CHAPTER XI

THE DESERTERS

The Odyssey of going on pump : Death in the desert : The Legion's deserters : A disastrous flight in a motor-car : The tragic fate of an Austrian engineer : In the Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès : The business part of desertion : Oran and Algiers : The Consulate as a trap : The financial side of desertion : One hundred kilometres of suffering : Hamburg steamers : Self-mutilation : Shamming : In the Suez Canal : Morocco, the wonderland

Even Herr von Rader had the cafard—the fever to desert—and his good humour diminished perceptibly under its influence. In low cunning the equal of the oldest and craftiest légionnaire, he had quite got the trick of decorating himself, and certainly got along much better than most of the other recruits. But, as a veteran on the high road of life, he had a very highly developed sense of the practical side of human affairs. To take and not to give had always been his most sacred rule of life; living without working was for him the acme of human cleverness. Now, however, Herr von Rader began to reckon out for himself, with a face that got longer and longer, the Legion's pet arithmetic example: that he had to do an immense amount of work and got little or no pay for it.

He found this very trying.

"My friend," he said to me once, "I'm off. I just guess I won't bother you with details, but I'm sorry to have to tell you that this honourable regiment will have to get on as best it can without me. I'm going to clear out."

I warned him and kept telling him that it was utter folly to desert in this happy-go-lucky way without civilian's clothes and without any money.

Herr von Rader merely shook his head: "It's true enough that I've a large balance of poverty! On the other hand, I've a thundering lot of impudence—an absolutely immense and overwhelming quantity of impudence—and I guess, in spite of everything, I'll take that little pleasure trip and have a look at the neighbourhood. Somewhere round here there must be a nigger tribe who would consider it an honour when a chap like me with a real white skin does some swell conjuring for them. Why, they'll jump at the chance of making me their medicine man. Anyway, I'm off! If you're a wise man, you'll come too. It'll be fine enough even if it does not last for long. And I'll tell you a secret: in the sergeants' room the big service revolver is hanging comfortably on the wall. I've a sort of an idea that that piece of property will be off about the same time as me—on French leave! That's a great consolation for me, quite apart from the fact that I shall be damned glad to annoy that fool of a sergeant! Won't you come?"

I declined with thanks.

Herr von Rader now sought other followers. In every spare moment he gathered a following from among the young men around his bed. They lounged about and smoked cigarettes forging their plans for flight. More than once I went and listened to them and more than once I gave them a warning, but they were so wrapped up in their idea that all good advice was quite wasted. They wanted to make a bee-line for the south, marching only at night and avoiding all houses and villages. Then they thought of going west and working through into Morocco. One of them had found an old map of Northern Africa, and on this they had marked out their route. Their bayonets and the revolver they were going to steal were to be their weapons. They were not in the least afraid of Arabs or Moroccans, and about provisions they didn't worry themselves very much, as Herr von Rader cold-bloodedly pointed out that they were six strong men and could easily procure the necessaries of life by force. In reality they were very indifferent as to all these details. The only idea that they had in their heads was that they would soon have done with their wretched lives as légionnaires, and roam at large, free men once more.

They were thoroughly infected with the fever for desertion, which was ever to be found in the Legion. Plans for flight and their feasibility were ever being discussed in whispers, and this formed a part of the Legion's atmosphere—desertion was always the favourite topic of conversation in quarters and in the canteen. This was only natural. There is not a single man in the Legion who does not sooner or later repent his folly, recognising that it was the maddest thing he ever did in his life when he signed that ominous contract in the enlistment bureau. He has to work as he never worked in his life before, and he has less money in his pocket than in the most needy times of his civil life. Even if he had been a miserable beggar, a wretched copper had not such an enormous value in his eyes nor had it been so hard to earn as in these days of poverty in the Foreign Legion. He is wretchedly poor, living under the strictest military discipline, working hard and getting less than nothing out of his life. At first the strangeness of his surroundings has a certain charm: but the harder he has to work and the oftener he becomes acquainted with the heavy penalties which no légionnaire escapes for long, the quicker comes the lust for freedom.

The idea of flight gradually ripens in him. He talks about it with his friends; in every spare moment he washes and cleans for the non-commissioned officers to earn a few coppers, and every evening he sits with the veterans, with the old grey-haired fellows who have breathed the air of the Legion so long that they are no use for any other sort of work, and who, as if under a spell, no matter how often they have sworn never to don the red trousers again, always come back again to the Legion. They know Algeria like the palm of their own hand and gladly sell their priceless wisdom for a litre of canteen wine. But in this case good advice is not worth much.

Money is the main necessity for flight. If good intentions counted for anything in the matter, the percentage of deserters would reach a fabulous figure; but the poor fellows who go out on foot, without a penny in their pockets, very seldom get away and are generally brought back in a few days by the gendarmes. Hunger and thirst almost always drive them into the Arab villages or to the Spanish peasant settlements on the main roads, which are so often patrolled that detection is unavoidable. Then is the wisdom of the old légionnaire a vain thing indeed—against enemies like hunger and thirst the truant can do nothing.

In addition to the lust for freedom the légionnaire has generally got the cafard: a feeling of hatred for anything connected with the Legion, the extraordinary impulse which leads him to undertake the maddest and most hopeless things rather than stay a day longer in the Legion. When they are as ill as this the poor fellows run off no matter where, without the slightest consideration or preparation.

The Legion has coined a special expression for this kind of desertion: "Going on pump"—in French, "Aller au poump." An extraordinary word of unknown origin.

You "go on pump." One evening as we sat in quarters cleaning our leather equipment, an old légionnaire, an Austrian, suddenly got up.

"You damned set of fools," he cried, "I'm going out. I'm going on pump."

As he spoke he buckled on his bayonet.

"I hope I'll never see the blasted lot of you again."

He went out and never returned.

Several weeks afterwards there was shown to us at roll-call the photograph of a body that had been horribly maimed. It was the Austrian. A patrol had found him by the Morocco frontier. The officer in command, to whose equipment according to regulation a camera belonged, had taken the photograph. Each company in the Legion got a copy of this awful picture, in order to identify the corpse. The regiment has quite a series of these pictures, all showing a man's naked body, hacked about in the most appalling fashion. This is the work of the Moroccan brigands, to whom the légionnaire, staggering hither and thither under the influence of the cafard, is a real source of joy. His uniform and bayonet are priceless possessions, easily won with a few sword-strokes. Besides, there is the consideration that Allah and his prophet reward a pious deed like torturing a dog of a Christian.

Hundreds of légionnaires who have started out in cafard have met with this awful death in the desert, martyred, maimed and tortured.

In general, however, the légionnaire finds going on pump, this flight into the desert, this mad rush for freedom without any real goal and without any sort of preparation, something quite natural that everybody tries once at any rate in the course of his career. In cafard….

As a rule the men desert in little groups, without any equipment but the uniform they wear and the bayonet that clanks at their side. They go forth at night, before nine o'clock, while the barrack gates are still open, and run, under cover of the darkness, madly through the sandy vineyards. They are miserably cold in the chilly African night, and the pangs of hunger soon assail them. But they keep going on: they are accustomed to accomplish miracles of marching even when loaded with the Legion's heavy baggage; without it they cover enormous distances. Five minutes at the double with that long cat-like stride of the Legion which never tires those who have once got the knack of it—and then five minutes' marching. They go on like this without stopping all through the night, and in the morning the truants are a good sixty kilometres from the garrison. Arriving at some lonely farm or other in the grey of the morning, they obtain a crust of bread and a sip of wine. It is very seldom the sympathetic heart of the Spaniard that takes pity on them: no, it is more often the bayonets which advise him to be obliging and conciliatory. In the daytime the poumpistes hide among the rocks or bury themselves in a deep hole in the sand. When night comes on they start on their way once more, ever southwards, keeping their bearings by the stars as they have learnt to do in the Legion—for a very different purpose it is true. When they hear the sound of horses' hoofs they take cover in deadly terror and lie for hours, still as mice, until the patrol has long passed out of sight below the horizon. Thus the days pass by. Bands of energetic and enterprising runaways often terrorise the Arabs in the lonely settlements for weeks on end, until the oppressed ones send for help and a fight results in which the deserters are of course sadly worsted.

Desperate fellows "on pump," who are determined to reach Morocco at any price, sometimes succeed in getting hold of a rifle. They have then a weapon to defend themselves against the brigands. They cannot take their own rifles with them, for with rifles they would never be allowed to pass the barrack gates.

A tough old veteran, who knows the frontier, marches with the utmost care. He knows that there is a triple row of tents, a quarter of a kilometre apart. One dark night he creeps through. This operation takes a long time to carry out. The tents, it is true, are a long way apart from each other, and it seems easy enough to get through. But this is only at first sight. For every 200 yards there stands a sentry guarding the line till the next tent is reached.

The line of tents is almost endless. Were the deserter to attempt to creep through direct or even in a slanting direction, he could not possibly avoid being noticed by one of the sentries who are stationed in a triangular arrangement. But he knows the trick. He creeps through 100 yards from a sentry and then strikes off at an angle of 45 degrees until he reaches the next row. Then straight on once more and then off again at an angle….

Now he works himself, crawling on his stomach and burying himself in the sand for hours at a time, up to a tent in the outside line. He steps silently into the tent, feels about with care—and he is the possessor of a rifle and a cartridge-belt. Thus armed he has now a chance of life and of getting safely across Morocco.

In most cases, however, after a few days of golden freedom, a freedom consisting of perpetual marching and ceaseless hunger, the man on pump meets his fate in the shape of a band of mounted "Goums," [5] and finds himself, after a very short space of time, looking down the muzzles of their revolvers. He then has to go back the same way he came, fastened by a long chain to one of the Goums' horses, panting and coughing with the exertion of keeping up with the horse, which he must do if he doesn't want to be dragged over the sand and stones. Thus he is taken from station to station till the garrison is reached. If he is lucky enough not to have lost any part of his equipment and has not been absent more than a week, he is tried by the regiment, and gets off with sixty days' cellule—solitary confinement in the dark. If, however, any part of his uniform is missing, he is tried for theft and desertion by the court-martial in Oran, which is noted for its Draconic sentences.

"Traveaux forcés," penal servitude for years, is then his fate—a penalty which usually means death, for there are very few constitutions that can stand the terrible life in the penal settlements.

Rader and his friends were poumpistes of this type. One evening the man of strong language and never-failing wit was missing when the roll was called. Several others were reported missing from various rooms, and the next morning the whole company knew that six Germans had deserted en bloc.

The sergeant of our section made a list of the uniform and equipment Herr von Rader had left behind. He cursed, as only a lazy sergeant in the Legion can curse, his own personal bad luck because the six deserters, being in his company, now gave him a lot of work and worry. At the evening roll-call the colour-sergeant appeared in person in our room and ordered Corporal Wassermann to take good care that no more of the men under his charge deserted: otherwise he'd make it d——d hot for him. The captain, however, sent for all the Germans in his company.

He made us a long speech in the company's bureau:

We had all served our time in Germany and we ought really to be content with the life in his company. There was no flogging in the Legion! When anybody thought he had a ground for complaint he should report himself at once to the captain. The Legion was a regiment of foreigners, and one nation was treated in exactly the same way as another: a German soldier in it had naturally exactly the same rights as every one else. He would be very sorry if his men took to deserting. It was quite hopeless to try! A description of the deserters had been telegraphed long ago to all the stations in Algeria, the police all along the coast were on the look-out, and in a few days we should see the truants brought back to the regiment.

"You only get into trouble when you desert, as it is very heavily punished!"

"The whole thing is this," said Smith when we came back into our room. "The cap'n is champion fencer of France, and thinks he must be always practising in the fencing saloon! He hasn't the least idea what things really look like in the company!"

Even a raw recruit knew much more of what went on in the company than its leader. The non-commissioned officers took very good care that the captain did not learn too much….

In reality the colour-sergeant and the non-commissioned officers were all-powerful. The captain was merely what one might call the owner of the business, who signed the punishment sheets and reports which his managers laid before him, without bothering his head about details. The non-coms had the mess-allowance in their hands, put down whatever men they pleased on the punishment sheet for absolutely nothing at all, and would very quickly have done to death any one who made a complaint, even if at first he got his rights by complaining.

"By the beard of the Prophet," laughed Smith, "I'd like to see what happened to the chap who made a complaint. Why, the whole bally lot of non-coms would be down on him in less than no time, and in a couple of weeks he'd be a Zephyr in the penal battalion. That's what happens when you complain, Signor Capitano. But he's quite right about deserting is our champion captain. We do see most of 'em again."

Then he went over to Rassedin and asked him if he thought that Rader and the other five poumpistes would get away. Rassedin shook his head and laughed, making with his thumb and forefinger that counting gesture which means paying all the world over.

"No money," he said dryly.

The other veterans too thought that Rader and the other five were not the sort of men who would succeed in surmounting the difficulties of a flight unprovided with money.

The flight of the six comrades was an inexhaustible topic of conversation in the company. Smith used to spin one yarn after another of mad bids for freedom. Two of these histories I shall never forget.

While Smith was in the second battalion at Saida, there were two brothers in his company, two Englishmen of good birth. The final and maddest freak of their mad lives landed them in the Legion. When their family learnt that they were wearing the Legion's uniform, they did all they could to procure their freedom. In vain! Petitions to the French Secretary of War were of no avail, and the English Consul in Algiers naturally refused to intervene. Finally the two brothers were sent a large sum of money and they tried their luck at deserting. They were no farther than Saida station when they were arrested and marched back to prison.

As soon as they were free again they made a second attempt at flight and got as far as Oran. But their descriptions had been telegraphed there and they were arrested as they were going on board the steamer. This time they were sent for six months to the penal battalion.

The poor devils must have written despairing letters home. Their relations were determined to get them free at any price. With an English merchant as go-between, they bribed a Levantine, who hired an automobile and waited days and days by Saida, in the neighbourhood where the convicts had to work. After long delay the brothers succeeded in escaping at night from their tent. They reached the appointed rendezvous in safety, found the Levantine with his motor waiting for them, and started off as quickly as the sand would allow. The automobile, however, had attracted notice in Saida, and the military authorities came at once on the idea that these dauntless deserters had hit on the unusual method of flight by motor-car. Telegrams flew from station to station, and the Arab police barricaded a narrow part of the road a little north of Sidi-bel-Abbès, which passes at this point through a rocky part of the country, absolutely impassable for vehicles.

A short time afterwards the motor came up. The runaways took no notice of the warnings of the gendarmes who rode to meet them, and crashed at full speed into the pile of stones. The motor was overturned, the two deserters being killed immediately. The Levantine was seriously injured and brought into the hospital at Sidi-bel-Abbès, where he died a few days later.

The other story is a really sad one.

An Austrian engineer had, as a young man, for some reason or other enlisted in the Foreign Legion. After a while he managed to escape and worked his way home to Austria again. He must have been a clever fellow, for he soon gained a distinguished position in his profession. Fortune smiled upon him. He made a notable invention, which made him a wealthy man. Ambition led him to send the machine he had invented to the World's Exhibition in Paris. In the distinguished engineer nobody would recognise the deserter from the Foreign Legion—at least so he thought. But cruel fate willed otherwise. Standing by his machine at the exhibition he was recognised by an officer from his company who was just then on leave in Paris.

The officer did his duty as a soldier and had the deserter arrested. At one blow the man who had worked his way from the depths of poverty to the top of his profession, who looked upon the days in the Legion as merely a dark shadow on his life, became once more a légionnaire. A few days in a Parisian military prison, a few hours' journey by rail in a prisoners' compartment, the short sea-voyage to Oran, the cruel minutes before the court-martial—and then perpetual, blunting work in an Algerian mine, truly a living death. And thus this man had to live for many a long month, till the horrible climate carried him off….

Flight from the Legion is always a risky and difficult undertaking, risky since there is always the severest punishment waiting for the deserter who gets caught. Even the possession of really plentiful means is no guarantee for a successful flight. There are so many hindrances to surmount, such a mountain of difficulties to be climbed.

To begin at the beginning.

The Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès supplies the clothes. Buying civilian clothes is the first chapter of a légionnaire's flight, the first part of his preparations for which the would-be deserter needs not only money but also a finely developed talent for haggling and bargaining. To open negotiations is very easy: the légionnaire simply addresses a passer-by in one of the little alleys and whispers to him that he knows of some one who would perhaps buy civilian clothes. In one case in a hundred the passer-by shakes his head and goes his way. In the ninety-nine other cases he looks pleased, and in just such a whisper tells the légionnaire to follow him into his house without attracting attention. Once there, the bargaining begins. Heaps of old clothes are fetched, until something is found somewhere about the customer's size. Boots, shirt, collar, hat, and tie are all found. To an honest man of business the transaction would seem somewhat strange.

These Ghetto transactions have an underlying principle of their own: furnish as poor goods as possible at as high a price as you can get! The buyer is already nervous at the prospect of his flight, so, in spite of all, he pays an absolutely fabulous price. Fifty francs is usually the price of an old suit, of which the trousers come, perhaps, from Germany, the waistcoat from France, and the coat from Italy, and which would be very dear at ten francs. The "business friend" next claims a gold piece for allowing the légionnaire to change his clothes in his house; a further gold piece arranges for the care of his uniform, which a légionnaire who is at all careful will not be persuaded so easily to leave in the lurch. For the deserter captured without his uniform is tried for theft by court-martial, and the military tribunal in Oran always passes sentence of a long term of penal servitude. But the man of Israel is willing enough—provided he gets a gold piece for it—to take care that the uniform and entire equipment of his customer is safely preserved for the poor regiment. Neatly bound together the uniform lies idle for a few days. Then, one dark night, a youth from the Ghetto throws the parcel over the wall of the barracks. A ticket has been pinned on beforehand, on which the name and number of the owner has been written so that the gentlemen in the quarter-master's office needn't cudgel their brains wondering how to register this parcel from heaven.

All so considerate!

The runaway, however, wanders through the alleys of the Jewish quarter and the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès, taking great care to avoid instinctively saluting the officers and non-coms he meets. His money, with which he bought his civilian clothes, and of which there is still enough for his railway journey and passage, is a mighty help to him.

He must not attract notice anywhere; he must bridle his tongue, lest the curious French which is individual to the Legion betray him, and he must act the rôle of the harmless traveller to a nicety. He naturally cannot begin his journey from the station of Sidi-bel-Abbès, which is watched by a commando of the Legion's non-commissioned officers day and night. No, he must go on foot to one of the stations on the way to his destination; the farther from Sidi-bel-Abbès he is, the less likely he is to attract attention. So he makes a long night march, keeping a sharp look-out for the patrols of Arab police. Then comes the railway journey to a coast town. The only two towns that come in question are Oran and the town of Algiers, since regular lines of steamers only run from these two ports. Oran is mostly avoided, because it is so near to Sidi-bel-Abbès, and because there are so many of the Legion's officers to be met with there. The journey to Algiers, on the other hand, is very expensive, and it often happens that the truant's money is exhausted, and he lands there penniless. In this case German légionnaires usually go to the German Consulate, but only receive the stereotyped reply that there is no money at the Consul's disposal "for purposes like this."

The Consulate is not only powerless to help them, but, into the bargain, is one of the best and most efficient mouse-traps a French gendarme could want. Old légionnaires always give you the same warning: "For the Lord's sake don't go to the Consul in Algiers." If, in spite of this, a deserter does go to the Consul, he is merely told that he cannot possibly gain assistance there.

And now the trap begins to do its work. The police in Algiers know well enough that there are a great many escaped légionnaires among the men who come to the Consulate. When any one comes out looking in the least bit suspicious, they receive him tenderly and inquire lovingly about his papers. The deserter is then done for….

I should like to know whether the German Consul in Algiers has the slightest idea that, in all innocence, he has been the ruin of so many German légionnaires.

The runaway whose money has been swallowed up by the railway journey and who cannot pay his passage over sea, must in most cases give himself up for lost. It is generally only a question of a few days till he is arrested. A careless word in a wine-shop, a lame excuse when he seeks work and can show no papers—in short, the whole system of denunciation which is so flourishing in Algiers very soon hands him over to the police.

And even when he has money enough to pay his passage on one of the Mediterranean lines, and has his ticket safe in his pocket, he is not yet in safety. Most of the runaways who have succeeded in reaching Algiers make the mistake of taking a passage on one of the German or English lines of steamers, and is arrested at the eleventh hour as he goes on board. It is on the foreign ships that they keep a specially sharp eye. On the French boats, on the other hand, which ply between Algiers and Oran, you don't need any papers or even a passport, because the authorities look upon these boats as an internal French means of communication.

The route from Algiers to Tunis is absolutely safe for the deserter. There, nobody notices him in the enormous rush of the Levantine traffic, and he needs no passport to cross to an Italian port. But the expense is enormous.

Among the légionnaires who desert, the number of those who can escape in civilian clothes by the comparatively safe way of the railway and the Mediterranean boats is very small. Travelling costs money…. A flight over the town of Algiers needs really quite a little capital—150 francs at least. This is a very low estimate, for the purchase of clothes alone takes about seventy francs. How few of the men in the Legion can raise such a sum like this!

In most cases they are poor devils who have no one in the wide world who could or would send them a sum of this sort; most of them never had a franc to their name while they were in the Legion, to say nothing of a gold coin. Men like this are seldom successful in their flight, even when they spend months and months in preparation and discuss their route a hundred times over with the veterans of the Legion. They don't run blindly into the desert like the poumpistes, who don't really want more than a few days of runaway freedom. Their way is also to the coast. In uniform! On foot!

In these two expressions there is expressed the deserter's whole difficulty. Although the distance from Sidi-bel-Abbès to the coast is only about one hundred kilometres, not a very great stretch for a légionnaire who is accustomed to long marches, it is beset with danger for every yard of the way. The runaway can be recognised a long way off by his uniform. True, he only marches by night. But the starlit nights of Algeria are very bright, and he has to creep from rock to rock and from hollow to hollow, to avoid being seen by the patrols. By day he lies motionless in the sand. He suffers hunger and thirst for days on end, and lives on fruits, which he steals when hunger drives him to risk discovery.

When he has reached the coast in safety, the game of hide-and-seek begins anew. He often lies for days in some little coast town, where the Mediterranean tramp-steamers touch, concealed in a shed or in some old boat on the shore, till a ship carrying the German or English flag comes into port. He swims out to this ship in the middle of the night, climbs on board, and hides in one of the ship's boats, or in the coal-bunker. He first makes his appearance when the ship is on the high seas as a more or less pleasant surprise for the captain. He is now safe—they can hardly throw him overboard. There are, moreover, a great many captains who shut their eyes when a runaway of this sort is discovered, and even if the ship is still lying in port do not give him up. There are some even who carry their humanity so far as to stand a certain amount of unpleasantness with the authorities for his sake.

These are mostly German ships, and above all, ships from Hamburg. Deserters from the Legion land over and over again in the old Hansa town, and again and again you may read in the Hamburg daily papers that deserters have arrived with such and such a ship, and have been taken charge of by the police authorities. Now and then they go just as they stand, in their uniform, with bayonet and all the rest of it, to the paper's offices and tell the worried editor about their life and sorrows in the Legion….

These are those who have had luck; the tiny proportion of penniless deserters who are successful in their flight. Not freedom but prison awaits the large majority at the finish of their attempt. The Arab gendarmes are paid a bonus on the deserters they arrest, which amounts to many thousand francs a year!

The regiment is acquainted with many other means of desertion, if by "desertion" you understand every means by which the deserter can free himself from work in the Legion. In the terrible heat of summer, when the difference in temperature between day and night is simply enormous, sickness, in many a grim form, stalks through Algeria. The drinking water becomes infected, and typhoid sets in: the légionnaire who is tired of active service can be pretty sure of a long spell of illness.

But to make quite certain he helps matters artificially—with an extraordinary measure in vogue in the Legion: he drinks a mixture of absinthe and milk. Every veteran in the Legion swears this hellish drink never fails to bring on an attack of fever! The object of this suicidal method of desertion is naturally to avoid work in the Legion by a long spell of sickness—its object is always attained; mostly so effectively that the man never takes his place on parade again, but rests for ever in the Legion's cemetery!

In the same way self-mutilation may be met with: the chopping off of a finger which renders the légionnaire unfit for active service. Others simulate illness or madness. This the suspiciousness and brutality of the doctors in the Legion renders very difficult. Now and then a légionnaire with a will of iron manages to play the comedy of madness successfully.

The means employed are sometimes rather drastic. Some years before I entered the Legion, a Belgian served in my company who shammed for a whole year. He dirtied the men's quarters in such a fashion that his comrades fell upon him and ill-treated him in every possible way, but he merely answered their curses and reprisals with an inane laugh. Neither curses nor blows seemed to make the least difference to him.

This fellow had grit. He played his part as a lunatic, as unpleasant for himself as well as for others, without ever wavering. They shut him up, they compelled him to do the hardest work, they brought him into hospital and wellnigh starved him or tortured him with drugs; he was confined for weeks in the dark, he was sent to the hospital at Daya and treated with cold water—all in vain! His method and his smile remained unchanged! After thirteen months the doctors felt themselves checkmated, gave up the job as hopeless and certified him mad. The colonel, purely out of curiosity, sent for the lunatic, who must needs have an attack of his particular malady in the regimental bureau itself.

As soon, however, as he was home again in Belgium, he wrote postcards to the officers and to several members of his company…. He had foiled them all and they were the idiots! The most unmitigated ass of them in his humble opinion was the regimental doctor! If possible the surgeon-major in the Algerian corps was a bigger fool still!

Tremendous energy is, however, necessary to bring a sham of this sort to a successful issue, and cases like this constitute a tiny minority. The doctors in the Foreign Legion are both clever and suspicious and the result is that there is always a good dose of Legion's brutality included in their treatment. All those who reported themselves sick, and hadn't some outward and visible sign of their ailment to show, were treated from beginning to end as shams.

Our médecin-major was an especial terror to the légionnaires. I only came into personal contact with him twice; the first time was on a manœuvre march when he refused me the medicine I wanted, and the other time was when I was vaccinated. There was an epidemic of small-pox in Sidi-bel-Abbès, and the whole of the Legion had to be vaccinated as quickly as possible. We were marched by companies into the great drill-hall where Monsieur le Major and his assistants were at work. Such a method of vaccination as this man employed I have never seen in my life and I have been vaccinated at least a dozen times. I am acquainted with every method of vaccination, from the gentle lancet-prick employed in Germany to the method in use in America, where they pare away the skin with a piece of ivory. As our company marched past the assembled doctors in Indian file I saw to my astonishment that the men were bleeding severely. When my turn came I flinched involuntarily—the doctor drove the lancet three times so forcibly into my upper arm that a regular fountain of blood spurted out.

It was pure brutality. Nothing more or less. This was typical of the man. It was his custom, the first time a man reported himself ill, to send him back to his company and give him three days' arrest for shamming. If the fellow appeared again he tried the effect of emetics followed by a long period of starvation. The only time he was supposed to be reasonable was when he saw symptoms of typhoid, which was his special hobby.

The Legion was thoroughly afraid of the hospital! They were desperate fellows indeed who tried shamming!

The topic of desertion from the Foreign Legion is wellnigh inexhaustible. When the transports sail from Oran or Marseilles to Indo-China with relief companies of the Legion on board, the Suez Canal is a favourite means of deserting. According to the Canal regulations the steamers must slacken speed in the narrow straits of Suez, and the légionnaire takes the opportunity to jump overboard. He swims the short stretch to land and is then safe. The sentries on the transports may not use firearms in the international waters of the Suez Canal, and therefore cannot fire on the deserter as he swims. Neither is extradition from the English or Egyptian authorities to be feared.

Several of these transports from the Foreign Legion pass through the Suez Canal every year, and these desertions are so frequent that the Ghetto of Port Said pays a fixed price of ten shillings for the capital service boots of the Legion!

Desertions en masse occur now and then, but these may be classed as mutinies rather than as desertions. In Southern Algeria, in the loneliness of the desert, the garrison of some small fort occasionally breaks out, marching for the Morocco frontier. The next bevy of troops soon brings the runaways back again, and even if it comes to a shot or two the superiority of the numbers against them soon brings the mutineers to reason. A mutiny like this generally ends in the mutineers being shot. An act of this sort is nothing else than an outbreak of madness caused by the dreadful monotony of service on the lonely stations in the desert. It is an outbreak of the cafard! The poor devils should be treated by a doctor instead of being sentenced by a court-martial.

The Foreign Legion is a fruitful field for hypnotic suggestion. In my time a number of légionnaires deserted from Sidi-bel-Abbès, with the intention of fighting their way through to Morocco. Morocco was just then talked about till the idea became surrounded with a sort of halo. The attempt itself was pretty hopeless—the men were driven to it by the suggestive power of the words, "le Maroc."

Morocco was the Legion's fairyland, the land the soldier longed for. Not a single day went by without a rumour of fighting in Morocco raising excitement in the Foreign Legion to fever pitch. Dark war-clouds were gathering on the horizon. From the frontier there came continual reports of the intrigues of the pretender, and in the inland of Morocco mighty battles were fought at short intervals. Among the watchful officers of French Africa every one was certain that the internal troubles in Morocco were not merely the petty splutterings of the usual native fireworks, but the first sparks of a mighty bonfire.

The Foreign Legion knew of this; then all that was discussed in the officers' mess filtered through to the regiment through its own various private channels.

Orderlies came rushing into the barracks in a fever of excitement as soon as they came off duty in the mess and told their friends in the Legion all about the heated debates that had taken place and which all revolved around Morocco. The servants of the staff officers brought news of Moroccan visitors closeted with their masters; Spahis who had served their time in the Morocco frontier garrisons and who were quartered on the regiment on their way through to Oran, told how sharp duty on the frontier now was, and how the garrisons were perpetually being strengthened.

The veterans put their heads together and discussed the prospects of a bloody war! They had wonderful stories to tell of the golden treasures of Morocco, of the jewels that the better classes wore, and in their fancy they pictured an Eldorado of plundered wealth and booty. These mysterious rumours grew from day to day. More than half of the regiment's officers were ordered to the little frontier towns, and it was not unnatural when the Legion found in this a sure sign of fighting to come. With a broad smirk, an orderly brought the news that the colonel had engaged two masters to teach him Arabic, and it was easy to see how proud he was of the enormous supply of ammunition which was sent out from France. Recruiting began with zeal in the Spahi barracks opposite. Arab recruits with their splendid horses joined daily. Sections for telegraph duty went off to the frontier to see to the old wires and to lay new ones; volunteers were called for to form a corps for the heliographs, and veterans whose time was up got the tip from one or other of the officers that it would be very much to their advantage to stay on and not to take their dismissal just then….

In this roundabout way, through non-coms, orderlies, and soldier servants, everything was perhaps very much distorted, but it all sounded very probable and typical. The Legion is like a mighty ear-trumpet—through its countless channels it gathers up the officers' gossip and intrigues for its own uses, and really knows a good deal about the state of affairs in Northern Africa; it knows that the military circles at the head of affairs in Algeria have their own axe to grind, and that the clever catch-phrase "pénétration pacifique" was formed in an officers' club, and that greedy squinting at Morocco is as old as the occupation of Algeria!

It was as if every one stood under the ban of a mesmerist. The longing for "le Maroc" spread to the légionnaires, who gave practical evidence of their longing for change and excitement, deserting in crowds. Most of them met their deaths. The border tribes cut their throats.

Others had more luck. In the army of the pretender, the present Sultan, Mulai Hafid, there used to be several officers who were once soldiers of the Foreign Legion!

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]

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.

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:

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.