Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome and embarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria, have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in _Biribi_. The French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled. But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. _Il vous empoigne_, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the author of _Biribi_ has experienced in his own person the tortures of which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word. After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these, the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent, unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system. 'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur à cheval, has lost two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis. 'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape. 'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."