THE DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT.

Northland Age, Volume 2, Issue 41, 22 May 1906, Page 2

THE DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT.

(Paris letter to "Pall Mall Gazette") Child of the great revolution, reared in the reek of battles which set Europe ablaze ; bespangled protegee of the Second Empire, decorated by its chief on the field of Solferino ; pensioner of the Third Republic, whose bloody inception she witnessed ; heroine of many a stricken field ; by turn instrument of pleasure and angel of mercy, the cantiniere, her turn of duty done, is to disappear from the roll of the French Army. The cantiniere sprang into, existence in the person of Felicia Loguet, wife of a cuirassier of the. Revolution. At fifty-seven she strapped a barrel of brandy on her hip and followed her husband to the frontier. At Toulon she loaded and fired with her own hands a cannon at which all the* detachmentr hud been killed ; at Hohenlinden a ball tore away a finger while she gave drink to two wounded hussars. “I have still nine left for my country," she said, and continued her work. At seventy-seven she followed the Grand Army in its retreat from Moscow ; wounded at Bautzen, she turned up again smiling during the campaign in France in 1814, sitting on Ihe shaft of her cart, clothed in rags, her feet stuffed into cavalry boots, an officer’s cap cocked over one eye and wiping her glasses with a Russian flag. She died at last, after Waterloo, rather of rage than of old age. The Second Empire was another brilliant page in the history of the "daughters of the regiment." Mine. Cros, of the Foot Chasseurs of the Guard, was decorated on the field of Solferino by*the Emperor's own hand and the cantiniercs of the First Zouaves, the Thirty-fourth Regiment and the Emperor's Dragoons all received the medal for the campaigns of 1861 and J§62. In the "Terrible Year" Mme. Saurin. of the Third Zouaves, made herself famous by killing with her own hand a German officer who attempted her capture. But the cantinieres of '7O will live in history, rather for the tender, womanly devotion with which they tended the wounded under fire. And now the book of that history is to be closed. In a few months the 1,073 women, soberly uniformed in scarlet-piped blue, are to be numbered out of the service.