CHAPTER XLIII. MORT POUR LA PATRIE. If the French forces were to quit the Regency of Tunis to-morrow, the most melancholy, and at the same time, almost the sole memorial of its military occupation would be a series of little wayside cemeteries, in which lie the real victims of the latest Punic War. At the entrance of the summer palace of Kheir-ed-Din at the Goletta, under the shade of a Moslem _kouba_ near the Manouba road, in the silent plains around Ghardimaou, beneath the green palm-trees on the banks of the Gabes river, amidst the sandy coast of Jerba, and within the burying-ground of the Almoravides on the outskirts of holy Kairwan, groups of black wooden crosses and turf-covered mounds mark the resting-places of many hundreds of brave young soldiers, who left the smiling shores of France in all the joyousness of enthusiasm of a first campaign, only to find a grave in Africa. If M. Roustan found his Nemesis in the Tribunal de la Seine, it was the great sanitary controversy which hopelessly wrecked the fame and fortune of his employers. The subject is beyond all doubt the saddest phase of the Tunisian question, but its consideration cannot be omitted in any impartial history of the campaign. If the untimely death of these two thousand striplings amidst strangers in a foreign land, teaches statesmen of all nations the danger of substituting duplicity for diplomacy, they will not indeed have died in vain. In the last chapter I have told the story of M. Saint-Hilaire’s account in the witness-box of the origin of the Tunisian Expedition, but unfortunately for himself and his country, and above all for the “brave young troops,” he held very different language in the Chambers seven months before. The following was the ministerial programme of the 12th May:—