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His flesh quivered, as if it felt fierce French nails fasten into it. He saw the blood-lust flame in the eyes which searched his face. He trembled, but spoke up firmly. "No. The Secret Service of England." "Liar!" roared the patron. "Menteur! Espion! Foul seducer of a desolate veuve de France! Die, traitor! Madame, raise your pistol; shoot shoot instantly for the honour of France!"
The empire fell apart as usual, and no less quickly than usual, under his successors; and from his death until the strong hand of General Lyautey took over the direction of affairs the Hassanian rule in Morocco was little more than a tumult of incoherent ambitions. The successors of Moulay-Ismaël inherited his blood-lust and his passion for dominion without his capacity to govern.
The blood-lust, the heroism, the savagery, the thrust, the oath, the dust-choked prayer, the forgotten breathing clay under the bloodstained foot; the very clash and din of the fray; all is told with the brush. And yet not one unnecessary detail squandered.
As a queer character this man is worth remembering by those who study the psychology of war, but he is not typical of the soldiers of France, who in the mass have no blood-lust, and hate butchering their fellow beings, except in their moments of mad excitement, made up of fear as well as of rage, when to the shout of "En avant!" they leap out of the trenches and charge a body of Germans, stabbing and slashing with their bayonets, clubbing men to death with the butt-ends of their rifles, and for a few minutes of devilish intoxication, with the smell of blood in their nostrils, and with bloodshot eyes, rejoicing in slaughter.
"I seen you, an' I was wonderin' what you was up to. If you try anything like that again, I'll beat cheh to death. Understand?" They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion immeasurable and inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its blood-lust sated, terrified by what it saw, begged them impartially to cease.
In another he reviewed troops at Fontainebleau, and again, from an eminence, he overlooked a spirited battle, directing it with a masterly wave of his sabre. These things were a little disconcerting to one in whom the blood-lust had diminished. He was better pleased with a steel engraving of the coronation, and this he secured for a trifle.
"You pledged us safety if we would accompany you here." "I pledged you safety, Monsieur," she corrected haughtily. "I gave no word of promise as to others. Yet circumstances have changed. I supposed then we had enough of victims to appease even such blood-lust as yelps yonder." "You mean the preacher and Benteen?" "Ay; they would suffice, with plenty of slaves for good measure.
He felt that the great wolf had put a dishonor upon him; and for a few days he was no longer the impartial student of natural history, but the keen, primitive hunter with the blood-lust hot in his veins. Then this mood passed, or, rather, underwent a change.
Murder, rape, torture, held high carnival; men were hanged or shot on the slightest suspicion or on no suspicion; women were insulted, outraged, killed; even children were not safe from the blood-lust of Cumberland's murderers. The pacification of the Highlands was accomplished on much the same methods as were afterwards employed to bring about the pacification of Poland.
Some of the letters from French soldiers, scrawled in the squalor of the trenches by men caked in filth and mud, are human documents in which they reveal themselves with extraordinary intimacy, and in which they put the whole truth, not disguising their terror or their blood-lust in the savage madness of a bayonet charge, or the heartache which comes to them when they think of the woman they love, or the queer little emotions and sentiments which come to them in the grim business of war.
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