noon
La guerre ! 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 .