CHAPTER XII

A CHAPTER ON PUNISHMENTS

The return of the poumpistes : The scale of punishments in the Legion : Of spiteful non-commissioned officers : The Legion's axiom : Sad history of Little Jean : The punishment machine : Lost years : A légionnaire's earnings in five years--francs 127.75 : The prisons in the Foreign Legion : Pestilential atmosphere : Human sardines : The general cells : Life in the prison : On sentry duty among the prisoners

"Nom de Dieu!--voilà les poumpistes!" cried the sergeant of the guard at the barrack gates. Every one sprang up. We of the guard (my company was on guard that day) crowded round the gate; the adjutant vaguemestre, the regimental postmaster, ran out of his little office opposite the guard-room; a couple of officers came up, and légionnaires streamed out from everywhere in a wild rush for the entrance to the barracks.

"The poumpistes have come back!" they cried to each other.

It was in fact the truants from our company, poor Rader and his five friends. They were indeed a pitiful sight. Two gendarmes brought them in. They were all six bound together by a thin steel chain. Their dirty uniforms hung around them in rags; they were faint and emaciated and looked dead tired. Their faces were scarred. Rader had a blood-stained bandage round his right arm. In their eyes you could read the deadly fear of the punishment that awaited them.

They had, of course, been treated pretty badly by the gendarmes. They looked round them shyly, ashamed of their helplessness and of their fetters. Herr von Rader alone had not lost his sense of humour.

"How are you? Glad to see you!" he said to the sergeant! "I am back again all right."

In the little bureau of the officer of the day the two gendarmes had their depositions taken and received the usual receipt from the regiment for the safe delivery of the deserters. They withdrew looking very pleased with themselves, for this receipt was worth 25 francs, entitling them to their reward.

The poumpistes were kept waiting in front of the guard-room, still joined together by the chain. When Herr von Rader noticed me, he greeted me with many head-shakings:

"Damned rotten business!" he said quite loud. "Mein Freund, they didn't make me a medicine man after all. The conjuring didn't work! All at once five damned Arab gendarmes rode up to us, holding their revolvers under our noses. I couldn't conjure them away.... Positively couldn't! Well, and then we had to walk back. Say, I don't care much about promenading when I am tied to a horse's tail. And the beggar of a horse did run, I can tell you--and I behind it--because I was tied to its tail, see?"

"Silence!" commanded the sergeant. "No talking here."

When the formalities of the surrender were over, the six deserters (I was one of the guard who escorted them with fixed bayonets) were marched off to prison.

The keys rattled. The sergeant of the guard considered it necessary to give vent to his bad humour in many superfluous remarks about "the dirty, ragged, good-for-nothing lot of poumpistes, whom the penal battalion would soon cure of skinning out," and gave Rader, who was the last to cross the cell's threshold, a mighty kick. Rader fell at full length. Then the heavy door swung to behind them....

A few years ago Herr von Rader and his companions would have been sentenced to quite a curious kind of punishment which was at that time considered in the Foreign Legion to be a radical cure for deserters--a kind of mediæval torture which, by the way, was not kept for deserters solely, but came into use very often. This was the "silo" and the "crapaudine."

The silo consisted of a funnel-shaped hole in the ground, broad at the top and pointed towards the bottom. A regular funnel. Into this hole, used as a cell for solitary confinement, the misdoers would be thrown, clad only in a thin suit of fatigue clothes, without a blanket or any protection at all against the rain or against the sun, at the mercy of the heat by day and the cold by night. The poor devils would be left for several days in this "prison." They could not lie down, for the bottom part of the hole was only one or two feet square. They spent day and night alternately standing and crouching, now in pouring rain, now in the burning sun. They very soon became ill from the foul vapours. When at length they were taken out of the silo, they could neither walk nor stand and had to be carried into hospital. Now and then a silo prisoner died in his hole.

They say in the Foreign Legion that it was General de Négrier who abolished the silo. When he was inspecting Saida, he found a row of fifteen silos, one beside the other, and every single one occupied.

He had the unfortunates taken out and they fell down in a dead faint on coming into the fresh air. Thereupon the general had every one of the silos filled up before his own eyes and forbade the silo penalty ever being used again.

A more primitive but perhaps a still more brutal torture was the crapaudine. The man to be punished was simply tied up into a bundle and thrown into a corner, his hands and feet being tied together on his back, till they formed a sort of semicircle. Such a crapaudinaire lay there helpless day and night, totally unable to move. The most he could do when he tried very hard was to roll from one side to the other. For a quarter of an hour a day he would be set free and got bread to eat and water to drink. A day and a night in the crapaudine was enough to deprive a man of the use of his limbs--several days gave him his quietus.

This penalty has also been abolished. It exists still in a milder form. In the field and on the march an offender is often punished by being bound to two posts driven into the ground.

To-day the punishments in the Legion are not quite as cruel as they once were. At any rate their cruelty is not quite so apparent. Rader's friends got off with fourteen days' prison, while he himself, after waiting in prison an age for his trial, was sentenced by court-martial. The poor fellow had lost his cap and belt and got a year's penal servitude for "theft of equipment." What happened to him there I have never heard.

There is no fixed penalty for desertion. In general the poumpistes are treated pretty mildly and sentenced, when they happen to be recruits, to 40 to 120 days' prison. Only when they are recruits. The veterans are always brought before the court-martial. But this is merely the general rule; if, for instance, a deserter has managed to get for some reason or another into the sergeant's or some other non-commissioned officer's "black books," the charge against him will be certain to include the loss of some part of his uniform, even when this is not in the least the case. The Foreign Legion has its own ideas of the subjects of pains and penalties.

Viewed from the surface of things, there actually is a sort of scale of punishment. At the beginning comes extra corvée, which is quite bad enough. For little omissions in the daily routine, for a paquetage not quite accurately put together, or for a button not polished well enough, the offender can be sentenced by the sergeant of his section to perform the heavy duties of the corvée, while his comrades are making their repairs or having instructions. As long as I served in the Legion I was never punished for a fault of my own, not even with extra corvée--I took good care not to give the slightest excuse for punishment. More than once, however, I made the acquaintance of general corvée. This was our sergeant's speciality. When he inspected our quarters in the morning and found some petty excuse for finding fault, he did not bother with details, but just said:

"Eh, corporal! A dirty, nasty room! Disgusting! The whole lot of you extra corvée this afternoon, under your supervision, corporal!"

Whereupon the corporal cursed and every fellow in the room anathematised the sergeant as a "sale cochon"--a filthy swine. As the "swine," however, was clothed with the bristles of authority, the extra corvée had to be performed in spite of all curses and anathemas.

Pretty nearly as frequent as this was confinement to barracks. This comes next in the scale of punishments and is always connected with "salle de police." Salle de police is only another name for the general cells in the prisons. Above all the offenders are not allowed to leave the barracks in their spare time. In other respects they do their duty as usual. When their day's work is finished, however, at five o'clock, they are called out every half-hour and sometimes every quarter of an hour to the drill-ground, where their names are called over by the sergeant of the guard. Any one who happens to miss one of these roll-calls finds himself in prison for a week. In their fear of not hearing the signal the men have not a single minute's quiet, and can hardly find time to clean their kit for the morrow. At nine o'clock, at the evening roll-call, they must report themselves in the guard-room, and are shut up in the salle de police for the night--in the general cells, which are filled to overflowing. Sleep among the crush of men and in that nauseating atmosphere is only possible for a few hours, when the tired body demands its right in spite of the disgusting surroundings. Next morning at five they are dismissed and have to perform the usual routine work with the rest of the company. Eight days' "salle de police" are looked upon as a very light punishment--a sure sign that the average légionnaire's susceptibilities are not all too fine.

Salle de police was something quite in the ordinary run of affairs for us: confinement to barracks was a part of life in the Legion. In our quarters I was the only man who had not made its acquaintance, and that was the merest chance, luck plain and simple.

No one excited himself about extra corvée and confinement to barracks. Every single man in the Legion had, however, a mighty respect for the prison.

Prison, arrest in the regimental lock-up, is the Legion's real punishment. Imprisonment in the Legion is made up of the hardest work possible, and living under the most awful sanitary conditions; one can only form an idea of what this punishment is like when one has had a look at the Legion's prisons.[6]

[6] See close of chapter.

Next comes "cellule," solitary confinement on starvation diet.

Then come the "Zephyrs," those condemned to the penal battalion. Every two or three weeks a transport of Zephyrs left the barracks in old ragged uniforms. In the battalion itself they have to wear the coffee-brown clothes of the convict.

"The sections for the reformation of incorrigibles" is the official name for this battalion, and deportation to the Zephyrs is the severest punishment which can be put into execution without the authority of a court-martial. The official grasp of the meaning of the word incorrigible is, however, a trifle strange sometimes. Under the strictest surveillance these unfortunates carry on pioneer work in the far south. They make roads, they dig wells, they build new stations in the most unhealthy parts of Algeria, far removed from all civilisation. They have to work as even a légionnaire, to whom the hardest work is so familiar, would only work under the sternest compulsion. And if extra pioneer work is needed in the south, if, for instance, a new road is to be built, the battalion's numbers increase with amazing rapidity. It is really astonishing how the number of incorrigibles in the Legion increases just when the military administration needs men--for work!

"Much work--many Zephyrs!" says the Legion's proverb.

The scale finishes with the heavy military punishments, from penal servitude to the death sentence, and here the decision of the Algerian court-martial in Oran is final. Its sentences are renowned for their pitiless severity. To be brought before this court-martial the légionnaire need not have committed any very grave offence. It is enough if he has lost some part of his uniform.

In a well-known French historical work on the subject of the Foreign Legion, Roger de Beauvoir writes:

"Each of the two discipline sections is 150 men strong: of these 300, 200 at least are in the penal section for selling part of their kit. It used to be the custom to 'let the stomach pay' for this offence, _i.e._, the offender was put on bread and water till he had replaced the lost equipment from the mess allowance that was saved. This punishment was finally considered too barbarously old-fashioned, and the court-martial took its place, which passes sentence of six months' imprisonment. The légionnaires long for the old régime!"

And thereby hangs a tale.

A very sad story, too.... No sensible man will attempt to dispute the fact that iron discipline is essential for the lurid mixture of human material in the Legion. If the justice of the Foreign Legion was in practice what it is in theory--stern but just--one could not say a word against it. It is, however, only just in theory, in the intention of the military law-makers. In reality it is the justice of unlimited tyranny; made so by the individual tyranny of officers and non-commissioned officers in individual cases, and in general by an obstinate tenacity to the letter of the law.

Every French officer and every French court-martial acts under the time-honoured assumption that the légionnaire makes a brave soldier, but is in all other respects a thoroughbred rogue and knave, and that one cannot go far wrong in assuming the worst about him. The word of a superior is always accepted as proof of guilt. There is no better illustration of this than the everlasting heavy penalties which are meted out for "theft of equipment." This sort of theft exists, of course. Theft is not a thing to be very much wondered at when the men's wages are five centimes a day.

But many hundreds of innocents are punished for this offence in the course of a year.

The favourite trick of non-commissioned officers, when they have a spite against a man, is to inspect his kit suddenly. Some trifle or other, a tie or a couple of straps, are quite sure to be missing and then there is the _casus belli_! "Lost is stolen--sold!" Thus the axiom of the Legion's authorities, against which the most positive assertions are of no avail. Now and then an offender of this sort is leniently treated, and let off by the regiment with sixty days' imprisonment; in the majority of cases, however, he is tried by the court-martial.

A typical case: "Jean the Unlucky" was the nickname of a young Frenchman in my company who had been sentenced in his second year of service to six months in the penal section for stealing a sash. He swore he was innocent, and as far as I can tell he spoke the truth, as his mother sent him twenty francs every month. Thus he was quite well off according to Foreign Legion ideas, and certainly need not have risked a heavy penalty by selling his ceinture for a few sous. The probabilities were in favour of his innocence, but that did not help him. He was sentenced. He survived his six months in the hell of the penal battalion and was then sent back to his company.

And now his troubles really began. At the time of his trial he had, in his rage at the false accusation, made more than one biting remark about our adjutant and his little ways. This the colour-sergeant never forgot. In spite of the fact that Little Jean was a quiet fellow, who did his duty to the best of his ability, a good soldier and a capital shot, he kept wandering backwards and forwards between the prison and the company, the company and the prison. Nothing he could do was right. Sometimes his boots were not properly cleaned, sometimes his bed was a centimetre out of the dead straight line in which beds must stand, and at another time he had not stood properly at attention at roll-call. Such were Little Jean's grave offences against the holy spirit of the Legion's discipline--ridiculous accusations, which bore the stamp of spite so plainly that even our careless captain should have noticed it.

These human machines punished automatically, without feeling, without thinking for an instant. The sergeant's reports demanding punishment for Little Jean's awful sins were signed automatically. When the sergeant put him down for eight days' confinement to barracks, the captain mechanically increased the penalty to eight days' imprisonment, because Jean le malheureux, coming from the penal section, had naturally a very bad reputation. Then came the commander of the battalion, who, not caring to be outdone in matters of discipline, doubled the dose. The sergeant's modest eight days' confinement to barracks had now grown to sixteen days' imprisonment.

But now came the embodiment of authority in the regiment in the person of the colonel. This colonel had his own ideas as to how one should treat the pernicious elements in the regiment:

"Second-class soldier Jean Dubois, No. 14892, 11th company, is sentenced by the colonel to 40 days' imprisonment for continued slackness and insubordination."

That was read to us the next time the regimental orders came out.

You see, the machine worked admirably. Its mechanism runs with wonderful accuracy. Any one who took an interest in the matter could work the whole thing out in advance. Dubois did this. He knew well enough what was waiting for him--from day to day he became quieter, from day to day sadder, so that at length he hardly spoke at all to his comrades. He could do nothing to protect himself; he hadn't even enough energy left for flight. Good Lord, he had long lost that little bit of energy he had, lost it--somewhere down south in the sunburnt wastes, where the penal battalion works and suffers.

The machinery ground on.... Eighty days' imprisonment was Little Jean's next dose. After that he got sixty days' cellule--just for a change. If you consider only the number of days, you might think he had got off pretty cheaply this time. Not a bit of it. These sixty days were days of starvation. For cellule means hunger and emaciation--awful hunger and awful emaciation.

After his sixty days of diet cure Dubois came back to the company for just a week, if I remember rightly. Then the machine began to work again. This time it was a month he got.... Thirty days' imprisonment--for this incorrigible and insubordinate subject! No, one really cannot be surprised that the colonel lost all patience. So he refused to confirm the punishment and sent the black sheep of the company to trial by court-martial. And once more the machine began to do its work.

Two years' imprisonment, two years' penal servitude in a fortress, for Jean le malheureux!

With the next batch of convicts they carried him off to Oran. I have heard nothing of him since--I do not know how he fared as a convict. In my unconquerable optimism I am ready to assume that this two years' interregnum did not do particular harm to Little Jean's health and that he returned home, having done his duty by the Foreign Legion, dapper and cheerful as he used to be. Even this supposition gives us a very pretty bit of arithmetic.

Jean Dubois' original period of service 5 years

Extra service for time spent in the penal battalion 6 months

Ditto for regimental punishments 7 months

Ditto for imprisonment in fortress 2 years --------------- Total time Jean Dubois had to serve in place of his original five years 8 years 1 month

In this optimistic piece of arithmetic my optimism even goes so far as to assume that Jean the Unlucky, during his two years of imprisonment and during the rest of his period of service, did not incur any additional penalties.

If I, however, compel myself to consider his career from a pessimistic point of view, the sum works out much more prettily. Dubois had not a very strong constitution and it is quite possible that the penal battalion, plus imprisonment, plus starvation, plus despair, quite finished him off. In that case the loss of a blue scarf, a spiteful sergeant and the crass stupidity of a series of officers have been the death of him.

But if Jean Dubois really got over his years of prison--when he returns home (he is a Frenchman!) his strength will not be worth much in the workaday world.

While I think of it. There is yet another very pretty piece of arithmetic. Little Jean was a thoughtful man. When he comes back home after his long years of Legion he will perhaps sit down and work out how much he has earned in these eight, long, hard years.

The example would look like this:

Francs First year of service, 5 centimes a day 18.25 Second year of service, 5 centimes a day 18.25 Third year of service, 5 centimes a day 18.25 Fourth year of service, 10 centimes a day 36.50 Fifth year of service, 10 centimes a day 36.50 ------ Grand Total 127.75

The other three years? In these Little Jean worked free, gratis, for nothing. These three years were "rabiau," as they say in the Legion, of no use, superfluous. In his three "rabiau" years Little Jean naturally got no pay. Why should a convict get paid?

So you see Little Jean's earnings amounted to the grand total of 127 francs 75 centimes--earned in eight years. Besides all this, this worthless fellow had been fed all this time! And clothed into the bargain.

Yes--c'est la Légion!

* * * * *

The prison in the barracks at Sidi-bel-Abbès used always to loom before me like a threatening spectre.

On both sides of the entrance to the barracks, close to the road, but separated from it by a high wall, lay the two little houses with their flat tin roofs which caught the sun's rays so pitilessly. Inside there were rows and rows of cell doors in the long narrow corridors. The single cells were a little more than three yards long and one yard broad; the general cells were perhaps five yards square. There was no light, and a little hole in the wall and an opening over the door were the sole means of ventilation. The floor was flagged or of clay. There was a wooden bench in each cell, a water-jug, and an old tin pail. The single cells and the general cells were exactly alike in their "fittings"--whether five men or fifty were shut up in these cells made no difference! They got, according to the regulations, one water-jug and one pail! I was never (and even to-day that is a satisfaction to me) shut up in the Legion's prison. But I have seen enough, when I was on guard there, to have had quite enough of the prison without any nearer experience of it.

I repeat: five yards square, thirty, forty, or more occupants: an air-hole nine inches in diameter high up in the walls and a tiny crack over the door.

Any of these cells would at once be condemned by a veterinary as unfit even for a pigsty!

Before réveillé at five o'clock in the morning all the sentries on guard were marched up to the prison, and the sergeant opened the cells, whereupon an awful stench streamed out. He read out the names from the prison register, and the prisoners came out of the cells into the passage as their names were called. Then they began to clean up. The pails were carried by two men, accompanied by a sentry, to the sewer openings in the barrack-yard. When the bigger cells were over-filled (and this was almost always the case) they looked awful. The room was like a sewer, flooded, pestilential.... To clean the cells there were only a couple of old brooms in the prison. A few pails of water were flooded over the floor, carelessly and hurriedly, for the sergeants did not care about wasting too much time on the "prisonniers." A little water and a few strokes with the broom! What is not washed away trickles through the cracks and crannies in the stone floor and forms a new basis for pestilence.

The bowl of black coffee which forms the légionnaire's breakfast is not given to the prisoners. They get no breakfast. They are allowed to wash themselves at the basin in the corridor. Then they are led out to work, on an empty stomach, frozen through by the chilly African night spent uncovered on a hard wooden bench, and faint from breathing in that pestilential atmosphere.

All those who were sentenced to short terms of imprisonment were commandeered to clean up the barrack-yard, to split wood, and to break stones. The prisoners with longer sentences, and those in cellule, had to go out to the "march of punishment," marching round in a small circle for two hours on end, carrying heavy bags of sand, now and then doubling for the sake of variety. When the corporal in command was in bad temper he made them go through a course of Swedish gymnastics into the bargain. This was tremendous work when burdened with the heavy sack, and it strained the muscles and nerves in a way that nothing else could.

At ten o'clock the prisoners were given soup. They never got full rations, since as long as they were in prison their mess allowance ceased as well as their pay.

The soup is thin, and the piece of meat which swims in it is as small as may be.... Their bread rations consist of half of what they get in the company. The prisoners in solitary confinement are placed on starvation diet. Their soup consists of hot water with little bits of potatoes and bread-crusts, and they only get this every other day. In the interval they have to live on bread--on a quarter of the Legion's bread rations. One must have seen how terribly emaciated these poor fellows become in a few days to be able to do justice to the barbarity of a system which has three main ideas: undernourishment, overwork, frightful sanitary conditions.

After they have finished "dinner," their work begins again. The drill suits had got dirty, and bore signs of the nights they had gone through. The operation, too, of emptying the tin pails cannot be performed without the suits being considerably the worse for it. But the drill suits were only changed when an inspection by the colonel was imminent, and clean underclothes were a luxury absolutely unknown in prison.

The sergeants on guard always considered it an important part of their duties to treat the prisoners as badly as possible. In the prison it simply rained curses. Many sergeants took an especial delight in inspecting the prisoners every three hours throughout the night. They had to come out into the yard, and the sergeant read their names and numbers by the light of the lantern, taking as long about it as he could, while the poor wretches had to stand there motionless in their thin clothes for half an hour in the cold night air. This would be repeated three or four times a night. In this way the sergeant manages to while away his dreary night on guard, and had in addition the pleasing sense of having played his little part in the regiment's system of justice. Under discipline in the Foreign Legion they understand a series of variations, improvements or otherwise, on the mediæval systems of torture.

It is merely the petty offences against discipline that are punished in these hovels.

I was on the watch in the narrow corridor of one of these prisons, pacing to and fro on the cold flags with fixed bayonet. Eight hours before the poumpistes, Rader and the rest of them, had been brought in. Through the narrow opening between the wall and the prison, a little strip of starlit sky could be seen, and down the narrow passage the cold night wind howled. But it could not drive away the pestilential stench which hung heavy over the prison and which was perpetually being increased by the vapours from the ventilation holes and the tiny openings in the cellules. This awful smell tortured my nerves and rendered sentry-go in the prison anything but pleasant.

Besides Rader and his fellow-deserters, there were forty others in the general cell. When at ten o'clock at night the sergeant inspected the prison and the cells were opened, I saw how the men lay huddled together on the wooden benches, man to man, like sardines packed in a tin. But in spite of this scarcely twenty out of the forty prisoners could find room on the bench. The others crouched in the corners, sleeping with their knees drawn up to their chins; several lay on the bare floor, filthy though it was. It was freezing cold for them in their thin drill clothes. The prison blankets they had been given were hardly worth calling blankets, ancient rags, so thin that one could see through them like a veil and so small that the men had the choice of covering their feet or their bodies; the blankets were not big enough to do both. They were stiff with dirt and most of them were alive with vermin. In the daytime they were just thrown into a corner of the cell.

It was no wonder that the men who had just been shut up in this cell could not sleep. Once I heard Rader ask gently who was doing sentry. He must have stood on the shoulders of one of his comrades to be able to reach the ventilation hole, which was high up in the wall. When I answered it was I, he said he could not stand it any more in there--hadn't I a cigarette? I spitted a packet of cigarettes on my bayonet and handed it up to him.

"Keep up your pecker, old man," I whispered.

"Good Lord, good Lord ..." was the reply, in a pitiful tone which hadn't even a touch of Rader's droll humour left in it.

The sound of groans and curses reached me continually from the cell; all spoke very gently for they knew that they would be severely punished if a noise was heard. It is a prison custom for the sentry in the corridor to let the butt of his rifle fall loudly on the floor when he hears the sergeant coming. This is a warning signal. When in their excitement they spoke a little louder I could now and then hear through the opening what they were saying. In eloquent French, one of the prisoners, whose accent proclaimed him to be a man of education, was complaining of life in the Legion, and all was still in the cell while the ringing voice spoke in passionate excitement.

Snatches of what I heard are still fixed in my memory:

"My God, if I could only die!--My friends, I've always done my duty here.--I've marched and marched and marched for four long years.--For four years I've borne burdens, exposed to wind and weather, and have tired my strength.--Four long years! Yes, I've lost my tie, oh, la la, a thin blue rag worth a couple of centimes--and was marched off to prison! I'd stolen the tie, I'd sold it--who believes the word of a légionnaire! _Mea culpa_, my friends!"

"_Mea maxima culpa!_" repeated the speaker quietly. "'Tis true one has never been much use and has made a monstrous thing of one's life--you and I and all of us! And why not? That's all past and done with now. All the same--I'm ashamed of the country in which the Foreign Legion can exist. I'm a Frenchman. But I say: Damn the Legion, damn the land of the Legion...."

And over all there hung the pestilential vapours in the tiny room with the crowded humanity within.

When I was relieved at midnight the sergeant asked: "Anything unusual?"

"No, nothing special," I answered.