Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion. 1916

CHOC

I

The first rays of the morning sun were stealing up the palm-bordered roads towards Sidi-bel-Abbès, above whose ramparts the minaret of the great mosque blazed white in the sky. Eighty miles from Oran on the coast, and the headquarters of the Foreign Legion, Sidi-bel-Abbès is surely one of the strangest cities on earth.

It was built by the Foreign Legion, it is swept and garnished by the Foreign Legion, it is held against the Arabs by the Foreign Legion. At night the electric lights round the bandstand of the Foreign Legion on the Place Sadi Carnot blaze against the Algerian stars, whilst the Muezzins on the balconies of the minarets keep watch over Islam and their voices send north, south, east and west the cry that was old in the time of Sindbad the Sailor!

All' il Allah—God is great.

But the marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès is not the fact that here Edison and Strauss face Mahommed in the form of his priests, nor the flower gardens blooming on the face of the desert, nor the roads along which the Arabs stalk and the automobiles dash. The marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès lies in the Legion.

When France found herself faced with the problem of Algeria, that is to say, the problem of infinite wastes of rock and sand inhabited by a foe mobile and ungraspable as the desert wind, she formed the Legion.

She called to the wastrels, the criminals, the despairing and the impoverished of every country and every city—and they came.

Men of genius, street sweepers, artists, doctors, engineers—it would be difficult to touch a profession, a race or a grade of intellect not to be found in the Legion.

General de Négrier said that the Legion could do anything—from the building of a bridge, to the writing of an opera, to the painting of a picture—all the genius that civilization has turned away from its doors is here at command—for a halfpenny a day.


The sun had touched the upper border of the huge blank eastern wall of the Legion's barracks and it was still a few minutes before réveillé, when in room Number 6 of the tenth company the garde-chambre for the day slipped from his bed, stretched and yawned noiselessly, and glanced round him.

The room was like the ward of a hospital, and the likeness was made no less striking by the card above each of the twenty beds, a white card setting out each man's name and number.

Jacques' number, as shown by the card on the bed he had just vacated, was 7,083.

Jacques Radoub, known always and everywhere as Jacques, tout court, was a small and wiry-looking individual with the face of a gamin, that is to say, the face of a child who is a jester, who may be a cut-throat, and who is certainly and above all things a Parisian.

Jacques had, in fact, been an Apache by profession, and Monsieur Lepine had given him the choice between a penitentiary and the Legion. He chose the Legion, because, as he said, he liked the name better.

He was quite aware that life in the Legion was as hard as life in a penitentiary, and he did not care a button about the social difference; he liked the name better, that was all. He was an artist.

He stood now, for a second, glancing at the others, nineteen men stretched in all the attitudes of slumber. Germans, French, an Englishman, an American, a Greek and a Russian. Then, shuffling on some clothes, he left the room silently as the shadow of a moving cat.

In a moment he was back with a huge jug of steaming coffee, and as he entered shouting to the others to wake up, the réveillé came from the barrack yard. The réveillé of the French Army that sounds every morning across France to find its echo in Algeria.

"Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta,

Rat tat tat ta ta ta ta.

Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta,

Rat tat tat ta, tat ta."


In a moment the room was astir. Between the réveillé and the muster in the barrack yard there was only half an hour, yet in that half hour the coffee was drunk, the men dressed, the beds made and the floor swept, Jacques yelling to the others to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, as it was his duty to put the completing touch to the dusting and cleaning and fetch the water.

Then he came tearing down the stairs after the rest, and out in the barrack yard half cut in two by the blaze of the six o'clock sun, and under a sky blue as a cornflower, the long, long lines of white-clad men fell in whilst the echoes roused to the bugles.

Then, led by the bugles, the columns wheeled out of the barrack gates, making for the great drill ground, where the arms were piled and the men were exercised at the double.

It was terrific, with the sun-blaze now in their faces, with the sun beating now on their backs, and, now, with their sides to a furnace door round and round and round the great parade ground they went, the dust rising and hanging about them in a haze.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and then the thunder and movement ceased and the légionnaires, released for a moment after their first exercise of the day, broke into groups, cigarettes were lit, and the dust-hazed air filled with the fumes of caporal.

Jacques, though sweating, showed little signs of stress; he had lungs of leather. Not so Casmir, a man in his company to whom he was talking.

Casmir was a bitter-looking individual who had once been a Government clerk. His white uniform was clinging to him with perspiration, and he was just getting his wind back.

The two men were walking up and down rapidly, for it is impossible to stand still after half an hour of the double.

"Well," said Casmir, "this finishes me. This is the last time. I'm off."

He had been threatening for the last week or so to make a bolt.

Jacques, a fountain of wisdom in most things practical, had always dissuaded him from this fatal course. The man who tries to escape from the grip of the Legion is, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, brought back, and when he is brought back, Heaven help him.

"Take my advice," said Jacques, "and leave that alone. No good. Stick it as I have done and make the best of it. I have been at it four years and ten months to-morrow, and in another two months I walk out like a gentleman."

"Well," said Casmir, "I have been in it only six months and in another twelve hours—well, you will see."

"Have your way," said Jacques, "you are a fool. Do you think a clever man like myself would not have cut and run years ago had there been a decent chance? I weighed it all ages ago. The chance is too small and the punishment too big. It's impossible to drill sense into a head like yours, else I'd say, 'Look at me. If running away is not good enough for me, it's not good enough for you.'"

"All the same, I'm going to do it," said Casmir.

"Then do it and be damned," said Jacques.

The bugle was sounding "Fall in," and the morning exercises went on. At eleven o'clock, sweating, dusty, fagged out but cheerful, the vast regiment of légionnaires, wheeling in column formation to the sound of drums as well as bugles, marched back to barracks.

As they passed through the gates, Jacques flung a word to a small and dusty figure that was hanging about by the gate. It was Choc.

He had picked up Choc one night, a year ago, in the town. A dog that seemed compounded of all the known breeds of dogs—with the exception of the noblest.

Choc was dust-coloured, his hair stood in permanent bristle upon his shoulders, and he was terrific in battle; he had fought everything in Sidi-bel-Abbès and in the negro village that lies by the parade ground of the Foreign Legion, and without any manner of doubt, his family tree, had it been worked back, would have disclosed an Irish terrier somewhere in the not remote distance. But the fighting qualities of Choc made less appeal to Jacques than the fact that he was an out and out blackguard, an expert thief, an Apache.

I have said that Choc was hanging about the gate. That was the impression he gave one. It was not the honest waiting of a dog for its master, it was the waiting of a confederate for his mate at a public-house door or the corner of a race-course. There was no tail-wagging. As the column passed in, the dust-coloured one, sniffing about, did not even cast an eye at Jacques. Then, when the last files had passed the gateway, he slunk in after them and hung about in the courtyard till Jacques, who was a friend of the cook, came out of the cook-house with a bone for him.

This happened every day. Choc, who slept in some hole or corner of the town best known to himself, paid two daily visits to the barracks, at eleven and six.

At eleven o'clock he got a bone or by chance a bit of meat, at six o'clock he appeared to accompany his master into the town.

At six o'clock every day the work of the Legion is over, and you may see the légionnaires, spick and span, streaming through the barrack gates to the town, there to amuse themselves as best they can. They have no money. Literally no money, save what is sent to them by friends or relatives. The halfpenny a day paid them by Government scarcely serves for tobacco; they have to buy their own soap, mostly, and washing is a big item in a regiment where white fatigue uniforms of washable material are worn, and must be worn speckless.

Jacques had taught Choc a lot of tricks. In the Place Sadi Carnot of an evening, with the band playing a march, you might have seen Choc on his hind legs marching up and down before his master. Visitors to Sidi-bel-Abbès, attracted by the animal's queer appearance and his tricks, would question Jacques about him, and the result was nearly always profitable to Jacques. It was said that Choc stole cigarettes for him in the native quarters of the town, sneaking packets from the Moslem traders' stalls whilst Jacques held the latter in light conversation, and not only cigarettes, but articles more bulky and more valuable.

To-day, Jacques, having given Choc his bone and dismissed him, was turning to enter the barracks when he ran into the arms of Corporal Klein.

"Ah, there's that dog of yours again," said Klein. "I was looking for you to tell you. The Colonel says he has had enough of him, and he's to be shot."

Jacques swore the great oath of the Legion—which is unprintable.

"Shot—and what for?"

"Biting the sentry. It was last night after you had come back from the town. Seguer was on duty and the beast stuck about the gate, and Seguer tried to make him go and got bitten in the foot, right through his boot."

"He must have kicked him," said Jacques.

"Who knows? Not only that, but the Colonel says he has been having reports about you and him and your doings in the town, says that the Legion has enough blackguards in it without enlisting four-footed ones, and there you are, the order is promulgated, the dog has to go."

"Catch him, then," said Jacques.

Klein, a big man, in spite of his name, came towards Choc, who was busy with his bone. Jacques whistled shrilly between his teeth, and the dog, picking up his treasure, started for the barrack gate. Flying pebbles and dust marked his path, and he was gone.

Klein laughed. He was a good-natured man, a friend of Jacques' and he had no grudge against the dog.

"All the same," said he, "the dog has to go, you know what it is. The order has been given and once the order has been given there is no staying it."

Jacques knew quite well what it was. He knew the Colonel and he knew the Legion.

Choc might evade capture, but caught he would be, sooner or later.

He said nothing, however. The bugle call for soup rang through the yard, and as he was orderly of his room he had to rush off to the kitchen, from where in a moment he returned, bearing a steaming can for his men; then he had to return for bread.

No one noticed the least change in him, and if there had been a change in him nobody would have bothered. The Legion never bothers about anything, and the most monstrous happenings pass with scarcely a comment from the hearers and beholders.

All that afternoon Jacques was engaged on scout-patrol manoeuvres, and at six o'clock, spick and span, he left the barrack yard for the town.

Choc was waiting for him at the gate, but not close to it. The sentry, having his orders, had tried to lure him in, but Choc, alarmed by this unaccustomed civility, had removed himself a full hundred yards away, where he was sitting with his stump of a tail sticking out straight behind him.

He followed Jacques.

But Jacques did not make direct for the town. He skirted the ramparts till he came to the western side, where the great rough yellow wall was blazing in the light of the sinking sun, then, getting into the ditch, he followed the wall a certain distance, stopped, glanced up and down the ditch to make sure that no one was observing him, and then drew a stone from the wall, disclosing a hole in which was seated, like a squat gnome, a little fat linen bag.

This was his cache. The money he had collected by one means or another during the last four years and ten months. It was a fair sum, partly in gold, partly in silver, and he had intended it for that day, now only two months distant, when, to use his own words, he would walk out of the Legion like a gentleman. He was going to use it for a different purpose now, and placing the bag in his pocket, without troubling to close the cache, he turned, and, followed by the dog, came back along the ditch.

Stars like the points of needles were piercing the pansy-coloured sky when Jacques and his companion reached the Place Sadi Carnot. The Place was crowded, légionnaires, visitors and townsfolk crowding around the bandstand, some seated, others standing about in groups. The warm air was filled with the scents of jessamine and garlic, the African earth, caporal and cigar smoke, all vague and blended to form the smell of Sidi-bel-Abbès en fête.

Then the electric lights blazed out and the band struck up. They were playing the Sambre et Meuse, that splendid march of the French Army, spirited enough almost to raise the slain, but Jacques did not beat time with his foot, nor, when Choc glanced up at him, did he give the dog the signal to start his tricks.

He walked about for a while, showing himself to his companions, then he disappeared from the Place and, followed by the dog, sought the native streets.

Sidi-bel-Abbès is slashed across by two great boulevards running north and south, and east and west. Here you find plate glass windows and Paris jewellery, motor-cars, cocottes, American women in blue veils. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London and New York all represented by some fragment of their social life, just as in the Legion they are represented, each, by some form of the universal diseases that prey on society.

Behind these gay boulevards you find the real Sidi-bel-Abbès.

You walk into the country of Islam. Passing through the narrow bazaars, the moon above your head becomes the moon that lit the three Calenders, and the lamps that light the gloom of the booths are the lamps of Aladdin.

The légionnaires swarm here, yet their blue and red dress uniform does not detract from the Oriental charm; they have about them some subtle touch of Africa that blends with the surroundings.

Jacques, followed by his companion, passed through several of the narrow streets till he reached an alley where, at a door set in the wall, he knocked.

The door opened and he went in, leaving Choc to wait for him outside, seated on the ground. Arab dogs came down the alley, saw the stranger, advanced, burbling and bristling, recognized him, and passed on; the rising moon laid a pale finger on the wall-top and from far away across the faint noises of the city came the cry of the priest from the balcony of the minaret calling the faithful to prayer; and now a window opened somewhere and the laughter of a girl, the tinkle-tankle of a guitar, and a snatch of song blew away on the night wind and then snapped off to the closing of the casement.

This was the Spanish quarter of the Moslem town, and perhaps the wickedest; outside the jurisdiction of the Bureau Arabe, and visited only by the shadiest characters among the European population of the place.

Twenty minutes passed and then the door opened and a man came out. He was dressed in mufti, but the alteration in dress did not deceive Choc. He knew his master at once, and, rising, followed him down the alley into the street.

Jacques had made up his mind to escape from the Legion. It was the maddest act of his life.

First of all, he was not an ordinary légionnaire, but a criminal serving for rehabilitation. If he managed to escape he would have to begin life over again without papers. It would be impossible for him to find work in France; he must go to England or some other country where papers were not required. Then, again, he had only to wait two short months and he would secure his rehabilitation and be able to leave the Legion and obtain work.

Though he had started in life as an Apache, Commonsense had been talking to him for the last two years or so, pointing out that a franc made by robbery is not worth two sous made by work. The rate of exchange is always against the criminal; so appalling is it that one may wonder at any man with an ounce of brains doing business on such ruinous terms. Jacques had recognized this, and he had determined, on finding himself his own man again, to take to honest ways.

He was now ruining all the plans he had made for that future so nearly in his grasp. Throwing everything away—for a dog.

As a matter of fact, there was no struggle involved in the giving up of his plans. Cold plans for the future dictated by commonsense did not stand for a moment before the warm desire to keep the dog and flout Authority. Choc was his mate and he was not going to lose him.

Passing a shop where viands were sold, he bought two sausages and put them in his pocket, then he walked on, striking towards the European quarter.

The band was still playing in the Place Sadi Carnot and the faint sound of it came on the warm, perfumed wind.

To Jacques it seemed a month ago since he had left the Place, and it seemed extraordinary to hear the band at it still.

But he had little time to think of anything except his objective, and that was Oran, eighty miles away.

There is a railway between Sidi-bel-Abbès and Oran, that is to say, a trap for runaway légionnaires. Jacques was not such a fool as to use the railway, or even to walk along the embankments. Time was of no matter to him. The pursuit would be after him before he could reach Oran, even by rail; he had to trust entirely to his disguise and to luck. He recognized that Choc would be his main difficulty; he could not disguise Choc.

He had lit a cigarette and he passed along to the city gates without let or hindrance; a bourgeois taking an evening stroll with his dog excited no comment. At the gates it was the same, and, walking with a leisurely manner with his hands in his pockets, he found the road to Oran and struck along it. It lay before him white in the moonlight, and beyond the gardens of the town, on either side, stretched the sand wastes and rocks of a miserable plain that in daylight is yellow, parched, sun-bitten and murderous in its desolation. A few stunted palms broke the sky-line on the right, whilst on the left could be seen the lights of the railway and the furnace-lit smoke of a train just coming in from Oran. Jacques, noting these, looked up and down the road, to right, to left, not a soul was there to be seen. Then, calling to Choc, he struck into his stride.

Nearly five years of life in the Legion had rendered him almost impervious to weariness in marching. Five kilometres an hour is the regulation pace in full marching order and laden with rifle, ammunition, and equipment. Forty kilometres a day is the minimum on active service.

Five miles or so from Sidi-bel-Abbès a mounted police patrol passed Jacques without halting and with scarcely a glance at him, but they were going towards the town, and would know nothing of his escape.

Then, thinking things over in his mind, he reflected that the fact of his escape would be still unknown even at the barracks, where it was just turning-in time. Légionnaires sometimes outstepped their leave. The pursuit would not be on his heels till to-morrow morning, when, definitely declared absent, his description would be circulated, right to Oran.

But this did not incline him to slacken his pace. He kept on steadily, till he had reached a point some ten miles from the town, when he took his seat by the wayside, took the sausages, which were wrapped up in a sheet of the Journal d'Oran, from his pocket, and divided one with Choc. Then, noticing a prickly pear bush growing near by, he cut some of the fruit and carefully peeled it.

It was their first meal in the desert, and they had four, for it was not till the morning of the third day of his escape that Jacques entered Oran.