In the Foreign Legion Part 13

"Voleur!" cried the bugler. "Thief!"

The word acted like a signal. All at once fists were clenched, a bayonet gleamed, a struggle arose, and a dozen men rolled on the ground. The scene lasted for perhaps a minute. Then all was still--the man from the tenth company lay there gasping and covered with blood.

His face was black, so terribly was it bruised. A blow from the bayonet had split his cheek and a stream of blood flowed over his blue jacket.

The guard came up and the fellow was carried into hospital.

"He wanted to steal my money! He wanted to decorate himself!" said Ra.s.sedin grimly. "For the present we've decorated him!"

The man lay in hospital for weeks. That was the end of it. That night's lynch-law in our quarters was not inquired into. The punishment of the thief rests in the hands of his comrades. So decrees the custom of the Legion....

When it came to "decorating," Herr von Rader was in his element. The Legion's little ways had nothing mysterious for him. In a week the whole Legion knew him and respected him as a man of brains and resource. Every evening he went across to the canteen. Money he had not. But he juggled untiringly with empty wine-bottles, performed the most difficult conjuring tricks with absinthe gla.s.ses, and used to tell Madame la Cantiniere (who understood a little German) the funniest stories. Very soon he succeeded in making a deep impression on that worthy lady, the queen over so many desirable wine-casks. She found the clever Herr von Rader amusing, and she did something that she had never done before in her life. She gave the man of many tricks a gratis bottle of wine every evening, and into the bargain the change out of an imaginary ten-sous piece. Madame's Portuguese husband had no idea of this little secret of his wife's kind heart. Anyway, he need not have troubled himself: Herr von Rader had not the slightest intention of endangering Madame la Cantiniere's conjugal fidelity--he only loved her wine....

Thus did Herr von Rader decorate himself with his glib tongue and his clever fingers. The soldiering part of his work was easy enough for him. Herr von Rader got on better under the flag of the Legion than all the other recruits. Sometimes, however (when Madame la Cantiniere was in a bad temper or her Portuguese husband kept too sharp an eye on her), even Herr von Rader would fall into a thoughtful mood. Then he would rub away angrily at his leather equipment and propound practical philosophy. Something like this:

"Nom de Dieu!" (Herr von Rader was already quite at home with the curses of the French language.) "Nom de bon Dieu! This Legion is no good. Nix good. Now, for an intelligent man like me there is a bottle of wine and a cigarette easily to be had anywhere in the world. You'll admit that! Is it easy here? It is not! I've got to waste a lot of thinking and fine art just to keep in cigarettes.... This Legion's rotten. I've been had. They've swindled me! I'll tell you what, mein Freund: I'm going to skin out. This boy is going to run away...."

He did "skin out," some time afterwards. For it the cheerful Herr von Rader was to suffer the whole immeasurably hard punishment system of the Legion.

Even this cheerful fellow, who knew so well how to help himself, and in consequence was far better off than the other men in the Legion, was troubled by the simple problem of the Foreign Legion! A problem which so many of the Legion's soldiers have tried to reason out with so many head-shakings. A problem which once an Arabian Spahi put very plainly in a few scornful words:

"The Legion works--the Legion gets no pay!"

CHAPTER VII

THE CITY OF THE FOREIGN LEGION

The daily exodus to town : Ben Mansur's coffee : The Ghetto : The citizens of Sidi-bel-Abbes and the legionnaires : 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-Abbes! Every afternoon shortly before six o'clock there began a very exodus from the Legion's barracks to the town. A legionnaire 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-Abbes 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 legionnaire 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-Abbes 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-Abbes 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 cafes lie.

For private financial reasons the legionnaire does not buy in these shops and in the fashionable cafes he is badly treated. The legionnaire 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 Legion," or "Bar du Legionnaire," or "Bar de Madagascar"

these hovels called themselves. Good wine is ridiculously cheap in Algeria. But out of the legionnaires 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 legionnaire. One cafe 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 legionnaires. La Legion made love to Manuelita unceasingly.... The old legionnaires 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 Cantiniere there was no woman in the town of the Foreign Legion who would even in her wildest dreams have deigned a legionnaire worthy of a glance.

Smith would never have patronised this Cafe de la Legion. 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-Abbes under the sh.e.l.l of poverty with which Israel is so fond of surrounding itself.

In the Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbes 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 princ.i.p.ally in the change of small currency notes. Many banknotes which originally formed the kernel of a legionnaire's letter from home have wandered into the mysterious channels of Jewish trade. The Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbes has earned a small fortune in these small transactions.

A legionnaire 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 "funf 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 legionnaire. 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 legionnaire may want to sell the second-hand merchants of Sidi-bel-Abbes 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-Abbes, 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-Abbes if there had been no Legion.... His woman-kind draw their skirts close about them when they meet a legionnaire 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 legionnaire sometimes makes he keeps a specially rubbishy cla.s.s of article and charges double prices for it.

The regiment of foreigners is a very good thing for the honest citizen of Sidi-bel-Abbes, but nevertheless he despises the Legion and the legionnaire--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 Legionnaire, 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-Abbes always found this concert very fine, but what he did not like about it was that besides himself thousands of legionnaires 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 pa.s.s, and thought he would now have the music all for himself....

The legionnaires 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 a.s.sembled in full force, discussing in fifteen different languages the evident impossibility of living in peace with the honest citizen of Sidi-bel-Abbes. All at once an old soldier gave the word of command:

"En avant par colonne du regiment--marche!"

The Arabian policemen tumbled to right and to left, the citizens of Sidi-bel-Abbes 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-Abbes 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 legionnaires.

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-Abbes has been rather more careful in his treatment of the Legion. It is true that an order of the town council says that a legionnaire can only get a ticket for the gallery in the town's theatre, but if a legionnaire 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-Abbes, 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 inst.i.tute 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 legionnaires, strictly forbidden under a penalty of a month's imprisonment: the "village negre," 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 legionnaire 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.