THE CITY OF THE FOREIGN LEGION
The daily exodus to town : Ben Mansur's coffee : The Ghetto : The
citizens of Sidi-bel-Abbès and the légionnaires : How the Legion
squared accounts with the civilians : A forbidden part of the town :
Primitive vice : A dance of a night : The gardens : The last
resting-place of the Legion's dead
En ville! Off to Sidi-bel-Abbès! Every afternoon shortly before six
o'clock there began a very exodus from the Legion's barracks to the
town. A légionnaire would rather clean and polish for an hour after
lights out in the semi-darkness of the night-lamp than miss his stroll
to town. The daily walk in Sidi-bel-Abbès was part of the Legion's
sacred tradition. At five o'clock the gigantic gates of the barracks
were closed and only a little side door remained open. Here the
sergeant of the guard posted himself and carefully inspected everybody
who wanted to go out, so that the Legion's reputation for chic should
not suffer. The uniform to be worn in town was prescribed every day by
a special regimental order; each légionnaire had to wear the same
uniform, red trousers and blue jacket or white trousers and blue
overcoat, and everybody took an especial pride in looking as trim and
smart as possible.
Three thousand soldiers of the Legion used to stroll about the streets
of Sidi-bel-Abbès every evening. For me this daily walk was a wondrous
change from the Legion's routine. Above the gleam of the electric arc
lamps shone the starry glory of a southern sky. Little black boys in
white breeches, whose countless folds might have told endless stories
of stolen trifles they had concealed, lounged at the street corners and
cried the evening paper, the _Echo d'Oran_; Arabs in white burnouses,
carrying in their hands the dangerous Arabian sticks, in which they
find a never-failing missile, stood motionless, silently watching with
looks of suspicion the "Rumis," the white foreigners who will always
remain foreigners to them and whose customs they will never be able to
understand. All Sidi-bel-Abbès was promenading; citizens of the town,
officers and civilians of the "Bureau Arabe" with their womenfolk. In
between came the Legion's heavy soldier-steps and the sound of gently
rattling bayonets.
Four streets, which run exactly north, south, east, and west, to Oran,
Daya, Maskara, and Tlemcen, divide the town at right angles. They are
the main streets in which the European shops and fashionable cafés lie.
For private financial reasons the légionnaire does not buy in these
shops and in the fashionable cafés he is badly treated. The légionnaire
has no business in the main streets--from the honest citizen's point of
view.
Between the blocks of the main streets, however, a labyrinth of small
courts and alleys is hidden. There the Spanish Jews and Arabs live,
there trading and bargaining goes on incessantly.
In this maze of dark alleys the men of the Legion were at home, in the
treacherous wineshops which depended on the custom of the soldiers.
"Bar de la Légion," or "Bar du Légionnaire," or "Bar de Madagascar"
these hovels called themselves. Good wine is ridiculously cheap in
Algeria. But out of the légionnaires extra money must needs be made.
They were given a brew in the wineshops made from grapes which had been
pressed already two or three times and to which a little alcohol lent
flavour and "aroma." Beside the wineshops were Mohammedan restaurants
in which one could eat "kuskus" and "galettes," tough pancakes with
honey; restaurants in which knives and forks were looked upon as
accursed instruments, which doubtless the devil of the Rumis must have
invented for devilish purposes unintelligible to a true believer.
Poverty and filth reigned in these places, but they were good enough
for the poor despised légionnaire. One café in this quarter had an
individuality of its own, depending exclusively on the custom of the
Legion. In a corner by the theatre a pretty little Spanish girl had put
up a wooden hut and filled it with rickety old chairs, to be treated
and used with great care, given her in charity probably somewhere or
other merely to get rid of them. There she sold coffee to the soldiers
of the Legion. This little woman had a good eye for business. Her
coffee was, 'tis true, merely coloured hot water and not especially
good water at that, but the soldier of the Legion willingly drank it,
for Manuelita's coffee was very cheap indeed, and a pretty smile and a
coquette glance went with each cup. When business was slack the hostess
would even chat a little. These tactics secured for the sly little
Spaniard the faithful custom of the légionnaires. La Légion made love
to Manuelita unceasingly.... The old légionnaires stole flowers for
her, and if somewhere in Tonquin or on the Morocco border plundering
had been going on, Manuelita would some months later be sure to receive
the finest presents, stolen for her by her old friends of the Legion
and carried about all the time in knapsacks. The Legion was grateful to
Manuelita. She was the great exception. Besides her and Madame la
Cantinière there was no woman in the town of the Foreign Legion who
would even in her wildest dreams have deigned a légionnaire worthy of a
glance.
Smith would never have patronised this Café de la Légion. He knew
something much better. To him I owed my acquaintance with Ben Mansur's
coffee. His was a Moorish coffee-house. Finely coloured mosaics formed
Arabian proverbs on the floor and against the walls there were long
marble benches. Arabs crouched on these benches and smoked comfortably
gurgling narghiles--the incarnation of quietude and silence. For hours
they sat over a single cup of coffee, whose purchase gave them also,
according to Arabian custom, the right of spending the night on the
marble benches. In stolid silence they played "esch schronsch"--chess.
One seldom saw a soldier of the Legion here, for Ben Mansur only spoke
Arabic. Smith, however, was his bosom friend, and these two always
greeted one another solemnly with deep bows, with their arms folded on
the breast in Arab fashion.
Ben Mansur's coffee was a dream of fairyland. All day and all night
charcoal glowed in the ancient Moorish stove in the corner, and in a
wonderful octagonal copper kettle, which must have done service for
generations of Arabs, there simmered boiling water. A silver can
contained a thick coffee brew, a kind of extract. From this Ben Mansur
filled the little clay cups half full and poured in boiling water. Then
he conjured dreamland into the tiny little cups, adding a drop here and
a drop there from mysterious bottles, a drop of essence of oranges, a
drop of hashish oil and a drop of opium. Ben Mansur's coffee, with its
wonderful aroma and the restful oblivion which that little cup gave,
was a wonder never to be forgotten. Smith and I used to sit on the
marble benches by the hour, legs crossed in honour of the customs of
our host's race. Before us stood the water-pipe of the Orient, a
"narghile," filled with wonderful tobacco very different from the
products of the Algerian tobacco monopoly. Ben Mansur would never take
more than two sous, which is two cents, for both of us, no matter how
many pipes we smoked or how many cups of coffee we drank. This was his
idea of hospitality.
Then again I used to wander with Smith through the dirty streets of the
Jewish quarter, where the rubbish-heaps lay in the open streets and the
atmosphere was tainted with every variety of smell. At the corners thin
Spanish Jews, with the sharp features common to their race, haggled
over a bargain; Algerian Jews walked stately through the alleys, in
long flowing robes of blue and brown silk, men of importance who held
the wealth of the country in their hands as the go-betweens of the
world's trade and the riches of Algeria. Wealth and power dwelt in this
miserable quarter of Sidi-bel-Abbès under the shell of poverty with
which Israel is so fond of surrounding itself.
In the Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès no trifle is so small that it is not
worth haggling about, and no proposition paltry enough to come amiss to
the man of the Ghetto, whose love of money is so great that he does not
despise even the Legion's small copper pieces. The Ghetto and the
Foreign Legion have quite lively business connections, consisting
principally in the change of small currency notes. Many banknotes which
originally formed the kernel of a légionnaire's letter from home have
wandered into the mysterious channels of Jewish trade. The Ghetto of
Sidi-bel-Abbès has earned a small fortune in these small transactions.
A légionnaire is seldom much of a man of business and he certainly is
always in a big hurry to get his dollar or his five marks or his five
pesetas changed into francs and centimes--so he submits with more or
less grace to fantastic rates of exchange, getting little more than
three francs for a dollar and about four francs for a "fünf Mark
Schein." All other business of the Ghetto with the soldiers of the
Legion is equally profitable--for the other man, be it understood, not,
of course, for the légionnaire. Very often men of the Legion steal,
under cover of darkness, silently through the little streets of the
Jewish quarter carrying big bundles of brown woollen blankets and blue
sashes, stamped in the middle and at the corners with the Legion's
stamp in white paint, which marks them clearly as regimental property.
But what's in a stamp! It can be got rid of easily enough with good
will and a little turpentine....
Anything that a légionnaire may want to sell the second-hand merchants
of Sidi-bel-Abbès buy; at prices below contempt, it is true, but all
the same they buy it. The small silver coins of the Ghetto have been
the ruin of more than one soldier of the Legion who in a fit of rage
sold his uniform to the obliging trader and paid the penalty with a
long term of imprisonment.
Thus the interests of the Ghetto and the interests of the Legion are
identical in a small way, and as a result the Ghetto man and the
soldier are quite friendly with each other.
The honest citizen of Sidi-bel-Abbès, however, a half-caste of Spanish
or Levantine or French extraction, is anything but fond of the
red-trousered foreigner. He despises the Legion and its men from the
bottom of his heart and has quite forgotten that the very same Legion
built his town for him in the beginning; that there would be no
Sidi-bel-Abbès if there had been no Legion.... His woman-kind draw
their skirts close about them when they meet a légionnaire in the
streets, as if he were plague-stricken. He himself--why, he has managed
to bring it about that the officers' mess is now merely used as an
evening club, while the officers have to dine in hotels, in order that
the honest citizen may make a little money out of them. The
sub-lieutenants dine in one hotel, the first lieutenants in another,
the unmarried captains and higher officers patronise a third. Every
hotel had to have a share in the spoils, of course! The honest citizen
is very indignant when the regimental band does not give a concert
three times weekly for him; he has his public parks swept by the Legion
and takes good care that all the provisions for the three thousand
soldiers are bought in the town itself and nowhere else. For the
trifling purchases which even a poor devil of a légionnaire sometimes
makes he keeps a specially rubbishy class of article and charges double
prices for it.
The regiment of foreigners is a very good thing for the honest citizen
of Sidi-bel-Abbès, but nevertheless he despises the Legion and the
légionnaire--this citizen of the Foreign Legion's town.
He takes good care, however, not to express his feelings of dislike too
openly to Monsieur le Légionnaire, for he has more than once learnt
that the men in red trousers are not to be trifled with. That they are
much better left alone, in fact. The much-tried patience of the Legion
has its strongly defined bounds and sometimes it gives way. When the
Legion is not occupied in Tonquin or Madagascar or some such lovely
neighbourhood, the regimental band gives a concert several times a week
in the Place Sadi Carnot. The good man of Sidi-bel-Abbès always found
this concert very fine, but what he did not like about it was that
besides himself thousands of légionnaires promenaded in the Carnot
square, enjoying the band's music as much as the civilians.
One day the honest citizen drew a cordon of police around the Place
Sadi Carnot, with orders to let no soldiers pass, and thought he would
now have the music all for himself....
The légionnaires were struck dumb with astonishment at this unheard-of
impudence and the Arabian policemen felt very uncomfortable. News of
the "outrage" was sent to barracks and in a very few minutes the men of
the Legion were assembled in full force, discussing in fifteen
different languages the evident impossibility of living in peace with
the honest citizen of Sidi-bel-Abbès. All at once an old soldier gave
the word of command:
"En avant par colonne du régiment--marche!"
The Arabian policemen tumbled to right and to left, the citizens of
Sidi-bel-Abbès vanished as if by a conjuring trick into the side
streets, and in five minutes there was not a single soul in civilian
clothes to be seen on the Place Sadi Carnot. The men in red trousers
held the field in triumph.
Since they were in fine humour and out for a real good time they
promptly smashed up all the chairs on which the ladies and gentlemen of
Sidi-bel-Abbès had been sitting, made a pile of them and lit up a grand
bonfire while the regimental band played its gayest marches.
In the meantime a deputation of citizens had rushed to the colonel of
the regiment and made a great noise about these horrible légionnaires.
The colonel merely laughed.
"My good sirs," said he, "it is now eleven o'clock. My men have leave
till midnight. In another hour all will be over."
"But they have burnt the chairs," wailed the deputation.
"I'm very glad they have not burned anything else," laughed the
colonel. "You leave my men in peace and they'll let you alone."
Since that time the honest citizen of Sidi-bel-Abbès has been rather
more careful in his treatment of the Legion. It is true that an order
of the town council says that a légionnaire can only get a ticket for
the gallery in the town's theatre, but if a légionnaire with
superfluous money wants a seat in the stalls, he can nevertheless get
it. The honest citizen has learnt to respect the Legion's feelings.
But, under the surface, the citizen's contempt of the Legion naturally
remained. The soldier of the foreign regiment puts out the fires which
break out in Sidi-bel-Abbès, he saves the citizens and their goods when
the stream of the Mekerra becomes a roaring torrent in the rainy
season, and he protects the helpless townspeople when the descendants
of the Beni Amer try to institute the Jewish persecutions they are so
fond of.... He does all that. But the poor devil of a mercenary has no
money, and this is the Mortal Sin.
* * * * *
One quarter of the town was taboo to us légionnaires, strictly
forbidden under a penalty of a month's imprisonment: the "village
nègre," the negro town, the home of every sort of disease and crime.
The beasts in human forms which house there had more than once killed a
légionnaire to rob him of his sash or some such trifle.
Forbidden things always have a mysterious power of attraction, and I
was burning with curiosity. Slowly, keeping a sharp look-out for
patrols, I crossed the big drill-ground one night and turned, close
behind the mosque, into the maze of huts. It was a pitch-dark night,
and I kept falling over the dirt-heaps and tripping in the holes in the
hard trodden ground.
At last I saw lights. The main street of the village nègre lay before
me, a narrow little alley. I could have touched the walls on either
side with outstretched arms. The miserable low houses were half in
ruins, and irregular holes took the place of doors and windows. The
alley, but a few paces long, was brightly illuminated by the light of
half a dozen torches stuck in holes in the walls.
In this narrow space the vice of Sidi-bel-Abbès was hidden. Songs and
cries and shrieks filled the air. Before the huts women were sitting,
poor prostitutes, who sold themselves for a few coppers and a drink of
absinthe. Here was vice in its most primitive form. The night was cold.
Braziers with glowing coals stood before every hut, and women crouched
over them that they might better warm their bodies at the warmth of the
fire. Modesty seemed to be a thing unknown. A negress with a figure
full of strength lay there stretched at full length almost naked, with
the warmth-giving firepan beside her. She was too worn out or too lazy
to speak, she merely invited the passers-by with a gesture to come into
her hut. Near her a Frenchwoman, in whose face her awful life had cut
deep furrows, sat in a torn silk dress on the bare ground. Beside them
Arabian girls crouched, children almost, the copper bangles on their
arms and legs showing that they were from the far South. Italian women,
with the characteristic gold earrings of their race, and Spaniards,
with oily shining hair, quarrelled in high-pitched voices. The blazing
light of the torches gave their faces an uncanny look. In the midst of
these miserable women moved the scum of the population of
Sidi-bel-Abbès. There were negroes in ragged linen coats who in daytime
carried heavy burdens on their backs and spent their evenings regularly
in the village nègre. Spanish labourers chattered and gesticulated with
the Spanish girls. It was the meeting-place of the poor and the
wretched, a corso of humanity at its worst.
My bayonet rattling gently against the steel sheath startled the men
and women. When they saw that they only had to deal with a single
légionnaire and not with one of the much-feared patrols, they cried out
to me from all sides--in a curious patois of low French mixed with
Arabic. The little I understood of it was quite enough. The language of
the légionnaire leaves nothing wanting in the way of force and
clearness--the language of the village nègre was filth condensed. Two
negresses began to quarrel as to whether a common légionnaire could be
in possession of even one sou, a weighty question which was answered in
the negative amid much laughter. The Frenchwoman, who was anything but
sober, poked me in the ribs and begged me, hiccoughing, for a "petite
absinthe." Obscene gestures and drunken cries everywhere. And in the
corner there leaned in dignified repose an Arab policeman.
It smelled of moschus and heavy sweet Arabian cigarettes. In Arabic the
alley was called the Street of the Seven Delights. Smith had told me
that. One could but shudder at the contemplation of the seven
delights....
Then the comedy became clear to me. The honest citizen of
Sidi-bel-Abbès despised the soldier of the Legion--but he tolerated the
horrors of the village nègre.
Short commands sounded from afar and the steady steps of a patrol drew
near. If I was discovered, it meant prison for me, so I dived into the
protecting darkness of a small by-street. Stumbling and falling
continually I felt my way forward in the pitchy darkness, till I heard
low voices. The alley took a sudden turn.
I found myself in the court of a Moorish house. Arabs in white robes
crouched and squatted on the ground smoking their narghiles. Most of
them hardly looked up as I came in, and an old man with a long white
beard nodded and smiled to me.
On the glowing fire stood a copper kettle with bubbling hot water, and
an old negro was making tea for the Arabs. On the wall on one side of
the court a cloth was hung up, of fine brocade, with golden embroidery,
on a ground of red and yellow, in fantastical arabesques. Many cushions
were spread on the white sand. The Arabs themselves sat on finely woven
yellow mats. At respectful distance from the men girls stood and
lounged about, wondrous youthful forms with veil-like robes and
countless copper ornaments on arms and legs, which tinkled at their
slightest movement. All were sipping tea out of tiny little cups. All
at once I heard English words, an old nursery rhyme:
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the king's horses and all the king's men
Could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Startled, I turned round and saw in the folds of an Arabian burnous the
face of a white woman with fair hair and features who must once have
been beautiful. Smoking an Arabian cigarette, she nodded dreamily with
a happy smile and ever anew she would sing the nursery rhyme....
Suddenly a girl sprang up, bracelets jingling, a child almost, of the
pure Arabian type. Fascinated, the Arabs and the other women stared at
her; so still it was that one could hear the sound of one's own
breathing. The girl let the thin veil of a garment she was wearing fall
down to her hips and stood immobile as a statue for a minute or two,
her arms stretched out, the head proudly thrown back, her eyes shining
in triumph--courting admiration. She reminded me forcibly of a bronze
statuette I had possessed in days gone by....
Very slowly the child of the South began to dance. The delicate veil
swayed and waved in ever-changing folds around her body of pure copper
colour. Her dancing was wondrously graceful--it was beautiful beyond
dispute. A strange scene it was, enhanced by the very bright colours
and the heavy sweet smells of mysterious perfumes.
I stared in wonder at the dancing of this child of Nature and the
wonderful rhythm of her movements. Faster grew the dance, the swinging
and circling and posing. Suddenly the girl seized one of the torches
and swung it in broad circles around her head. The firelight fell with
its ruddy glow on her shining hair of black-blue. The hissing torch
seemed to be enveloped in the swaying veil; ever faster grew that mad
whirling. After a final lightning circle of the torch the girl fell
down exhausted....
A low murmur of applause arose from among the Arabs and many silver
coins were thrown to her on the mat.
The woman who had sung the English nursery rhyme sat there as one
stunned; she had forgotten herself and forgotten her surroundings. "My
God," she kept on murmuring, "my God...."
I stole away and went slowly home to barracks, worn out.
* * * * *
A flowery belt of gardens surrounds the town. In broad alleys, which
had been trenches in days gone by, stood groups of palm-trees and olive
groves, planted by the soldiers of the Legion many years ago in the
short intervals of peace. The botanical garden of Sidi-bel-Abbès had
also been founded by the foreign mercenaries, and, to this day, the
Legion has the right to gather flowers from the beds of the Jardin
Public for its dead, and sends three soldiers daily to keep the paths
in order and work for the gardener. In return for this the regiment
considers the Jardin Public its own private property, and on Sundays
that wonderful garden, with its wealth of foliage and flowers, is the
scene of a red-trousered invasion. Not very far from the Jardin Public
lies the regimental garden, where the Legion raises its vegetables and
plants its potatoes. I found it very funny when I was for the first
time commandeered to carry dung in the Legion's garden--it seemed to me
a most peaceful occupation for a modern mercenary.... Far out stretches
the long line of flower gardens, with their narrow foot-paths shaded by
olive-trees. Right at the end of the town, where the gardens come to an
end and the sand begins, there lies the cemetery of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Its
showy monuments, its well-kept flower-beds, and its silent groups of
trees do not give it any particular claim to individuality. If you pass
through the churchyard, however, you will come to a large open space.
Many hundreds of grave mounds lie there. The black wooden crosses are
one like the other. This is the last resting-place of the Foreign
Legion's dead. The Legion's churchyard. I was once commandeered to work
there. An aged corporal, who lived in a cottage in a corner of the
cemetery, and in the days of his old age filled the post of
grave-digger to the Legion, gave me gardening tools and a watering-can.
I walked along the long rows of graves, pulling out weeds and watering
the grass. An indescribable feeling of loneliness overcame me.
So impersonal, so poor, so barren are those graves! They lie quite
close together as if even in death the légionnaires must be drawn up in
line for parade. The crosses are so small, so roughly painted, that one
cannot get over the feeling that sordid economy is practised even on
the last resting-place of the légionnaire. The crosses are hung with
wreaths made of glass beads and with an artificial flower here and
there. The name of the dead man is written on a small piece of board
and underneath the name stands his number. To this comes the laconic
addition: "Légion étrangère." I felt sorry for these poor fellows who
even in the last sleep of death had to bear a number which reminded one
of a convict prison. I went from cross to cross and read the various
names. Almost every nation in the world has contributed to the graves
in the cemetery of the Foreign Legion, though the German names on the
little crosses have a large majority.
A regiment of dead soldiers lies buried here. But it is only a small
fraction of the Legion's dead. The others sleep somewhere in the sands
of Africa--where they fell. Thirteen hundred légionnaires lie buried in
Mexico. Hundreds and thousands rot in the swamps of Madagascar.
Indo-China has been the death of hundreds of others.
The wind swept the dead leaves which fluttered across from the cemetery
of respectability over the graves of the légionnaires. I looked at the
endless line of grave mounds and at the meaningless numbers. And I
thought of an old German song:
Verdorben--gestorben.... Ruined--dead!