paradise, and thou perhaps didst turn thyself away to some poor sparrow that sat with merest tinsel on its wings.
They were all of fifteen thousand tons and eighteen knots. To these was added the Suffren, also of eighteen knots, but only twelve thousand seven hundred tons: she had come from Brest with a flotilla of torpedo boats. There were six armoured cruisers, Jules Ferry, Leon Gambetta, Victor Hugo, Jeanne d'Arc, Aube and Marseillaise.
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