midday
La guerre ! '' and chanting to the enraptured soldiery a `` Marseillaise '' of her own improvisation , all slang , and doggerel , and barrack grammar ; but fire-giving as a torch , and rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it , waving the tricolor high over her head . The African day was at its noon . From the first break of dawn the battle had raged ; now , at midday , it was at its height . Far in the interior , almost on the edge of the great desert , in that terrible season when air that is flame by day is ice by night , and when the scorch of a blazing sun may be followed in an hour by the blinding fury of a snow-storm , the slaughter had gone on , hour through hour , under a shadowless sky , blue as steel , hard as a sheet of brass . The Arabs had surprised the French encampment , where it lay in the center of an arid plain that was called Zaraila . Hovering like a cloud of hawks on the entrance of the Sahara , massed together for one mighty , if futile , effort -- with all their ancient war-lust , and with a new despair -- the tribes who refused the yoke of the alien empire were once again in arms ; were once again combined in defense of those limitless kingdoms of drifting sand , of that beloved belt of bare and desolate land so useless to the conqueror , so dear to the nomad .