I
Stories about the Foreign Legion have, nearly all, the same centre
idea and motive--escape or attempted escape.
It is the one thing the légionnaires think of. They grumble about
their food; they grumble about their chief officers and their
subordinate officers; they grumble about the hot days and cold nights
of Algeria; they grumble about the scarcity of cigarettes, the price
of wine, the scarcity of soap, the hardness of their work, the
smallness of their pay, but they never grumble about their loss of
liberty.
They dream about it.
It is the one idea around which all other ideas revolve, and it is
kept alive and active less perhaps by the general hardness of life in
the Legion than by the fact that escape is, though seemingly
feasible, next to impossible.
No man can buy his discharge from the Legion. No man, once he has
signed the fatal paper, can escape from the consequences of his act
by influence. You may be the son of a prince--it does not matter, or
of a Rockefeller--it does not matter, you have to dree your weird for
five years and carry your rifle and knapsack under the blazing sun to
the last day of your term of enlistment.
After all, you have signed a contract, and signed it with your eyes
open, and should you fight against fate and try to break your
contract, you find that the system you are struggling with has
provided against that.
Twenty thousand men or so, distributed in Algeria, Indo-China and
Morocco, and most of them willing to escape on the slightest chance,
require a pretty definite and complete system of restraint.
Corporal Jacques had very clear views on this matter. Bitter
personal experience had convinced him of the futility of all attempts
at evasion. Where he had failed he could not see the chance of
anyone else succeeding. Nor did he wish anyone else to succeed.
Such a success would have cast extra discredit on his own attempt, an
attempt that was fast fading from the memory of the regiment, but not
from the memory of Corporal Jacques.
One bright morning, Jacques, who had returned to the barrack yard
with his squad after three hours' practice on the ranges, turned from
lighting a cigarette to watch the arrival of a column of recruits
just arrived from France by way of Oran.
There were forty men in the column, men of all heights and ages, all
nationalities, a sinister-looking crowd, dusty, tattered, limping,
many of them most evidently underfed and nearly all of them wearing
that look of dejection common to lost dogs and lost men.
Most of these new recruits had joined the Legion to escape
starvation; a few were of the active criminal type and had evidently
been given the choice of the Legion or the Penitentiary. Jacques'
keen eyes sorted them out and classified them at once, but there was
one man he could not classify, a man of middle height, dark,
clean-shaven, youthful and of military bearing.
This person's clothes though dusty were well-cut, and his boots of
brown tan leather were a marvel.
He carried himself easily, with an air of indifference and
detachment, as though he were a spectator and not a member of this
little company of tragic actors, and when the recruits were dismissed
to find their quarters, he lit a cigarette before going to the depot
to receive his uniform.
Jacques felt interested in this individual. Here was most evidently
a man of superior birth, an aristocrat strayed into the trap of the
Legion. Every now and then the net closes on a gorgeous bird of this
description. Jacques knew the type and despised it; the young man of
good birth gone wrong was, in his experience, a person to be avoided;
he had had his soap stolen by a Viennese banker's son and he had been
badly treated financially--it was a matter of five francs--by a
gentleman with manicured nails and no money morals, who had the
reputation of being a Count in his own country--though what that
country was no man knew.
But the present specimen was different somehow from the others, as
far as one would judge by appearances, and Jacques, falling into talk
with him, showed him the way to the depot and then to the dormitory
allotted to him.
No place in the world is kept more spick and span than the great
barracks of the Foreign Legion. It vies with an English lighthouse
or an English man-of-war in the polish of its brasses and the
neatness of its poor appointments.
The dormitory to which Jacques led the new-comer had the appearance
of a hospital ward. There were twenty beds, and every bed, except
one or two that were vacant, had a card with a légionnaire's name and
number.
"Here you are," said Jacques. "You can choose your bed from those
three near the door; shuffle into your uniform and you can sell your
old togs; you won't want them for another five years, and the
fashions will have altered by then."
He showed the new-comer, who was carrying all his kit and
accoutrements in a huge bundle, how to stow away his things, gave him
a few hints as to what to avoid if he wished for a peaceable life,
and took his departure.
The new-comer's name was Schneider, at least that was the name he had
joined under, a German name, yet he spoke French like a Frenchman.
Jacques saw him next on the drill ground, and noticed that he wore
his uniform as though born in it. They had thrown him out of the
instructional squad, finding that he was as well up in the business
of drill as the oldest légionnaire, and he was attached to Company 4,
practising the double with the great column round and round the vast
drill ground.
From the very first moment Schneider took his place in the Legion as
a person to be respected. He had not sold his clothes. They, and
the wonderful tan boots, he had given away to be sold and he had
never asked for the money. He had plenty of money.
The Legion, though recruited considerably from the ranks of the
broken-down, the criminal and the starving, is a regiment of dudes;
after the main ambition to escape comes the ambition to outvie one's
neighbour in cleanliness and neatness. This desire to be neat, to be
bright and speckless, is stimulated by the laws of the Legion that
bear with terrible severity upon slackers; all the same, it is a true
desire, a true ambition born of the spirit of the Legion, that
strange spirit of the mass which ever affects and bends the
individuality of the unit.
Schneider was such a dude that he manicured his nails; having plenty
of money, he was able to pay for services. The légionnaires' fatigue
uniform of white cotton cloth has to be washed nearly every day;
Schneider never washed his uniform, he paid another man to do that
job; the polishing of the metal work of his equipment and the
cleaning of his rifle never occupied his time; a brother légionnaire
did all this for him--at a price.
Consequently, he could keep his hands clean and his evenings were
free. He spent his evenings mostly in Sidi-bel-Abbès, in the Place
Sadi Carnot listening to the band, or in one of the better-class
cafés, unapproachable to the ordinary légionnaire on account of the
prices charged--thirty centimes for a cigar, half a franc for a
vermouth, and so forth.
Jacques sometimes saw Schneider seated before one of these cafés
reading the _Echo d'Oran_ and sipping his wine. Jacques, who had
taken an interest in the man at first sight, found as time went on
that his interest was steadily growing. He watched him as a cat
watches a mouse.
He could not make him out at all. Here was a man most evidently of
good birth, a man possessing money, and, more than that, a man who
evidently kept up correspondence with his people--for Schneider
received a good many letters--living the slave life of a légionnaire.
Had he committed some crime? If so, why did he keep up this large
correspondence? He was not of the criminal type, and, although men
of the ordinary type often do commit crimes, Jacques felt
instinctively that Schneider was not held in the Legion by fear of
the Law.
There were other points of interest about this person. Without being
in the least offensive in his manner, he managed to keep others at a
distance; he talked with anyone who chose to talk to him, yet he made
no friend; doing his duties well and without any sign of distaste,
he, yet, always gave the impression of a mechanism without any soul
in the business on hand. He never grumbled were the practice march
ever so long or the sun ever so hot on the drill ground. He seemed
quite content, in a fatalistic sort of way, with his lot, and Jacques
might have left the matter at that and lost interest in him had not
Schneider one day chosen to make him his friend.
It was six months after the latter had joined, and one morning after
parade, Schneider, producing a packet of cigarettes, offered one to
Jacques.
"They aren't very good, but they are better than the Algerian stuff,"
said Schneider.
Jacques, lighting up, assented, and the two men strolled back to the
barracks, talking of indifferent matters, till, just as they were
parting at the door of the depot, Jacques said:
"You aren't German, are you?"
Schneider laughed.
"No," said he. "I am not German. I am an Austrian--but I will tell
you about that some day."
Next evening, they met in the town and Schneider stood Jacques a
bottle of wine. It was the beginning of a friendship that was to
last some months, a warm friendship, at least on the part of Jacques,
who found himself actually caring less for Schneider's money or his
wine than his companionship. Schneider, now that the ice was thawed,
exhibited an interest in the Legion and its history in strong
contrast with his general air of disinterest in everything. More
especially did he ask questions about men who had tried to make their
escape, their methods and their chances.
"_Mon Dieu,_" would reply Jacques, "there's not a chance, not one in
a thousand has ever done it." He went into the subject from the
circumference to the centre and in the manner of an expert. He
showed how the boats were guarded at Oran, how the railway line was
watched and the roads patrolled.
"And how about escaping by way of the interior?" asked Schneider.
Jacques laughed and gave examples of men who had tried that business
and their horrible fate.
"It's a fool's game," said he, "however you take it; but why do you
talk of it so much. Do you want to escape?"
"Not I," said Schneider. "I am as happy here as anywhere else. I am
interested in the subject, that is all."
But despite his interest in the subject, he did not refer to it
again, and it seemed to Jacques for a moment as they returned to
barracks that under the calm and listless demeanour of his friend
there lay an uneasy spirit; the spirit of the slave that has sold
himself into slavery and who has awakened to the galling of his
chains.
Then he dismissed the subject from his mind. Schneider seemed
contented, and if he did want to escape, he would without doubt have
told the fact to his one friend in the Legion--Jacques.
One day, some two months later, Schneider took Jacques aside.
"You have asked me once or twice," said he, "about my nationality and
the place where I came from. I told you I was an Austrian and that
was the truth. I am, in fact, a Viennese. My family is one of the
oldest in Austria and I left my home and forsook my position on
account of an unfortunate love affair. You are my friend, and so I
tell you this, trusting that you will keep my secret."
Jacques, greatly flattered by the confidence of the other, swore
eternal secrecy, and Schneider went on:
"The girl I loved," said he, "was my equal socially, young, charming,
wealthy; she had discarded the attention of half Vienna, had chosen
me just as I had chosen her by that instantaneous power of selection
which Love alone bestows."
"_Oui, oui,_" said Jacques, scarcely understanding all this and quite
at a loss before the melodramatic language of the other, who, in
fact, seemed reciting some passage out of a cheap novel rather than
some experience from his own life.
"Everything went well," continued Schneider, "till one fatal day we
quarrelled."
"Ah, _mon Dieu_," said Jacques. "You quarrelled; and what did you
quarrel about?"
"That I cannot tell you," replied Schneider, "It is a matter I do not
care to refer to; it is sufficient that we quarrelled. I could not
endure life any longer, I left my country and, seeking an active
life, I came here."
"You certainly have got what you came to look for," said Jacques;
"and what has become of her; does she know where you are?"
"My friend," said Schneider, "not only does she know where I am, but
she is at the present moment in Sidi-bel-Abbès."
"In Sidi-bel-Abbès?"
"Yes. She is staying at the Hôtel d'Oran; she has written to me and
wishes to see me."
"And you are going?"
"No, I am not going," said Schneider. "Never again shall I see her."
"Ah, _mon Dieu_," said Jacques, "think twice about that. Never is a
long day. Come, see her and make it up; you have only four years and
a bit to serve before getting your discharge, and then you can marry
her."
"I will not see her," replied Schneider, "it is useless to speak of
it; but I want you, as a friend, to do something for me. I wish to
write to her. I have written to her, in fact, and here is the
letter. Will you take it to her? You know at the military post here
they sometimes open letters, at least so it is said. I want you to
give it into her own hands."
"I will do it," said Jacques. He took the letter and put it in his
pocket--there was no address upon it. "And for whom shall I ask at
the Hôtel d'Oran?"
"Madame Seraskier."
"Madame Seraskier?"
"Yes, that is her mother; she is staying there with her mother, so
you must ask for the elder lady. Madame Seraskier knows all about
this business, so you need not hesitate to hand the letter to
Mademoiselle Seraskier in her presence."
"I will do it," said Jacques.
He got an hour's leave that afternoon and started off for
Sidi-bel-Abbès.
Sidi-bel-Abbès is slashed across like a hot cross bun by two
boulevards, one running north and south, the other east and west.
The Hôtel d'Oran is situated near the junction of these boulevards,
and when Jacques arrived there, he found after numerous inquiries
that Madame Seraskier was at home. I say numerous inquiries, for in
the hotels of Sidi-bel-Abbès nobody seems to know anything about
anything, the Arab _khayf_ seems to have stolen into the mental
atmosphere of the business world, nobody seems capable of exertion or
surprise, and if you were to ask the lady clerk of the Hôtel d'Oran
as she sits in her glass-fronted office, "Madame, has a dromedary
gone upstairs?" I am perfectly sure she would reply, without even
raising those jet-black eyebrows of hers, "Monsieur, I do not
know--but I will ask." Jacques was shown up to the first floor and
into a private sitting-room, where an old lady and a young lady were
seated, one reading a novel and the other writing a letter.
He told of his mission with military brevity, and stood whilst the
young woman opened and read through the letter.
His mission was over with its delivery, yet he waited, scarcely
knowing why, half expecting that some verbal message would be given
to him, half held perhaps by his interest in the girl, who was very
good-looking yet spoiled in his eyes by a business-like and decided
manner evident in every movement.
"Thank you," said Mademoiselle Seraskier, as she finished reading and
handed the letter to the elder woman. "It is most good of you to
have brought this. There is no reply."
"No reply," said Jacques. He was thinking if this were so everything
was indeed up with this unfortunate love affair, and his interest in
his good friend Schneider made him bold.
"You will excuse me, mademoiselle," said he; "I am only a common
soldier and Monsieur Schneider is a gentleman, as is easily to be
seen, still he is my friend, and the welfare of my friend touches me.
He has been in the Legion some months now and he stands the life all
right; but it is in another six months or a year that the harness
will begin to rub. I know, for I have seen it in many a man like
him. The Legion tells, and the more a gentleman a man is, the sooner
it breaks him. Then he goes _cafard_ and shoots someone, or else he
tries to escape and gets hauled back. All this happens unless he has
some interest outside the Legion to hold him back and keep him quiet."
Jacques paused. He was a very blunt-speaking person and his shyness
before the ladies was dissipated by the sound of his own voice;
besides, he had a purpose.
"Monsieur Schneider has told me the whole affair," he resumed. "He
has quarrelled with you and will not make it up. Well, do not mind
him, give him another six months of drill and route marching and he
will sing another tune.--If you care for him, mademoiselle, as a
woman ought to care for a man, don't regard his tantrums and keep on
writing to him even if he tears up your letters."
The effect of this speech was astonishing. Mademoiselle Seraskier,
after looking at Jacques for a moment with eyes dancing with
merriment, suddenly turned and ran from the room; she seemed choking
with laughter, and the incensed Jacques was turning to go, when the
old lady held him.
"Do not mind my daughter," said she. "She is young, and young people
are sometimes foolish. Meanwhile, take my thanks for your kindness,
and as a small memento of our meeting please accept this."
She took a pink and blue five-hundred-franc note from a travelling
desk open on the table and approached Jacques with it.
"Madame," said Jacques, "I do not take money for assisting my
friends." He saluted, turned on his heel and departed.
It was magnificent. Five hundred francs to a légionnaire is the
equivalent of five thousand francs to an ordinary civilian, and he
had flung it back in the faces of these people--really in the face of
this girl who had laughed at his friend. He came down the stairs
swelling out his chest and with the feeling of a man who has cast
everything away but honour. Then in the street outside and all of a
sudden his splendour of mind faded and shrivelled up.
In a practical world where cigarettes were three sous a packet, he
had flung away five hundred francs. Twenty-five napoleons.
"Madame, I do not take money for assisting my friends." What a fine
sentiment for a man without five centimes in his pocket!
He stopped and actually retraced his steps for a pace or two, then he
resumed his way to the barracks, furious with himself, with
Schneider, Madame Seraskier, Mademoiselle Seraskier and the universe
in general. He saw Schneider that evening and told him that he had
delivered the letter, and Schneider not making any inquiries, he said
nothing more. He felt illogically angry with Schneider, so much so
that he borrowed five francs from him. It was the first time he had
ever borrowed from him. With the five francs, Jacques went off to
the canteen, where he stood treat all round, drank two bottles of
Algerian wine and went to bed happy.