Part 3

Jacques said nothing. He handed the rifle back to the recruit and Zeiss' life was saved. Then, getting away by himself, on the pretence that the sun had given him vertigo, he lay down on the sand under the shelter of a tree and laughed. Laughed with a laughter that shook his whole body down to his toes. It was the sudden uplift of the tragic from his mind as well as the facts of the case that caused this extraordinary convulsion of merriment.

Then he rose up, dusted the sand from his tunic, and returned to the firing-ground.

But the laughter had not cleared his mind of anger. He had spared Zeiss' life, but his enmity towards Zeiss remained, though Mimi now shared it. Those two. That is how he thought of them.

II

As he took up his position again, a horseman spurring at full speed came across the plain from the direction of the barracks. As he passed the drill ground where a couple of thousand légionnaires were at exercise, a hurricane of cheering followed him and the message which he had evidently shouted to them.

Then he came at full speed towards the men at the butts. They knew at once. The order for active service had come.

They were marched back to barracks, yelling, shouting, whistling and singing. One might have fancied that every man of them had just received news of a fortune having fallen to him. The barracks were humming like a vast beehive, and the word was going round that it was down south the trouble was. Down south, away in the depths of the desert where the whole Arab country was up in revolt, attacking the outpost stations and surging north.

The Legion does not take long to mobilize. An hour is sufficient. It was now eight in the morning; by nine, headed by the band and followed by the ammunition carts, the légionnaires in four-deep formation, wheeled out of the barrack yard and marched through Sidi-bel-Abbès, striking the great south road that cuts Algeria like a meridian of longitude.

Ten miles south of the town and precisely at eleven o'clock a halt was called, tents were put up, and soup was served.

It was the hot season, and unless driven by the direst necessity the Legion does not march under the three hours of terrific sun that withers everything from noon till three o'clock. Night is the time for marching, and the tents are generally struck shortly after midnight. There were also a hundred details to be attended to in the first hours of this big shake-out after six months' rest in barracks. Some of the tents proved to want repairing, and numerous little weaknesses had to be remedied before the great test came.

Half an hour after midnight the tents were struck and the long, long column, broken only by the rattling ammunition and baggage carts, got into its stride. Five kilometres an hour is the pace of the Legion, with a five minutes' rest at every tenth kilometre.

At dawn the column was marching still, and in the full blaze of day it was still marching, voiceless, tottering, almost broken with weariness.

Then it halted at the milestone that marked a distance of fifty kilometres from Sidi-bel-Abbès, the tents were put up by the wayside and coffee was served.

The men lay about exhausted in the tents. Under the sun across a great stretch of sand and rubbly ground on the right of the road, lay the city of little tents that had suddenly broken into existence like fungi, and around the city, showing sometimes the flash of a bayonet in the sunlight, could be seen the dark forms of the patrols. Grumbling, smoking, swearing, the population of the tent city filled the air with a murmur, dying at last to silence as sleep took the légionnaires. They had marched forty kilometres. Forty kilometres laden with rifle, ammunition, knapsack, tent and collapsible tent poles. Forty kilometres at the rate of five kilometres an hour, with only four breaks of five minutes each. Forty kilometres with only twenty minutes' rest.

But this was nothing to the fantastic labours before them. Next day, and the day after, and the day after, the march went on, ever south, and ever through more desolate country. They reached the region of the small outpost stations, where men of the penal battalion were at work road-making and fort-building. Here wind came to them that the trouble had shifted more to the east, where a great army of Arabs was at work breaking, pillaging and murdering. Three outpost stations had been sacked and the soldiers put to death, and with this news the Legion, setting its teeth, struck on to the south-south-east.

They were entering now the real desert. The great yellow desert that lies burning in the sun for ever. Now voiceless, now sighing and shifting its sand to the wind that blows from nowhere. Here there are no roads, only caravan tracks marked by the skeletons of men and animals, an horizon hard like burnished brass, a thirst that drains even the water in the oasis wells.

Jacques, old campaigner that he was, had never grown used to the desert, no white man ever does. There is a spirit here that daunts the soul and haunts the heart for ever.

As they marched, sometimes, came marching abreast of them, miles away, vast sand devils, recalling the D'jin released from the bottle in the Arabian tale. Sometimes the devils would move as though waltzing with viewless partners, but the Legion scarcely cast an eye upon them. The Trumpet of Doom alone could have arrested the attention of that vast centipede, sun-dazzled, or moon-lit, exhausted, dead to everything but the necessity of movement. The water ran short, but still they marched; men fell out only to be tied to the tails of the ammunition carts, where they had either to be dragged along the sands or march; feet bled, eyes were blinded, brains reeled, but the purpose of the mechanism never failed, nor did the movement falter.

Five kilometres an hour was the inexorable pace to which the machine was set.

A longer halt than usual whilst waiting for despatch bearers had shifted the starting hour of each march to one o'clock in the morning.

Then, under the stars and in the perishing cold of the desert night, the bugles would ring out, the city of little white tents shrivel up and vanish, and the great centipede reform itself out of all its incongruous elements.

Criminals, soldiers of fortune, clerks, once men of learning, men from all the quarters of the world and all the walks of civilization, woke from profound sleep or troubled dreams and became, once again, the Legion.

As they marched under the stars, not a voice broke the silence of the ranks, half-awake; still under the opiate weariness of the last march, the night seemed to them like a blue veil tangling their feet. The sound of the vast moving column filled the night, not with the tramp of men, but with a noise like the shuffling of a great snake--the shuddering, shuffling sound of sand trodden upon and tossed aside by the feet of the Legion.

Men marched as they pleased, there was no keeping in step. It did not matter how rifles were carried--so that they were carried; how men marched--so that they marched.

One thing alone mattered--the pace. Five kilometres an hour.

Then a pale light would appear in the east and flicker out, and then, vague blue and luminous, dawn would show and tinted fingers along the sand rim begin to lift the veil.

It was day far up in the sky before the first sun-flash struck the sands.

Then came the blaze, and like Memnon the Legion would find its voice.

Mixed with the creak and rattle of the baggage and ammunition carts, above the dull pounding and scuffling of feet, you would hear the growl of voices breaking out all down the line. A grumble half a mile long; the voice of the bruised, battered, and bedevilled soul of the Legion. This centipede with a brain for every pair of legs possessed a single soul. Artist, Author, Bank Clerk, ex-soldier or Apache, Optimist, Pessimist, Grumbler or Man of Fortitude, all were subdued to the same medium. Like the oars of the Trireme or the bricks for the Pyramids, the rifles of the Legion linked the minds of their holders in a common bondage of thought--or want of thought, gave them a common tongue to express the suffering common to all.

The cutting of the gun-straps, the weight of the knapsacks, the weariness of the march, all were voiced in that awful grumble, more akin to the grumble and groan of the baggage and ammunition carts than the voices of human beings.

Then the sound would die out, and the moving column resume its garment of silence, and so it went on till on the morning of the twelfth day, just after sunrise, the sands right in the sun-blaze suddenly became alive and moving; the people of the desert, mysterious as the desert itself, had declared themselves.

It was like the springing to life of D'jins. The Legion had come to attack, and lo! it was attacked, its movements had been watched by scouts, keen-eyed as vultures. All to eastward and southward the swarming sands showed like sea foam beneath the fluttering green flags and the blaze of spears; drums beat, and on the wind came the crying of that vast, sun-born host like the crying of far-off sea-birds on a quarrelling beach.

The voice of the Legion made answer like the roar of the tiger that is sure of its prey.

Then silence for a heart-beat, followed by a few sharp orders, and the column, no longer moving, undulated, broadened, became formless, and then, click! became a geometrical figure.

A hollow square, with the baggage and ammunition carts in the centre, the girding straps of the ammunition boxes flying loose.

Far above, a dot in the blue, hovered a vulture. From that height, the dark, rigid square would have the appearance of a pattern traced on the sands.

III

The Legion waited as the storm surged towards it, crescentic, a host of the Past armed with the weapons of Saladin; then the great square broke into flame and smoke on three of its sides and the crash of rifles shook the silence of the desert far away beyond the reach of the voices of the attackers.

The vulture, larger now, saw the dead piling before the guns, and the waves of the living lapping over the ridges of the slain--then, in a flash, came the great break-up.

_Allez, schieb Los_! The Legion, no longer in square formation, was pursuing, attacking, bayoneting. That solid, silent fort of men behind the speaking rifles had burst its bonds of formation and silence. The cries of the fallen, the falling and the dying were drowned out by the piercing yell of the légionnaires, mad with the _cafard_ of Blood.

At last the Legion had found its voice.

The voice of its rage against the world, of its hatred of itself, of its lust for blood and its desire to hack, and hack, and slay.

Stayed up for a moment and held by the very imminence of destruction, the enemy turned upon its pursuers and fought hand to hand.

This lasted but a very little time, and then came the second _débâcle_, worse than the first, and not to be recovered from.

The pursuit conducted by detached companies spread fan-wise to the south, the south-east and the south-west.

The Legion always drives its bayonet home, keeps on striking when once it has struck, and makes an end where it has made a good beginning.

IV

An hour after noon, Jacques, wounded in the arm and knocked out by a blow on the head, lay on the sands recovering his scattered wits. A hundred paces or so away lay Corporal Zeiss, whilst advancing towards the two men came the form of a woman.

An Arab woman.

Her tribe was half destroyed.

She had followed close on the heels of the attacking hosts with others of her kind, sure of victory and the delightful prospect of mutilating the wounded in unnameable ways.

Caught in the _débâcle_ and, by a miracle, unscathed, she was now pursuing her true vocation in life, just as, close to battlefields, one may see the peasant ploughman at work or the gleaner gleaning. She was in search of plunder without the least idea as to how the plunder would profit her or how she was ever to regain her tribe. She knelt down beside Zeiss.

Jacques, now fully recovered, watched.

He knew Zeiss at once by his flax-coloured hair.

The woman's back was towards Jacques, and turning on his left side he seized his rifle, found that it was loaded, and then, with an Apache grin on his face, turned on his stomach and lay with the rifle to his shoulder, ready to fire, just as he had often lain on the practice ground.

The woman stood up, the shot rang out and she fell.

Then Jacques, rifle in hand, rose up, and still rather shaky from the result of his injuries, approached the two figures lying on the sand. Zeiss was dead and the woman was dead, and her plunder lay on the sand in the form of Zeiss' ears, Zeiss' earrings, and other things belonging to Zeiss.

She was comely. It only wanted that fact to complete the satisfaction of Corporal Jacques. For the first time since his betrayal he felt at ease. Zeiss was no longer a thorn in his flesh, and he had revenged himself on Mimi.

"On Mimi?" you will say.

Well, on her sex.

It is the same thing--or at least it was the same thing to Jacques.

He stood shading his eyes against the sun whilst the wind of the desert blowing in his face brought the far-off bugle calls of the Legion.

The hounds were being collected.

The battue was over.

SCHNEIDER

I

Stories about the Foreign Legion have, nearly all, the same centre idea and motive--escape or attempted escape.

It is the one thing the légionnaires think of. They grumble about their food; they grumble about their chief officers and their subordinate officers; they grumble about the hot days and cold nights of Algeria; they grumble about the scarcity of cigarettes, the price of wine, the scarcity of soap, the hardness of their work, the smallness of their pay, but they never grumble about their loss of liberty.

They dream about it.

It is the one idea around which all other ideas revolve, and it is kept alive and active less perhaps by the general hardness of life in the Legion than by the fact that escape is, though seemingly feasible, next to impossible.

No man can buy his discharge from the Legion. No man, once he has signed the fatal paper, can escape from the consequences of his act by influence. You may be the son of a prince--it does not matter, or of a Rockefeller--it does not matter, you have to dree your weird for five years and carry your rifle and knapsack under the blazing sun to the last day of your term of enlistment.

After all, you have signed a contract, and signed it with your eyes open, and should you fight against fate and try to break your contract, you find that the system you are struggling with has provided against that.

Twenty thousand men or so, distributed in Algeria, Indo-China and Morocco, and most of them willing to escape on the slightest chance, require a pretty definite and complete system of restraint.

Corporal Jacques had very clear views on this matter. Bitter personal experience had convinced him of the futility of all attempts at evasion. Where he had failed he could not see the chance of anyone else succeeding. Nor did he wish anyone else to succeed. Such a success would have cast extra discredit on his own attempt, an attempt that was fast fading from the memory of the regiment, but not from the memory of Corporal Jacques.

One bright morning, Jacques, who had returned to the barrack yard with his squad after three hours' practice on the ranges, turned from lighting a cigarette to watch the arrival of a column of recruits just arrived from France by way of Oran.

There were forty men in the column, men of all heights and ages, all nationalities, a sinister-looking crowd, dusty, tattered, limping, many of them most evidently underfed and nearly all of them wearing that look of dejection common to lost dogs and lost men.

Most of these new recruits had joined the Legion to escape starvation; a few were of the active criminal type and had evidently been given the choice of the Legion or the Penitentiary. Jacques' keen eyes sorted them out and classified them at once, but there was one man he could not classify, a man of middle height, dark, clean-shaven, youthful and of military bearing.

This person's clothes though dusty were well-cut, and his boots of brown tan leather were a marvel.

He carried himself easily, with an air of indifference and detachment, as though he were a spectator and not a member of this little company of tragic actors, and when the recruits were dismissed to find their quarters, he lit a cigarette before going to the depot to receive his uniform.

Jacques felt interested in this individual. Here was most evidently a man of superior birth, an aristocrat strayed into the trap of the Legion. Every now and then the net closes on a gorgeous bird of this description. Jacques knew the type and despised it; the young man of good birth gone wrong was, in his experience, a person to be avoided; he had had his soap stolen by a Viennese banker's son and he had been badly treated financially--it was a matter of five francs--by a gentleman with manicured nails and no money morals, who had the reputation of being a Count in his own country--though what that country was no man knew.

But the present specimen was different somehow from the others, as far as one would judge by appearances, and Jacques, falling into talk with him, showed him the way to the depot and then to the dormitory allotted to him.

No place in the world is kept more spick and span than the great barracks of the Foreign Legion. It vies with an English lighthouse or an English man-of-war in the polish of its brasses and the neatness of its poor appointments.

The dormitory to which Jacques led the new-comer had the appearance of a hospital ward. There were twenty beds, and every bed, except one or two that were vacant, had a card with a légionnaire's name and number.

"Here you are," said Jacques. "You can choose your bed from those three near the door; shuffle into your uniform and you can sell your old togs; you won't want them for another five years, and the fashions will have altered by then."

He showed the new-comer, who was carrying all his kit and accoutrements in a huge bundle, how to stow away his things, gave him a few hints as to what to avoid if he wished for a peaceable life, and took his departure.

The new-comer's name was Schneider, at least that was the name he had joined under, a German name, yet he spoke French like a Frenchman.

Jacques saw him next on the drill ground, and noticed that he wore his uniform as though born in it. They had thrown him out of the instructional squad, finding that he was as well up in the business of drill as the oldest légionnaire, and he was attached to Company 4, practising the double with the great column round and round the vast drill ground.

From the very first moment Schneider took his place in the Legion as a person to be respected. He had not sold his clothes. They, and the wonderful tan boots, he had given away to be sold and he had never asked for the money. He had plenty of money.

The Legion, though recruited considerably from the ranks of the broken-down, the criminal and the starving, is a regiment of dudes; after the main ambition to escape comes the ambition to outvie one's neighbour in cleanliness and neatness. This desire to be neat, to be bright and speckless, is stimulated by the laws of the Legion that bear with terrible severity upon slackers; all the same, it is a true desire, a true ambition born of the spirit of the Legion, that strange spirit of the mass which ever affects and bends the individuality of the unit.

Schneider was such a dude that he manicured his nails; having plenty of money, he was able to pay for services. The légionnaires' fatigue uniform of white cotton cloth has to be washed nearly every day; Schneider never washed his uniform, he paid another man to do that job; the polishing of the metal work of his equipment and the cleaning of his rifle never occupied his time; a brother légionnaire did all this for him--at a price.

Consequently, he could keep his hands clean and his evenings were free. He spent his evenings mostly in Sidi-bel-Abbès, in the Place Sadi Carnot listening to the band, or in one of the better-class cafés, unapproachable to the ordinary légionnaire on account of the prices charged--thirty centimes for a cigar, half a franc for a vermouth, and so forth.

Jacques sometimes saw Schneider seated before one of these cafés reading the _Echo d'Oran_ and sipping his wine. Jacques, who had taken an interest in the man at first sight, found as time went on that his interest was steadily growing. He watched him as a cat watches a mouse.

He could not make him out at all. Here was a man most evidently of good birth, a man possessing money, and, more than that, a man who evidently kept up correspondence with his people--for Schneider received a good many letters--living the slave life of a légionnaire. Had he committed some crime? If so, why did he keep up this large correspondence? He was not of the criminal type, and, although men of the ordinary type often do commit crimes, Jacques felt instinctively that Schneider was not held in the Legion by fear of the Law.

There were other points of interest about this person. Without being in the least offensive in his manner, he managed to keep others at a distance; he talked with anyone who chose to talk to him, yet he made no friend; doing his duties well and without any sign of distaste, he, yet, always gave the impression of a mechanism without any soul in the business on hand. He never grumbled were the practice march ever so long or the sun ever so hot on the drill ground. He seemed quite content, in a fatalistic sort of way, with his lot, and Jacques might have left the matter at that and lost interest in him had not Schneider one day chosen to make him his friend.

It was six months after the latter had joined, and one morning after parade, Schneider, producing a packet of cigarettes, offered one to Jacques.

"They aren't very good, but they are better than the Algerian stuff," said Schneider.

Jacques, lighting up, assented, and the two men strolled back to the barracks, talking of indifferent matters, till, just as they were parting at the door of the depot, Jacques said:

"You aren't German, are you?"

Schneider laughed.

"No," said he. "I am not German. I am an Austrian--but I will tell you about that some day."

Next evening, they met in the town and Schneider stood Jacques a bottle of wine. It was the beginning of a friendship that was to last some months, a warm friendship, at least on the part of Jacques, who found himself actually caring less for Schneider's money or his wine than his companionship. Schneider, now that the ice was thawed, exhibited an interest in the Legion and its history in strong contrast with his general air of disinterest in everything. More especially did he ask questions about men who had tried to make their escape, their methods and their chances.

"_Mon Dieu,_" would reply Jacques, "there's not a chance, not one in a thousand has ever done it." He went into the subject from the circumference to the centre and in the manner of an expert. He showed how the boats were guarded at Oran, how the railway line was watched and the roads patrolled.

"And how about escaping by way of the interior?" asked Schneider.

Jacques laughed and gave examples of men who had tried that business and their horrible fate.

"It's a fool's game," said he, "however you take it; but why do you talk of it so much. Do you want to escape?"

"Not I," said Schneider. "I am as happy here as anywhere else. I am interested in the subject, that is all."