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Others were ordered up to replace the worn-out command, and while an indomitable general pushed fresh columns into the field to track the savages to their winter lairs, the ragged troopers for all the world like so many beggars a horseback, so many mounted scarecrows were ordered in to the big garrisons near the supply depots to refit, recuperate, and restore to discipline.
Their clothes were tattered and torn, as though they might only be fit for scarecrows in the newly planted corn field; while their faces were unkempt with beards of a week's growth; which helped to make them look uglier than might otherwise have been the case.
They wear cork helmets, and the classic green spectacles; drink whisky and soda, and eat voraciously sandwiches and other viands out of greasy paper, which now litters the floor. And the women! Heavens! what scarecrows they are! And this kind of thing, so the black-robed Bedouin guards inform us, is repeated every day so long as the season lasts.
Instead of a rheumatic old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.
One morning I detected about three dozen of the poaching rogues stalking through the grass in the direction of my corn-patch, and, almost before I knew it, the feathered rascals had played havoc with my promising crop of popcorn. Then I remembered that I had read and seen pictures in books of scarecrows; so I dressed up a figure and set it up near the corn patch.
Guarding them against the hovering swarms of blackbirds were many scarecrows, rigged out in the uniforms and topped by the helmets of the men whose bones bleach amid the grain. In Switzerland they make a very excellent red wine called Schweizerblut, because the grapes from which it is made are grown on soil reddened by the blood of the Swiss who fell on the battlefield of Morat.
The first few miles were not marked by anything of particular interest: the collections of huts and bare walls which sometimes adorned the hillsides were far away; the curious piles of stones in the fields, almost like scarecrows, were only landmarks.
Passing between these alarming scarecrows one reaches the innermost court. The residence of our friends is on the right, the great hall of the pagoda is before us. In this paved court are bronze torch-holders as high as turrets.
YOU, the last descendant of the Counts Hermenstein, a noble and loyal family, will degrade your birth by taking up with the rags and tags of humanity the scarecrows of life? And by your sheer stupidity and obstinacy, you will allow your husband's soul to be dragged to perdition with your own! You call it love to keep him an infidel?
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun.
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