North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

IV

Beni-Ounif was dull. There was nothing interesting there except the mise en scène. It was pleasant to be dining with officers, for they were the principal patrons of the hotel, with whom stars and crosses were as common as watch-guards in New York; and it was stimulating to see the ensigns of the Legion of Honor where they were something more than the international compliment of a ribbon twisted in a black buttonhole and had their heroic meaning, a decoration on an officer’s breast. The crosses I saw stood for acts of bravery on the field of battle. There were a few other guests who came and went, a French hunter, a Belgian professor who told me of the prehistoric cabinets he had seen farther south, an officer’s remarkable collection, and explained to me the geology of the Sahara in brief and interesting lectures. The town itself never lost for me the vacant and makeshift frontier look that it had at first sight; one could walk from end to end of it in a few minutes and come out on the desert, which was monotony petrified. Nothing happened except the arrival and departure of the daily train. Once I met on the edge of the desert the goum, a compact small body of native Arab cavalry attached to the French arms, a splendid squad of fighting men; rather heavy and broad-shouldered they looked, wrapped in burnoose and turban, mature men whose life was war, black-bearded, large-eyed, grim—predatory faces; and they were in their proper place, with the naked mountains round and the desert under their horses’ feet—a martial scene of the old raiding race. I should not like to see them at work, I thought; their trade is blood, and they looked it—strong, hard, fierce—pitiless men. But usually there was nothing uncommon to my eyes. Once in the café, where we sat over our long glasses of the fortified liquors and tonic drinks of which there is so great a variety in desert towns, some one brought in a beautiful great dead eagle. It was as if he had been killed in his eyrie to see him there on the desert among the soldiers. We returned to our glasses and our talk: tales of Paris, tales of Odessa in the Revolution, tales of long Algerian rides, encounters, anecdotes of the road—what tales! And other men’s tales, too—Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Maurice Le Blanc, Claude Farrère, Pierre Louÿs—all my favorites, for my friend knew them better than I did, and made me new acquaintances “in the realm of gold” that I like best to travel. What happy talk! and the time went by. I went out alone to see the full moon rise over the solemn desert by the reddish hills in the chill air, and fill the great sky with that white flood of radiance that seemed every night more ethereal, more remote from mankind, more an eternal thing; and at the hotel we would meet again to dine late, for my friend being a private soldier, we waited till the officers were gone; and then again the tales and the happy talk, and good night. That was life at Beni-Ounif.

“Would I like to go to the theatre?” I repeated, for it was an unexpected invitation. “You might not think so, but there is a theatre at Beni-Ounif,” said my friend. So it appeared that the Legion, among the multitude of things it did, occasionally gave a performance of private theatricals for its own amusement, and my friend himself was to play that night. It was a beautiful evening with a cold wind. I made my way through the burly military group wrapped in heavy blue cloaks, with here and there a burnoosed spahi or tall tirailleur, and entering the small hall was given a seat in the front row among a few ladies and very young children, two or three civilians, my Belgian acquaintance being one, and half a dozen officers with their swords and crosses. “The tricolor goes well with the palm,” I said to myself, as I turned to look at the prettily decorated, not overlighted room, where trophies of the colors alternated with panels of palm-leaves on either side and at the rear, giving to the scene a simple, artistic effect of lightness and gayety with a touch of beauty, especially in the palms. It was characteristically French in refinement, simple elegance, and color; there was nothing elaborate, but it was a charming border to the eye, and no framework could have been so fit for that compact mass of soldiers as was this lightly woven canopy of French flags and the desert palm on the bare walls of that rude hall. But it was the men who held my eyes. The room was packed with soldiers of the Legion; a few spahis and tirailleurs stood in the rear or at the sides; there was no place left to stand even; and I looked full on their serried faces. My first thought was that I had never seen soldiers before. I never saw such faces—mature, grave, settled, with the look of habitual self-possession of men who command and obey; resolute mouths, immobile features; there was great sadness in their eyes that seemed to look from some point far back, heavy and weary; they had endured much—it was in their pose and bearing and on their countenances; they had ceased to think of life and death—one felt that; but no detail can give the human depth of the impression I felt at the sight—faces into which life had fused all its iron. And there was, too, in the whole mass the sense of physical life, of hardship and hardihood, and of bodily power to do and bear and withstand—the fruit of the desert air, long marches, terrible campaigns in the sands. It was a sight I shall always remember as, humanly, one of the most remarkable I ever looked on.

The Foreign Legion is commonly believed to be made up of broken men who have in some way found themselves eliminated from society, thrown out or left out or gone out of their own will, whether by misfortune, error, disappointment, or any of the various chances of life, and who have joined the Legion to lose themselves, or because they did not know what else to do with their lives. They come from all European nations and are a cosmopolitan body; and, no doubt, here and there among them is a brilliant talent or a fine quality of daring gone astray; but I imagine a very large proportion of them are simply friendless men who at some moment of abandonment find themselves without resources and without a career, and see in the Legion a last resource. I believe there are great numbers of such friendless men in our civilization. Among the thousands of the Legion there must be, of course, every color of the human past; the losers in life fail for many reasons, and in their defeat become, it may be, incidentally or temporarily, antisocial, or even habitually so, as fate hardens round them with years; but in a great number of cases, I believe, society has defaulted in its moral obligations to them before they defaulted in their moral obligations to their neighbors; and, holding such views, it was perhaps natural that, so far from finding the Legion a band of outcast adventurers and derelicts, I found them very human. I did not read romance or virtue into them. I know the hard conditions of their lives. If there be an inch of hero in a man, he is hero enough for me. The story of the French occupation of Algeria is largely the story of the Legion. For almost a century it has been one of the most effective units of the French army all over the world; and here in Algeria it has been not only a fighting force of the first order, but also a pioneer force of civilization. The legionaries have built the roads, established the military and civil stations, accomplished the first public works, drained and planted; they have laid the material foundations of the new order; they have not only conquered, but civilized in the material sense, and the labor in that land and climate has been an enormous toil. The reclamation of Africa is a great work, sure to be looked on hereafter as one of the glories of France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I thought, as I turned and the band began the overture, what a comment it was on society that in this great work of the reclamation of Africa from barbarism and blood and sodden misery so large a share was borne by this body of friendless men for whom our civilization could find no use and cared not for their fate. What a salvage of human power and capacity, turned to great uses, was there here! and from moment to moment I looked back on that body of much-enduring men with a keen recurring sense of the infinite patience of mankind under the hard fates of life, of the infinite honor and the infinite pity of it all.

To-night all was light gayety and pleasant jollity. The Legion has one characteristic of a volunteer regiment—its men can do everything, so various are the careers from which it is recruited. Its music is famous, and the orchestra played excellently; and as the first little play began, “Mentons Bleus,” the players showed themselves good amateurs. The audience responded quickly to the situations and the dialogue; there were brightened spirits and much laughter, easy, quiet enjoyment and applause. The second part was a series of songs, done by one performer after another, each doing his stunt with verve and the comedy of the variety stage; there was a full dozen of these light-hearted parts. In the intermissions the men stayed in their seats, though about the doorway there would be a little movement and changeful regrouping, but it was an audience that sat in their places ready for more; there was no smoking. The last number of the programme—a small, pretty double sheet, like note-paper, done by some copying process in pale blue, with a sword, rifle, and cap on the ground before two palms lightly sketched in the lower corner of the title leaf—was another one-act play, “Cher Maître,” and was received with a spirit that seemed only to have been whetted by the previous amusement; and when it was over the evening ended in a round of generous applause and a smiling breaking up of the company after their three hours’ enjoyment. It was pleasant to have been with the Legion on such a night, and to have shared in its little village festa, and I stood by the doorway and watched the men go by as they passed out, till all were gone.

It was midnight. The radiant moon poured down that marvellous white flood on the hollow of the desert where the little town lay low and gleaming, very silent. But I could not rid my mind of the soldiers’ lives. I thought of the torrid summer heats here in garrison, of the burning marches yonder in the south, of the days in sterile sands that make the sight of palm and garden a thing of paradise—incredible fatigues, mortal exhaustion, monotony. One cannot know the soldiers’ desert life without some experience; but some impression of it may be gained from soldiers’ books, such as one that is a favorite companion of mine, “Une Promenade dans le Sahara,” by Charles Lagarde, a lieutenant in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a thoughtful book, full of artistic feeling, and written with literary grace, the memorial of a soldier with the heart of a poet, who served in South Algeria. In such books one gets the environment, but not the life; one touch with the Legion is worth them all. I fell to sleep for my last slumber at Beni-Ounif, thinking of soldiers’ lives, friendless men—

“Somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan.”