SOUTH OF OUARGLA
"Halt!" cried Captain Tavernay.
The bugler at his side raised his bugle to his lips and blew. The
dozen chasseurs d'Afrique and the ten native scouts who formed the
advance guard stopped upon the signal. A couple of hundred yards
behind them the two companies of the Foreign Legion came to a
standstill. The convoy of baggage mules upon the right flank, the
hospital equipment, the artillery section, the herd of oxen which was
driven along in the rear, in a word, the whole expedition, halted in a
wood of dwarf-oaks and junipers at three o'clock in the afternoon.
The order was given to gather wood for the night's camp fires, and the
companies were dismissed. Each soldier made his little bundle and
fixed it upon his shoulders. Again the bugle rang out, sounding the
"Fall in." And the tiny force marched out from the trees of the high
plateaux into the open desert. It was extraordinary with what
abruptness that transition was made. One minute the companies were
treading upon turf under rustling leaves, the next they were
descending a slope carpeted with halfa-grass, which stretched away to
the horizon's rim, with hardly a bush to break its bare monotony. At
the limit of vision, a great arc like a mirror of silver glittered out
of the plain.
"Water," said a tall, bearded soldier, who marched in the front rank
of the first company. It was he who had stepped from the train at
Bel-Abbes with a light dust-coat over his evening dress suit. He
passed now as Fusilier Barbier, an ex-engineer of Lyons.
"No," replied Sergeant Ohlsen, who marched at his side: "the crystals
of a dry salt lake."
In the autumn of last year Ohlsen--or, rather, to give him his right
name, Tony Stretton--had marched upon an expedition from Mesheria to
the Chott Tigri, and knew, therefore, the look of those tantalising
salt lakes. That expedition, which had conducted a surrey for a road
to the Figuig oasis, had brought him his promotion.
"But we camp by the lake to-night," he added. "The wells of
El-Guethifa are close."
The companies went forward, and above that salt lake they saw the
mirages begin to shimmer, citadels and hanging gardens, tall towers
and waving woods and majestic galleons, topsail over topsail, floating
upon summer seas. At the wells the sheikh of the district was waiting
upon a mule.
"I want fifty camels with their saddles and their drivers at five
o'clock to-morrow morning," said Tavernay; and although as far as the
eye could reach there was no moving thing upon that vast plain except
the small group of Arabs and soldiers about the well, by five o'clock
the camels were squatting upon the sand with their drivers beside
them. The mules were sent back from El-Guethifa that morning, the
baggage was packed upon the camels, and the little force, insufficient
in numbers and supplies, went forward on its long and untoward march.
It passed through the oases of El-Maia and Methlili to Ouargla, at
that time the last outpost of French authority. At Ouargla it rested
for a week; and there, renewing its supplies, penetrated southwards to
survey the desert country of the Touaregs for the construction of the
oft-mooted trans-Saharan railway. South of Ouargla all the
difficulties of the advance were doubled. The companies went down
through the archipelago of oases in the dangerous Touat country
amongst a sullen people, who had little food to supply, and would
hardly supply it. Tavernay led his men with care, neither practising a
discipline needlessly strict, nor relaxing into carelessness. But he
was under-officered, and his officers even so were inexperienced.
Lieutenant Laurent, a man irritable and unjust, was his second in
command, and there were but two _sous-lieutenants_ besides. In spite
of all Tavernay's care the convoy diminished. One day a camel would
stumble on the slippery bottom of a salt marsh, fall, and break its
limbs; the next another would fail, and die through a long-untended
wound, caused by the rough saddle upon its back. In the ranks of the
soldiers, too, there was trouble, and Laurent was not the man to deal
with it. There was hardly a company of the Legion, recruited, as it so
largely was, from the outcasts and the men of sorrows, in which there
were not some of disordered minds, some whom absinthe had brought to
the edge of insanity. Upon these the severity of the expedition bore
heavily. Tents had been perforce discarded. The men slept under the
stars. They woke from freezing nights to the bitter winds of dawn, and
two hours after dawn they were parched by a burning sun, and all the
day they suffered under its pitiless and blinding glare. Storms
whelmed them in lofty spirals of whirling, choking sand. For a week
they would toil over high red mountainous ground of loose stones; then
would follow the monotony of bare round plains, piled here and there
with black rocks, quivering and glittering in the heat; the sun rose
day after day upon their left hand in scarlet, and set in scarlet upon
their right, and they themselves were still the tiny centre of the
same empty inhospitable space; so that only the difference of the
ground they trod, the feel of soft sand beneath their feet, where a
minute before they had marched on gravel, told them that they
progressed at all. The worst of the men became prone to disobedience,
eager for change; and every now and then a soldier would rise upon his
elbow in the night time, gaze furtively about over his sleeping
comrades, watch the sentries until their backs were turned, and then
crawl past them into the darkness. Of these men none ever returned. Or
some mania would seize upon them and fix a strange idea in their
brains, such as that which besieged Barbier, the fusilier, who had
once stepped out of the railway carriage in his evening dress. He
leaned over towards Stretton one evening, and said in a hoarse,
trembling voice--
"I can stand it no longer."
Both men were sitting by a tiny fire, which Barbier was feeding with
handfuls of halfa-grass and sticks. He was kneeling up in front of it,
and by the red waving light Stretton saw that his face was quivering
with excitement.
"What can't you stand?" he asked.
"It is Captain Tavernay," replied Barbier. He suddenly laughed in a
pitiful fashion, and cast a glance over his shoulder. "There is a man
put on to watch me. Night and day I am watched by Captain Tavernay's
orders. He wants to fix a crime on me! I know. He wants to trap me.
But let him take care!"
Stretton fetched the doctor, who listened for a while to Barbier's
rambling, minatory talk, and then shrugged his shoulders.
"Hallucinations," said he. "Ideas of persecution. The commonest form,"
and having fixed Barbier into his proper category, he walked away.
There was nothing to be done for Barbier upon this expedition. He had
to be watched; that was all. Thus for seven hundred miles the force
pushed southwards from Ouargla, and thus from within it disintegrated
as it went. Tavernay could not but notice the change, but he said
nothing to any subordinate. The men would fight well if fighting
happened. That he knew, and meanwhile he marched on.
It was just when the seven hundred miles had been completed that
Tavernay realised fighting was likely to happen. He went the round of
the camp as the sun was setting, when the rifles were piled and the
fires crackling. Stretton was at his side, and saw his commander stop
and shade his eyes. Tavernay was looking westwards. Far away against
the glowing ball of the sun, which was just dipping down behind the
plain, the figure of an Arab mounted upon a camel stood motionless and
black. Tavernay swung round and looked behind him. On the crest of a
sandhill to the north a second rider stood distinct against the sky.
Tavernay watched the men for a long time through his glasses.
"Touaregs," said he, gravely. "Masked Touaregs," and that night the
sentinels were doubled; and in the morning the bugle did not sound the
_reveille_.
Moreover, when the force advanced, it advanced in the formation of a
square, with the baggage camels in the centre, one gun in the front
line, and the other in the rear. They had marched into the country
where the Senoussa sect prevailed. The monasteries of that body sent
out their missionaries eastward to Khordofan, westwards to Tafilet,
preaching the purification of the Mohammedan religion and the
enlargement of Mohammedan countries now subject to the infidels. But
nowhere had the missionaries raised their standard with more success
than in this Touat country of the Sahara. The companies marched that
day alert and cheerful. They were consolidated by the knowledge of
danger. Captain Tavernay led them with pride.
"An insufficient force, ill-found, inadequately officered," he
thought. "But the men are of the Legion." They were _mes enfants_ to
him all that day.
But the attack was not yet to be delivered. During the night the two
scouts had ridden on their swift Meharis northwestwards, to the town
of Insalah. They knocked upon the gates of the great mud fortress of
Abd-el-Kader, the sheikh, and were instantly admitted to the dark room
where he sat upon a pile of rugs. When the eyes of the scouts became
accustomed to the gloom, they saw there was yet another in the room, a
tall man robed in black, with a black mask of cotton wound about his
face so that only his eyes were visible. This was the chieftain of the
Hoggar Touaregs.
"Well?" said Abd-el-Kader. And the scouts told him roughly the number
of the force and the direction of the journey.
Then Abd-el-Kader turned to the Touareg chieftain.
"We will let them go further south, since southwards they are
marching," he said, in his suave gentle voice. "A hundred miles more,
and they will be amongst the sand dunes. Since they have cannon, the
attack must be sudden. Let it be at the wells of Bir-el-Gharamo."
The Touareg chieftain rode out that day towards his hills; and,
unmolested, Captain Tavernay's expedition went down to the dunes.
Great waves of yellow sand, sometimes three hundred feet from crest to
base, intersected the face of the desert; the winds had given to their
summits the overhang of a breaking sea; they ran this way and that, as
though the currents of an ocean had directed their course; they had
the very look of motion; so that Stretton could not but remember the
roaring combers of the cold North Sea as he gazed upon these silent
and arrested copies. They made of that country a maze of intricate
valleys. Led by a local guide commandeered from the last oasis, the
companies of the Legion marched into the maze, and on the second day
saw, as they came over a hill, just below them in a narrow hollow, a
mud parapet built about the mouth of a well. This was Bir-el-Gharamo,
and here they camped. Sentries were posted on the neighbouring crests;
suddenly the darkness came, and overhead the stars rushed down towards
the earth. There was no moon that night, nor was there any sound of
danger heard. Three times Tavernay went the round of the sentries, at
eight and at ten and at twelve. But at three o'clock, just as the dawn
was breaking, a shot was heard. Tavernay sprang up from the ground,
the alarm rang out clear from the bugle over the infinite waste, the
companies of the Legion seized their piled rifles and fell into battle
order with an incredible neatness and expedition. There was no
confusion, no noise. The square was formed about the well--the camels
were knee-haltered in the middle, the guns placed at the corners. But
it was still dark. A few shots were fired on the dunes, and the
sentries came running back.
"Steady," cried Captain Tavernay. "They are coming. Fire low!"
The first volley rang out, and immediately afterwards on every side of
that doomed square the impact of the Touaregs' charge fell like the
blow of some monstrous hammer. All night they had been gathering
noiselessly in the surrounding valleys. Now they had charged with
lance and sword from the surrounding crests. Three sides of the square
held their ground. The fourth wavered, crumpled in like a piece of
broken cardboard, and the Arabs were within the square, stabbing at
the backs of the soldiers, loosing and stampeding the camels. And at
once, where deep silence had reigned a minute ago, the air was torn
with shrill cries and oaths and the clamour of weapons. The square was
broken; but here a group of men stood back to back, and with cartridge
and bayonet held its ground; there another formed; and about each gun
the men fought desperately. Meanwhile the morning came, a grey, clear
light spread over the desert. Tavernay himself was with one of the
machine-guns. It was dragged clear of the _melee_ and up a slope of
sand. The soldiers parted in front of it, and its charge began to
sweep the Touaregs down like swathes, and to pit the sand hills like a
fall of rain. About the other gun the fight still raged.
"Come, my children," said Tavernay, "fight well; the Touaregs give no
quarter."
Followed by Stretton, he led the charge. The Touaregs gave way before
their furious onslaught. The soldiers reached the gun, faced about,
and firing steadily kept off the enemy while the gun was run back. As
soon as that was saved the battle was over. All over the hollow,
wherever the Touaregs were massed, the two guns rattled out their
canister. No Arab could approach them. The sun rose over the earth,
and while it was rising the Touaregs broke and fled. When it shone out
in its full round, there was no one left of them in that hollow except
the wounded and the dead. But the victory had been dearly bought. All
about the well, lying pell-mell among the Arabs and the dead camels,
were the French Legionaries, some quite still, and others writhing in
pain and crying for water. Stretton drew his hand across his forehead.
He was stunned and dazed. It seemed to him that years had passed, that
he had grown very old. Yet there was the sun new-risen. There was a
dull pain in his head. He raised his hand and drew it away wet with
blood. How or when he had received the blow he was quite unaware. He
stood staring stupidly about him. So very little while ago men were
lying here sleeping in their cloaks, quite strong, living people; now
they were lying dead or in pain; it was all incomprehensible.
"Why?" he asked aloud of no one. "Now, why?"
Gradually, however, custom resumed its power. There was a man hanging
limp over the parapet of the well. He looked as though he had knelt
down and stooped over to drink, and in that attitude had fallen
asleep. But he might so easily be pushed into the well, and custom
had made the preservation of wells from impurity an instinct. He
removed the body and went in search of Tavernay. Tavernay was sitting
propped up against a camel's saddle; the doctor was by his side, a
blood-stained bandage was about his thigh. He spoke in a weak voice.
"Lieutenant Laurent?"
Stretton went in search. He came across an old grey-headed soldier
rolling methodically a cigarette.
"He is dead--over there," said the soldier. "Have you a light?"
Laurent had died game. He was lying clasped in the arms of a gigantic
Touareg, and while thus held he had been stabbed by another through
the back. To that end the contemptuous smile of a lady far away in
Paris had brought him. He lay with his face to the sky, his wounded
vanity now quite healed. He had earned Tavernay's praise, at all
events, that day. For he had fought well. Of the _sous-lieutenants_
one was killed, the other dangerously wounded. A sergeant-major lay
with a broken shoulder beside one of the guns. Stretton went back to
Tavernay.
"You must take command, then," said Tavernay. "I think you have learnt
something about it on your fishing-boats." And in spite of his pain he
smiled.
Stretton mustered the men and called over the names. Almost the first
name which he called was the name of "Barbier," and Barbier, with a
blood-stained rag about his head, answered. Of the two hundred and
thirty men who had made up the two companies of the Legion, only
forty-seven could stand in the ranks and answer to their names. For
those forty-seven there was herculean work to do. Officers were
appointed, the dead bodies were roughly buried, the camels collected,
litters improvised for the wounded, the goat-skins filled with water.
Late in the afternoon Stretton came again to Tavernay.
"We are ready, sir." Tavernay nodded and asked for a sheet of paper,
an envelope, and ink. They were fetched from his portfolio and very
slowly and laboriously he wrote a letter and handed it to Stretton.
"Seal it," he said, "now, in front of me."
Stretton obeyed.
"Keep that letter. If you get back to Ouargla without me, give it to
the Commandant there."
Tavernay was lifted in a litter on to the back of a camel, and the
remnant of the geographical expedition began its terrible homeward
march. Eight hundred miles lay between Bir-el-Ghiramo and the safety
of Ouargla. The Touaregs hung upon the rear of the force, but they did
not attack again. They preferred another way. One evening a solitary
Arab drove a laden camel into the bivouac. He was conducted to
Stretton, and said, "The Touaregs ask pardon and pray for peace. They
will molest you no more. Indeed, they will help you, and as an earnest
of their true desire for your welfare they send you a camel-load of
dates."
Stretton accepted the present, and carried the message to Tavernay,
who cried at once, "Let no one eat those dates." But two soldiers had
already eaten of them, and died of poison before the morning. Short of
food, short of sentinels, the broken force crept back across the
stretches of soft sand, the greyish-green plains of halfa-grass, the
ridges of red hill. One by one the injured succumbed; their wounds
gangrened, they were tortured by the burning sun and the motion of the
camels. A halt would be made, a camel made to kneel, and a rough grave
dug.
"Pelissier," cried Stretton, and a soldier stepped out from the ranks
who had once conducted mass in the church of the Madeleine in Paris.
Pelissier would recite such prayers as he remembered, and the force
would move on again, leaving one more soldier's grave behind it in the
desert to protest unnoticed against the economy of governments. Then
came a morning when Stretton was summoned to Captain Tavernay's side.
For two days Tavernay had tossed in a delirium. He now lay beneath a
rough shelter of cloaks, in his right senses, but so weak that he
could not lift a hand, and with a face so pinched and drawn that his
years seemed to have been doubled. His eyes shone out from big black
circles. Stretton knelt down beside him.
"You have the letter?"
"Yes."
"Do not forget."
He lay for a while in a sort of contentment, then he said--"Do not
think this expedition has been waste. A small force first and disaster
... the big force afterwards to retrieve the disaster, and with it
victory, and government and peace, and a new country won for France.
That is the law of the Legion.... _My_ Legion." He smiled, and
Stretton muttered a few insincere words.
"You will recover, my captain. You will lead your companies again."
"No," said Tavernay, in a whisper. "I do not want to. I am very happy.
Yes, I say that, who joined the Legion twenty years ago. And the
Legion, my friend, is the nation of the unhappy. For twenty years I
have been a citizen of that nation.... I pity women who have no such
nation to welcome them and find them work.... For us there is no need
of pity."
And in a few moments he fell asleep, and, two hours later, sleeping,
died. A pile of stones was built above his grave, and the force
marched on. Gaunt, starved, and ragged, the men marched northwards,
leaving the Touat country upon their left hand. It struck the caravan
route from Tidikelt to Ouargla; it stumbled at last through the gates
of the town. Silently it marched through the streets to the French
fortress. On no survivor's face was there any sign of joy that at last
their hardships were over, their safety assured. All were too tired,
too dispirited. The very people who crowded to see them pass seemed
part of an uninteresting show. Stretton went at once to the Commandant
and told the story of their disaster. Then he handed him the letter of
Captain Tavernay. The Commandant broke the seal and read it through.
He looked up at Stretton, a thin spent figure of a man overwrought
with sleeplessness and anxiety.
"Tell me how and when this was written," said the Commandant.
Stretton obeyed, and after he had heard, the Commandant sat with his
hand shading his eyes. When he spoke, his voice showed that he was
deeply moved.
"You know what the letter contains, Sergeant Ohlsen?"
"No, my Commandant."
"Read, then, for yourself;" and he passed the letter across his office
table. Stretton took it and read. There were a few lines written--only
a few; but those few lines recommended Sergeant Ohlsen for promotion
to the rank of officer. The Commandant held out his hand.
"That is like our Tavernay," he said. "He thought always of his
soldiers. He wrote it at once, you see, after the battle was over,
lest he should die and justice not be done. Have no fear, my friend.
It is you who have brought back to Ouargla the survivors of the
Legion. But you must give your real name. There is a scrutiny before a
soldier is promoted to the rank of office. Sergeant Ohlsen. That is
all very well. But Lieutenant----. Come, Lieutenant who?"
He took up his pen.
"Lieutenant Sir Anthony Stretton," replied Tony; and the Commandant
wrote down the name.