THE FOREIGN LEGION
Half a hundred miles southwestward from Oran, set in the middle of a
fertile plain which is traversed by the Mekerra and overshadowed by the
escarpments of Mount Tessala, is Sidi-bel-Abbès. You will pronounce it as
though it were spelled Sidi-_bella_-bess, with the accent on the second
part, if you please. This fortified garrison town is France’s watch-dog,
which guards the west, for it occupies a strategic position of great
importance on the railway from Oran to Colomb-Béchar and within striking
distance both of Morocco and of the desert. The town is surrounded by
a moat and by a tremendous bastioned and crenelated wall pierced by
four gates, named after Oran, Daia, Mascara, and Tlemcen respectively.
Starting from the gates, two broad streets, shaded by plane-trees,
traverse the town from east to west and from north to south, the latter
thoroughfare forming a dividing line between the civil and the military
quarters.
When we arrived, late in the afternoon, an excellent military band
was playing in the Place Sadi Carnot, and just beyond, through the
bars of great iron gates, we could see a huge three-story building
of ocher-tinted plaster rising from beyond a vast parade-ground. At
first glance it seemed as though the population of the place was
wholly military, so crowded were the streets and squares with loitering
soldiery—some in the dust-brown khaki of the _tirailleurs_, others
swaggering along in the scarlet cloaks and enormous trousers of the spahi
cavalry, but by far the greater number wearing quaint-looking képis with
broad flat leather vizors, and rather slovenly-fitting but immaculately
neat white uniforms with scarlet _fourragères_ festooned from their
left shoulders and broad blue sashes bound about their middles. Then I
suddenly remembered that I had seen this uniform before—in Morocco and
Madagascar, in the Sudan and Syria and far-off Indo-China. Yes, and on
a score of European battle-fields, all the way from the North Sea to
the Dardanelles, during the Great War. How could I have forgotten that
Sidi-bel-Abbès is the headquarters and recruit depot of the _Ier régiment
étranger_, one of the four regiments of that celebrated corps, composed
of adventurous spirits of many nationalities, known as the Foreign
Legion, perhaps the most famous military body, as it is certainly the
most romantic and picturesque, in the world?
_La Légion Etrangère!_ The very name is a trumpet-call which stirs the
hearts and makes the feet of the young men restless. Ouida, in “Under
Two Flags,” has drawn an imaginative but somewhat exaggerated picture of
the experiences of a gentleman adventurer in the Legion during the early
days of the occupation, but it has remained for Percival Christopher
Wren, in “Beau Geste,” to portray the life of a _légionnaire_ with a pen
equally facile and colorful and far more convincing. Nor have most of
us forgotten the gusto with which, as boys at school, we were wont to
declaim the opening lines of “Bingen on the Rhine”:
A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears;
But a comrade stood beside him, while his life-blood ebbed away,
And bent, with pitying glances, to hear what he might say.
The Foreign Legion is popularly believed to be made up of broken men who,
impelled by misfortune, misdeeds, unrequited love, or any of the other
mishaps of life, have left their own countries—sometimes quite suddenly,
between two days, and for their countries’ good—and who have enlisted
in the Legion in order to find forgetfulness in action, or to place
themselves beyond the reach of the law, or because they did not know what
else to do with their lives. They come from all the European nations,
from the Levant, and even representatives of the two Americas may be
found within their ranks, and there are among them men of gentle birth,
upbringing, and education; but I imagine that a very large proportion of
them are simply penniless and friendless men who see in the Legion an
opportunity of keeping body and soul together and a possibility, however
slim, of rising to a commission by some desperate deed of derring-do.
The _Légion Etrangère_ is the most rigidly disciplined, the hardest
worked, and the most miserably paid body of soldiery in the world. Upon
enlistment a recruit can give whatever name he chooses and no questions
will be asked, for the Legion is not interested in the antecedents
of its _bleus_ and makes no effort to ascertain their history or to
penetrate such _noms-de-guerre_ as they may choose to assume. The term
of enlistment is for five years, for service in Algeria or in any other
of the French possessions, and the pay is a sou a day, which, when the
franc stood at par, meant that a _légionnaire_ received the princely
remuneration of eighteen dollars a year for his services to a grateful
country. A _légionnaire_ can reënlist at the end of five years, and again
at the end of ten, while those who have spent fifteen years with the
colors are eligible for a pension, which varies according to rank, though
there are not many who live to receive it. A foreigner, on completion of
five years’ service, is entitled to naturalization as a French citizen.
But, once the _engagement volontaire_ has been signed, the recruit
belongs to the Legion, body and soul, until his term of enlistment is
completed. For a condemned murderer to escape from the death-house at
Sing-Sing were scarcely more difficult than for a legionary to make good
his escape. Neither wealth, nor political pull, nor social influence, not
the pleadings of his relatives nor the intercession of his ambassador
can effect his discharge. Homesickness, the deadly monotony of life in
garrison towns and desert outposts, the systematic brutality of the
non-commissioned officers—all these have led _légionnaires_ to make
desperate attempts to escape, but those who have succeeded in evading
the long arm of French military law are pitifully few. Sometimes the
emaciated fugitives are dragged back at the end of a rope tied to the
saddle-bow of an Arab police _goumier_ to face a term of servitude in the
_bataillons d’Afrique_, the terrible convict corps of the French army;
but more often their mutilated bodies are found in the desert, where they
have perished from starvation, sunstroke, or Touareg spear.
Though the officers of the Legion are as fine as any in the French
service, the non-coms, who enjoy a measure of despotic authority
inconceivable in the American and British armies, are nearly always harsh
and tyrannical and in some cases brutal beyond belief. The _légionnaires_
have little time for idling. They are worked like galley-slaves from
five in the morning until five in the afternoon, and though they are
permitted a few hours of relaxation at nightfall, their evenings are
usually occupied in cleaning their kit and accoutrements in preparation
for the morrow. The route-marches to which they are subjected, under
an African sun and over burning sands, loaded with the excessively
heavy equipment of a legionary, which includes half of a shelter-tent,
fire-wood, a blanket, an overcoat, a spare uniform, emergency rations,
and in the pouches a hundred rounds of ammunition, are of appalling
length, frequently averaging thirty miles a day. Small wonder that
throughout the French army the Legion is known as the _cavalerie à pied_!
The mess of the Legion is the most cosmopolitan gathering on earth. At
the long bare boards are seated men who between them speak half the
languages of the world and represent every grade of society; men who have
spent their lives amid the slums of great cities and others who have
been accustomed to all that goes with evening-dress; men who have worn
the shoulder-straps of the Prussian Guard and of the Household Cavalry,
who have raised their glasses to the toasts of “Hoch der Kaiser!” and
“The King, God bless him!” Here are men who have plunged on the wrong
horse, who have been short in their mess-accounts, have been jilted
by the girl they loved, have signed to a check a name that was not
their own, or have held one ace too many. Some of them have known the
inside of Schönbrunn and the Winter Palace, some the inside of Moabit
and Dartmoor. Families and friends are waiting and watching for some
of them; detectives are waiting and watching for others. Here too are
professional soldiers—Germans, Poles, Russians, Belgians, Italians,
Greeks, even Turks—to whom the end of the Great War meant the loss of
their livelihoods.
In all those distant corners of the world where France is engaged in
“little wars,” the Legion holds the place of honor—and of death!—on the
line of battle. The tunics of its veterans bear ribbons showing that
they have fought all the way from Tongking to Timbuktu, from the Niger
to the Yser. During the Great War the legionaries, having no votes, were
time after time sacrificed in last stands and forlorn hopes in order to
save their enfranchised and, therefore, politically influential fellows
of the home army. The appalling sacrifices which they thus made on the
altar of their adopted country were rewarded by authorization to wear
the scarlet _fourragère_ of the Legion of Honor, the Legion being one of
the very few units of the French Army to win this coveted distinction.
Yet, despite its hardships and perils, or perhaps because of them, it is
a real military school and offers the good soldier frequent chances of
promotion, decoration, and glory. Some of the most famous soldiers of
France have found their marshals’ batons in the knapsacks of the Legion,
and most of the officers of the Legion have begun their careers in its
ranks. I have in mind the case of one _légionnaire_, an undergraduate at
Harvard, who enlisted in the Legion at the outbreak of the Great War and
rose to a lieutenancy. After the Armistice the French government sent
him back to Harvard to complete his education at its expense, with the
promise that upon his graduation he could choose between retiring with a
pension or accepting a captain’s commission.
[Illustration: THE MOROCCAN IS NOT AFRAID OF MEPHITIC MALADIES
The lemonade-seller knows nothing of sanitary drinking-cups and rarely
washes the single bowl which he uses for all his customers
It would never occur to the barber, who plies his trade in the open
street, to sterilize his tools; to do so would be to thwart the will of
Allah]
The story of the French occupation of North Africa is largely the
story of the Legion. During the last hundred years the legionaries
have not only fought the Turks, the Arabs, the Kabyles, and the
Moors, the Touaregs of the Sahara and the Berbers of the Riff, but
throughout Algeria and Morocco they have built roads and railways,
strung telegraph-wires, helped in the construction of towns, established
outposts, sunk wells in the oases, drained, tilled, and planted
agricultural districts, and policed a region twice the size of France. To
the legionary might aptly be applied the lines of Kipling:
For there isn’t a thing on the face o’ the earth
The beggar don’t know—nor do ...
You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead
To paddle his own canoe.
When history grants it the justice of perspective, France’s reclamation
of North Africa will be recognized as one of the most remarkable
achievements of our time, and that achievement has been very largely due
to the patience, energy, and courage displayed by the soldiers of the
Foreign Legion. So, as I stood on the parade-ground at Sidi-bel-Abbès and
watched the bronzed battalions swing past at a quick-step to the lilting
music of the Legion’s splendid band, I thought what a commentary it was
on civilization that so large a share of the great task of redeeming the
Dark Continent from blood, bondage, and barbarism—a task to which saints
and martyrs, cardinals and emperors, great statesmen and great captains
have devoted their lives—should have been borne by these friendless men,
these soldiers of misfortune, for whom society has no use and whom it has
abandoned to their fate.
* * * * *
Far to the west, beyond Sidi-bel-Abbès and barely two score miles from
the frontier of Morocco, the holy city of Tlemcen looks down from the
slopes of the Lella Setta Hills toward the shimmering Mediterranean,
twenty-five hundred feet below and thirty miles away. Once a seat of
empire and of learning, a place of such sanctity that it drew pilgrims
from the uttermost corners of the Moslem world, it has sunk to the status
of a third-rate provincial town, its inhabitants more concerned with
cereals than ideals, more engrossed in the exportation of esparto grass
and olive-oil than in the dissemination of religion and knowledge.
Pomaria, the Roman town which once occupied a site near the present city,
was so named from the profusion of fruit-orchards in the neighborhood,
and these still exist, the whole country-side being in the spring a sea
of snowy blossoms. But here, as elsewhere, the invading Vandals justified
the modern implication of their name by ruining the Roman town, and the
Arabs destroyed what little the Vandals left. For the next six or seven
hundred years the history of Tlemcen is little more than a recital of the
various Berber dynasties by whom it was ruled and who gave to the city
which they rebuilt its present name.
Tlemcen reached the peak of its fame and prosperity in the thirteenth
century under the Abd-el-Wahid sultans, a dynasty of Zenata Berbers which
ruled the greater part of what is now Algeria and claimed descent from
Goliath, king of the Philistines. At this period the city boasted 125,000
inhabitants, a thriving trade, a brilliant court, and a powerful army.
The Berber rulers encouraged the settlement of Christians and Jews, as
many as five thousand of the former dwelling peacefully in the city, and
the sultan Yarmorasen had a Christian body-guard. Here died, in 1494,
Boabdil, the last king of Granada, while fighting for his kinsman, the
sultan of Fez. But the roaring trade which the Tlemcenites carried on
with Pisa, Genoa, Catalonia, and Provence was wrested from them upon
the Spanish conquest of Oran, to which Tlemcen became tributary for a
time. Early in the sixteenth century the town was held for a few months
by the corsair chieftain Arouj Barbarossa, who, with his usual ferocity,
sought to wipe out the ruling dynasty by causing twenty-two of the Zenata
princes to be drowned in the _sahrij_, or pool, which was built by the
Moors for naval exhibitions. But Arouj met his end in a skirmish with
the Spaniards near Oujda and a few years later the town was captured by
Salah Reis, pasha of Algiers, and under Turkish rule it rapidly declined
in importance. In 1835 the Algerian leader, Abd-el-Kader, sought to
reëstablish the ancient empire of Tlemcen, and, though he was forced to
evacuate it upon the advance of General Clausel, it was restored to him
by the Treaty of Tafna in 1837. Upon the renewal of the war in 1842,
however, it was reoccupied by the French, and there they have remained
ever since. Under their rule the Meshuar, or citadel, formerly the palace
of the sultans of Tlemcen, was turned into barracks for the troops; the
glorious mosque of Abul Hassan became a museum; the inevitable system of
boulevards was constructed; and the city was encircled by a wall, for the
three ancient lines of fortification had been in great part destroyed.
On a little knoll, a short distance to the west of the town, the Transat
has built a small but charming hotel in the Indian bungalow style, where,
particularly in the spring, when the fruit-trees are in blossom, one can
spend a few days most delightfully.
Though not so extensive, the Moorish monuments of Tlemcen rank in
architectural merit with those of Granada, both having been built, it
should be remembered, by the Almoravide and the Almohade sultans. Of the
sixty-four mosques which existed in the city at the time of the French
conquest, a number have disappeared or fallen into decay. Of those that
remain the most important is the Great Mosque, the Djamaa-el-Kebir, which
was not the creation of a single person, but grew, like so many of the
Gothic cathedrals, during the reigns of several rulers. The greater part
of the present structure, including the magnificent minaret, was erected
by Yarmorasen, the great Berber monarch who reigned in Tlemcen in the
sixth century after the Hegira, which, as every one knows, took place in
the year 622 of the Christian era. The minaret, upward of a hundred feet
in height, is adorned with marble columns and incased in superb mosaics;
in the center of the alabaster-paved inner court stands a fountain of
Algerian onyx, where the pious perform their ablutions before going in to
prayer; and the arches of the interior, which is richly decorated in the
arabesque style, is supported by a forest of columns—seventy-two in all,
to save you counting them. The beautiful proportions of the arches and
columns, the mellow colorings of the ancient tiles, and the dim religious
light make the Djamaa-el-Kebir one of the most impressive places of
worship in the world.
Close by is the mosque of Abul Hassan, built in 1298 and now transformed
into a museum. The exterior has been materially altered by the French,
who have so covered it with modern tiles as to suggest a hotel bath-room;
but the interior, which has two series of arches resting on alabaster
columns and a ceiling which bears traces of polychromatic paintings, is
charming. The building’s greatest glory, however, is the _mihrab_, the
holy of holies, the recessed shrine which indicates the direction of
Mecca, and toward which, consequently, the worshipers turn in prayer.
Floored with glazed and lustrous tiles of great antiquity, gloriously
rich colorings and its walls decorated in stucco-work of arabesque
designs as delicate as the finest lace, and roofed with a painted and
gilt stalactite vault of amazing intricacy, it has been described as the
finest example of Mohammedan art in existence, and it very probably is.
The surpassing beauty and endless variety of the conventional patterns
which are employed in the decoration of Mohammedan places of worship is
due, it should be remembered, to the fact that the representation of
nature in any form is absolutely forbidden by the Koran, a restriction
which applies not only to depictions of the human figure, and to
animals or birds, but even to plants and foliage of all kinds. The only
exceptions to this rule are the highly conventionalized representations
of lions in the courts of the Alhambra and over the gateways of Cairo and
Jerusalem. I might add, parenthetically, that the _mihrab_, in a more
or less conventionalized form, appears in the patterns of nearly all
Oriental prayer-rugs, which are spread upon the ground so that the apex
of the design points meticulously toward Mecca.
The status of Tlemcen as a holy city, which still draws pilgrims not only
from North Africa but from all parts of the Moslem world, is due to its
association with the highly venerated Moorish saint, Sidi Bou Medine, who
was born at Seville in 1126, wandered through the Mediterranean lands
effecting cures and performing reputed miracles, was summoned to Tlemcen
to stand trial on a charge of heresy, and died within sight of its gates,
expressing with his last breath the wish that he be buried there. So his
faithful followers laid him to rest on a lovely hillside near the little
hamlet of El Eubbad, a mile outside the city, and beside the _koubba_
which covers his grave they raised a mosque of incomparable beauty, one
of the finest specimens of Moorish architecture in the whole world of
Islam. Its columns are of many-colored marbles, and stucco lace-work so
delicate that it might have been made under a magnifying-glass covers
the arches which spring upward to the roof. The lofty portals are incased
with ancient Moorish tiles of the lost luster, and the cedar-wood doors,
covered with an intricately interlaced pattern in bronze, are said to
rival those designed by Ghiberti for the Baptistery in Florence.
A mile and a half to the west of Tlemcen, without the gate which looks
toward Fez, are the extremely picturesque ruins of Mansoura, a mushroom
city of amazing beauty, solidity, and grandeur, which was built almost
overnight by the Emir Abou Yakoub, sultan of Fez, while engaged in the
siege of Tlemcen. The siege lasted eight years, and the sultan, who
was of a luxury-loving disposition, turned his camp into a walled city
covering two hundred and fifty acres, complete with the palaces, mosques,
baths, barracks, and other buildings of an imperial residence. He named
it El Mansoura, “the victorious,” but in this he was somewhat premature,
for he was eventually compelled to raise the siege, though Tlemcen
was taken some years later by his successor, Ali V, the Black Sultan,
whereupon Mansoura was abandoned for good and all. Besides the forty-foot
walls, and the massive towers, and the minaret, which is more than six
score feet in height and one of the finest in existence, but little
remains of this all-of-a-sudden city which was born on a monarch’s whim.
But such portions as are still standing are very beautiful. Mellowed
by time and weather to a glorious shade of pinkish brown, they rise in
lonely grandeur above the almond-orchards, which, in the springtime, turn
the hill-slopes on which Mansoura sits into a sea of blossomed snow.
* * * * *
Before taking our departure from Tlemcen, courtesy and etiquette required
me to pay a call on the military governor. I found his residence with
some little difficulty—a modest, red brick villa with a Senegalese
_tirailleur_ pacing up and down before the gate. My ring was answered by
a soldier servant, and I was shown into a comfortable reception-hall,
from whose walls hung, to my astonishment, an enormous Harvard banner and
the Stars and Stripes. As I was staring at them curiously, wondering how
these familiar emblems happened to be so prominently displayed in the
quarters of a French officer in this remote Algerian town, the commandant
himself entered the room—a trim, alert, slenderly built man, the breast
of his sky-blue uniform ablaze with ribbons and in his hand a copy of
the “Literary Digest”! Then I recognized him as Colonel Paul Azan, the
distinguished French officer, wounded at Verdun, who during the closing
years of the World War served as instructor in military science at
Harvard.
He pressed me into a great leather chair, offered me an excellent cigar,
and proceeded to bombard me with questions, phrased in Back-Bay English,
as to conditions and happenings in the United States. Here we were,
gossiping like two friends of long standing of things four thousand
miles away, our conversation constantly interspersed with allusions to
Commonwealth Avenue, Copley Plaza, or College Yard, while the bayonet of
the Senegalese sentry’s rifle constantly passed and repassed the window,
and, beyond the olive-groves and almond-orchards of Mansoura, the distant
Moroccan mountains rose in purple majesty against the African sky.
Azan, it developed, was at the moment occupied with the equipment and
despatch of troops to reinforce the French armies mobilized along the
borders of the Riff, where, if the reports of the French Intelligence
Service were to be believed, the _harkas_ of Abd-el-Krim were preparing
for war. In fact, a column was leaving for the west by road that
very day. It was composed, so Azan informed me, of complements of
_tirailleurs_, spahis, _chasseurs d’Afrique_, _infanterie coloniale_, and
a battalion of the Foreign Legion.
“Are there any Americans in the _régiment étranger_ at present?” I
inquired.
“Just now,” replied the commandant, “we have only one of your countrymen.
But his is a most interesting case. Let me tell you about him. He comes
from somewhere in your Middle West, and I gather that his parents are
absurdly rich. In any event, they spoiled him by giving him far more
money than was good for him. Shortly after graduation—he attended one of
the big Eastern universities—he married a girl of excellent family and
they went to Paris on their wedding trip.
“A few days after their arrival in _la ville lumière_ he ran across a
party of college friends. They decided that they must celebrate their
reunion by making a night of it. They went to Montmartre. Having come
from America, which is very dry, they decided to make Paris very wet.
They succeeded so well that day was breaking when our young friend
returned to his hotel completely—what do you call it?—soused. His bride
of a week was waiting up for him. She was a young woman of strong
character and not afraid to speak her mind.
“‘If that’s what you think about me,’ the husband said when her
reproaches ceased for want of breath, ‘I won’t inflict myself on you any
longer.’
“He was very proud and haughty, being still quite drunk, you see. So he
marched out of the room and out of the hotel. And she was too proud and
hurt to call him back; perhaps she didn’t take his threat very seriously.
In the street he accosted the first _agent de police_ he met and
demanded the way to the nearest recruiting station. The gendarme, being
a patriotic fellow and seeing in our husky young American fine material
for the French army, bundled him into a taxi and told the chauffeur to
drive him to the _Bureau de Recrutement_ of the _Légion Etrangère_ in
the Rue St. Dominique. Our recruiting officers, particularly in Paris,
are accustomed to strange applicants, and, as our young friend had no
difficulty in passing the physical examination, he was promptly enlisted.
“A week later he arrived at the recruit depot of the Legion at
Sidi-bel-Abbès, not far from here. He was still wearing his
evening-clothes, though the shirt-front that had once been so immaculate
was rumpled and grimy, and his clothes appeared to have been slept in,
as they had. In short, he looked considerably the worse for wear. But a
bath, a shave, a close hair-cut, a baggy white uniform with a broad blue
sash ... and, behold, he was a full-fledged _légionnaire_!
“That was nearly a year ago,” continued the colonel. “Our gay young
romantic still has a trifle over four years to serve. Regularly, the
first of every month, he receives a letter from his wife, assuring him
that she will be waiting for him when his term of service is completed,
and inclosing a small sum for wine, tobacco, and similar luxuries. It is
a hard life in the Legion, particularly for a man who has been spoiled
by luxury, but his officers tell me that he is standing up well under
it—‘making good,’ as you say in the States. When we are through with him
I think it is safe to say that he will be a better man, a better citizen,
and a better husband.”
Two days later, near Oujda, we overtook the _régiment étranger_ on its
way to the fighting in the Riff—a dusty column of iron-hard, sun-bronzed
men, loaded like beasts of burden, their long overcoats buttoned
back from their knees, their forage-caps pulled low over their eyes
against the blinding sun-glare. As we passed they were roaring out the
marching-song which the Legion sings only when it is bound for battle. I
wondered if my young compatriot, of whom Azan had spoken, was among these
adopted sons of Madame de la République.
Soldats de la Légion,
De la Légion Etrangère,
N’ayant pas de nation,
La France est votre mère.