Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

MANSOOR

They were coming back from the rifle butts in the blaze of the late afternoon sun, Jacques walking beside Corporal Kandorff. The roofs and minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès showed beyond the barracks, swimming in the heat-shaken air, whilst on the tepid wind blowing in their faces came the scents of the desert and the smell of the town.

You can smell Sidi-bel-Abbès half a league off, the perfume of the yellow city is as distinctive as the perfume of a marigold, and as unforgettable. Camels, negroes, jasmine flowers, caporal tobacco and the old, old yellow earth of the ramparts all lend a trace of themselves to form a scent the very recollection of which brings up the bugles of the Legion, the domes of the city, and the cry of the muezzins from the minarets of the mosques.

Jacques was thirsty, and as he tramped along beside Kandorff he was abusive towards the universe in general. When he was short of money he was always like that, and lately he had been very short of money, reduced to borrowing a few halfpence that morning from Kandorff—fifteen centimes, and they were spent.

"Seven years in the regiment," he was saying, "and look at me. I who know every hole and corner of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Things are going from bad to worse; a year ago there was lots of pickings to be had what between the new drafts from Oran and the town there; but of late there's not a man joined the Legion with more than the rags he stands up in, and as for the town it's gone rotten. Visitors don't seem to come there now, there's no money and no tick and no trade to be done. I was the sharpest man in the regiment once at carving a bit out of the Arabs and the visitors and the traders, but where's the use in being sharp when you have nothing to cut. Tell me that. I had money once, enough to start in business when I got my discharge; much good my discharge will do me when I get it. It will mean rejoining for another five years, and that will be the end of me. I want the sight of money and I want it bad; every time I pass the Crédit Lyonnais I can scent the gold there just as you smell the cooking going on in a café. I'll break in there some day, and if I can't do anything more I'll just roll in the twenty-franc pieces, swallow them, choke myself with them. That's how I feel—you'll see."

"Then they would shoot you," said Kandorff, "and I would never get my fifteen centimes back."

Jacques laughed.

"Well, there would be some satisfaction in that," said he. "It's better to die owing fifteen centimes than owing nothing—one has someone to mourn one then. Ah, ha! here's the placard for Mansoor stuck up."

They had reached the barrack gates and he pointed to a poster just stuck upon the right gate-post. It was the offer of a reward of five hundred francs for the capture of Mansoor, late superintendent of the Arab police, and the delivery of his body alive or dead into the hands of Colonel Tirard, chief of the regiment of légionnaires stationed at Sidi-bel-Abbès. The poster was issued from the Bureau Arabe, but the goods were to be delivered at the headquarters of the Legion.

Mansoor, two days ago, had murdered a légionnaire; it was a sordid and ferocious crime, committed on account of a woman. The criminal had made his escape, Sidi-bel-Abbès had been searched, Oran sealed, and the desert posts warned, but the murderer was still at large, hence the reward. Jacques and Kandorff stood amongst the crowd that had gathered to discuss the notice.

"They'll never get him," said Kandorff.

"And why not?" asked one of the crowd.

"Why not? Well, just for the very good reason that he is an Arab and the Arab police will shelter him and wink at his escape."

"Winking at him won't help him much if he wants to cross the frontier," replied the other, "to get into Tunisia."

"He won't bother about that," said Kandorff; "he'll stick on to some wandering tribe and most likely the next time we meet him he'll be fighting us down south somewhere. That is the sort of man worse to let loose than a plague, and he will very likely raise a holy war of his own if he is not caught."

Kandorff—whose name was not Kandorff and who had spent some years in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Foreign Office—was a man who knew what he was talking about. He turned and entered the barrack yard with Jacques and the business passed from their minds. A légionnaire has no time to bother about murders, even if the murdered man is a légionnaire. Jacques and his companion had not even time to think about resting. They had their washing to do.

Jacques had annexed a piece of soap that morning and hidden it under his bed; he shared it now with Kandorff as they stood at the great washing trough, and then, the uniforms washed, pressed and packed safely away, they started off on their usual evening's walk to the town.

Arrived there they parted company, Kandorff going on some business of his own, whilst Jacques, left to himself, strolled off down one of the boulevards. The evening was delightful after the heat of the day, and the wind from the desert, warm but stimulating, played with the leaves of the trees bordering the street and blew in the face of the légionnaire as he walked, glancing in at the shop windows and pausing here and there to inspect their contents.

He reached the Crédit Lyonnais, which was closed, and stood for a moment looking at the building as though measuring the strength of it. This was the place where fellows shovelled twenty-franc pieces across the counter with copper shovels and pulled out drawers stuffed with pink and blue five-hundred-franc notes. Dreams rose before him of what the Legion could do if it only had the courage of its desires and opinions. The looting of Sidi-bel-Abbès rose up before him, a gaudy picture with himself in the foreground armed with a copper shovel and a sack. Then he resumed his way, striking from the boulevard into the native quarter, or rather the Moslem quarter of the town.

He was quite at home here and well known to many of the traders. He had eaten kouss-kouss in the terrible little native cafés where the front premises are only the stage curtains that conceal an opium joint or worse; he was known to black-eyed Arab children and to the quick-eyed Arab police, and to-night, being hard up for cigarettes, he was on the look-out for someone amidst all this host of acquaintances who could supply him.

In a narrow street and before an open booth he paused. Here on a bench beneath a swinging lamp sat a yellow man, cross-legged and wearing a red fez. He was rolling cigarettes.

He had rolled cigarettes since the time when he was a little boy, son of a cigarette-maker in Blidah. He would continue rolling cigarettes till they took him to the grave. He did not know how many he had rolled since his fingers had first closed on the rice paper and the yellow opium-tinctured tobacco. He might have rolled millions, tens of millions, he did not know. He never smoked the things he rolled and one might have taken him for an automaton, but for the song that was always humming upon his lips, a song without words, monotonous, dreary and fateful.

Jacques paused before this image and greeted it. It nodded in reply to his greeting and went on with its work.

Jahāl, for that was the name of this man, did not work for his own hand. He was only a servant in the employ of the Kassim company. It supplied him with the tobacco and cigarette-papers and paid him for the finished product. He sat now without replying to the remarks of the légionnaire, for he guessed Jacques was hard up for a smoke and had come to borrow.

Jacques noted the sullenness of the other and resented it. He was just on the point of flinging an epigram at the head of the silent one and turning on his heel, when the reed curtain at the back of the shop parted, revealing the head of Mansoor the murderer.

There was no mistaking that dark haughty head with the hare lip that exposed glistening teeth in an eternal sneer.

The pause in the talk between Jacques and Jahāl had evidently inspired Mansoor with the belief that the visitor was gone, and, as evidently, he had something urgent to say to Jahāl, else he would not have put forth from his hiding hole. As it was he drew back instantly, but not before Jacques had sprung into the shop, upsetting Jahāl, sending the pile of made cigarettes flying every way and striking with his head the swinging lamp so that it smashed against the fretwork screen depending from the low ceiling and went out.

Next moment, Jacques was behind the screen, in darkness, struggling with a cloth which someone—he knew it was a woman from the clash of the bangles on the arms—had flung over him. Then he was free and bursting out of a stifling atmosphere of camel-hair cloth, scent, and native smell through a window and with his right hand on the shoulder of Mansoor.

Mansoor had sprung into a lane through a window. The moon, filling with light as the west sank to darkness, shone on the scene and showed now the flying figure of Mansoor and the following figure of Jacques, who had missed the shoulder hold, fallen face forward from the low window on to the pavement, and, nothing daunted by his fall, was in full pursuit.

Jacques had joined in many a game of life and death, but never one quite like this. There was money in this business, a lot of money, and fame. More fame than he could ever get were he to perform the utmost prodigies of valour as a soldier fighting the enemy with his regiment.

Then Mansoor was a devil incarnate and he was absolutely certain to be armed. He had not fired yet, nor would he do so as long as there was the faintest chance of escape without using the automatic pistol in his belt.

He, Jacques, was unarmed.

All these considerations, flashing and splashing like heliograph signals across the brain of Jacques, tinged the business with the charm of drunkenness. This was Life stirred up and sublimated, the sort of life one holds for a moment by virtue of Absinthe.

With the rush of a rat, Mansoor broke from the lane into a passage that was simply a crack between two houses that were built right against the inner wall of the ramparts.

The house next the rampart had an iron stair leading to the upper story and the roof. Mansoor, followed by Jacques, swarmed up these stairs, reached the roof, reached the ramparts and dropped over into the encircling ditch.

Mansoor made the drop fifteen seconds only before Jacques. It was thirty feet and they ought both to have been killed, but we may fancy that the gods like a bit of sport sometimes, for they weren't.

But the Arab recovered from the shake-up of the fall before his pursuer had done likewise, and from the start at the ditch's edge for the race for freedom Jacques was under a half-minute handicap.

Half a minute is a terribly long time when the energy of life is blazing to a point as in battle, or a pursuit like this. It gave Mansoor time to get well away.

Just here, around the walls of Sidi-bel-Abbès, you will find vineyards stretching southward and breaking up at last into market gardens. Mansoor was making his way between two vineyards down a path that ended in a cul-de-sac.

A fence, in fact, ended the path and barred his way and checked it for a moment. He left it broken behind him and struck across a market garden where long lines of bell glasses glowed in the light of the moon. In the grape season all this place would be watched by the grape growers and by this a hue and cry might have been set up and half a dozen unsolicited helpers spoiling Jacques' game, but at this time of year the place was deserted and the pursued and the pursuer had the ground to themselves.

The time taken by Mansoor in breaking through the fence gave Jacques an advantage, for the break was so thorough that he was able to get through without delay; when he was through, Mansoor, at the other end of the garden, was negotiating the fence on that side.

Beyond lay broken ground, spotted here and there with stunted bushes and cacti.

When Jacques reached this place, Mansoor was far ahead but distinctly visible, and he had altered his pace. He was no longer running as if for his life, he had settled down to a jog-trot, and Jacques, after a spurt that lessened the distance between them by a quarter, held himself in and settled down to the pace of Mansoor.

The man who holds the lead in an affair of this kind holds the advantage, for the pursuer, if he overhauls the pursued, must inevitably come up to the scratch winded.

Jacques had come to the conclusion that the murderer was unarmed, else here, in this desolate place, he would undoubtedly have attacked instead of running away. Believing this, he determined to hang on the other's heels, wear him down, and then close with him.

He knew his own powers; a born long-distance runner and trained to feats of almost fabulous endurance by his seven years' life in the Legion, he felt that he held the trump card, and if, as he felt certain now, Mansoor was unarmed, he had no fear of the issue.

Sidi-bel-Abbès is situated on the borders of the desert, but the Algerian desert must not be confused with the Sahara, in those places where it shows limitless wastes of sand.

The desert places of Algeria show little sand except in districts away down south, as, for instance, by the Oasis of the Five Palms or that great, sandy track where we saw the Legion fronting the Arabs and defeating them.

The desert of Algeria consists of waste land, rock-strewn and desolate, yellow earth, sun-baked and hardened, a few miserable scrub bushes and cacti, an occasional oasis with palm trees blowing in the desert wind.

There is no water, except that which flows underground and breaks to the surface here and there to form the oasis pools.

Through this wilderness runs the great southern military road, built by the soldiers of the Legion, and the line Mansoor was now taking lay to the west of this road. It was his object to avoid the road; in this Jacques was with him; the road meant military patrols and the prize taken out of Jacques' hands.

Five hundred francs! Never for a moment had the idea left his mind; it had driven him like a charging bull into the shop of the cigarette-maker, it led him in pursuit down the lane, over the rampart, into the ditch and through the market garden; it was leading him now on the most desperate and dangerous chase that man ever engaged in, and it would lead him to the end, whatever the end might be.

The serious fact for Mansoor at that moment lay, not in the fact that he was a murderer, but the fact that he was five hundred francs. He was bundles of Algerian cigarettes, bottles of blue Algerian wine, jolly evenings at the canteen, lots of soap to wash uniforms with, kisses from black-eyed girls, glasses of coloured liqueurs at Kito's—and he was being chased by Jacques!—heaven help him!

The half-moon blazing in the sky lit the chase, and the cold of the Algerian night checked the breath of Jacques.

It seemed also to affect Mansoor, for all of a sudden he slackened his pace from a jog-trot to a quick walk.

His pursuer did the same, nothing loth.

At this pace, the marching pace of the Legion, he could keep on all night and half the next day.

In the Legion on a route march he would be carrying rifle, three hundred rounds of ammunition, knapsack and tent-pole, a weight of fifty kilogrammes or so. To-night he was free of all this, his own man.

As he kept up the pursuit the thought suddenly occurred to him that the barracks would have long closed by this, and not answering to the roll call his name would be posted as a deserter. This thought amused him for a moment, then it troubled him. He had deserted from the regiment before; that always leaves a stain on a man's name, no matter how good his subsequent conduct may be. The punishment for a second attempt is very heavy and the Legion is deaf to excuses and very merciless. Stung by this, he determined to finish the business at once, if possible, close with his prey and chance it. He broke into a run, but, lo and behold, as though gifted with eyes in the back of his head, or a supernatural sense of hearing, Mansoor did likewise.

Five minutes later, both men, as if by tacit consent, had fallen back into the old pace.

There are occasions when men hold quite long conversations with one another without a word of speech, and whilst they are grasping for one another's throats. Mansoor was saying to Jacques, "If you increase your pace I will increase mine; there is nothing to be gained by you in overhauling me like that; quite the reverse, for, seeing that I have a long lead, you would be the most exhausted of the two if you managed to outstrip me. Besides, in a racing test you might not be able to do so."

Jacques was saying, "That is true—curse you!—well, then, let's heel and toe it, I have the advantage of the practice marches of the Legion on my side, and I can stick to you till we both drop. I know, you have method in your game, for the further you lead me the more chance you have of falling in with some tribe of wandering Arabs who would back you against me. Well, I must take the chance."

These two men had once known each other; at a distance, it is true, still they had known one another and exchanged greetings. Jacques had a reputation of his own in Sidi-bel-Abbès, and so had Mansoor. They knew one another's reputations. This knowledge helped in the mute conversation between the pursued and the pursuer.

At dawn they had put some thirty kilometres between them and Sidi-bel-Abbès; the outline of the Tessala Mountains hardened against the fading darkness and then the sun rose, a ball of guinea-gold coloured, eye-dazzling fire, in a blue, still, silent sky.

The solitude here was unbroken by any sign of life; grass patch, scrub bush, ash-grey-green cactus, all seemed petrified in their natural colours, unreal in the real and living sunlight. Forsaken, and given over to eternal silence.

Jacques, used as he was to extreme and violent exercise, was beginning to fail. On route marches, it is true, he had often done forty kilometres heavily laden. They were not yet forty kilometres from their starting-point, and he was carrying nothing, but it must be remembered that the Legion on the march pauses often for a rest and that five minutes' rest makes all the difference.

Jacques had not had a moment's rest. The same held true for Mansoor. Both men were exhausted, but they were exhibiting the effects of their exhaustion in different ways. Jacques, marching well and firmly, had the appearance of a man still capable of covering many miles. His legs were still all right, but his head was giving out. The higher nervous centres could not hold to their work much longer, and that is one of the most fatal forms of exhaustion. For half a minute at a time he would forget Mansoor. At any moment he might fall together like a house of cards and lie on the ground, not dead, but sleeping peacefully, a prey to the man he was pursuing.

On the other hand, Mansoor was failing in the legs; occasionally he swayed and stumbled, but his mind was clear and it dominated his body, as a jockey dominates an exhausted horse.

They had entered a little gully where years ago quarrying work had gone on, for stone to metal the great south road, and Jacques' mind had just returned from one of its momentary lapses, when he saw the man he was pursuing wheel round and advance towards him.

Mansoor was holding something in his right hand. It was an automatic pistol.

It was the sight of the pistol that brought Jacques' mind vividly awake. A pistol! And he had been absolutely certain that his enemy was unarmed. The fact remained, and before the fact Jacques turned tail. But he did not run.

On his left a cave-opening in the rock caught his eye, and urged by the dread of a bullet in his back he dived into the cave.

Mansoor, pistol in hand, came along, swaying as he came, wild-eyed and dreadful, with the grey pallor of exhaustion showing through his dusky skin.

Right opposite the cave mouth, and thirty feet or so away, he flung himself down on the ground, rested his left arm on a piece of rock and the barrel of the pistol on the angle of his elbow, taking aim straight into the cave.

Jacques, seeing this, flung himself flat on the cave floor and waited for the first shot.

But Mansoor did not fire. He seemed content to lie recovering from his exhaustion and holding his enemy at bay.

Jacques had retreated as far as possible into the darkness of the cave, the opening was some nine feet or so from his face, and as he lay on his stomach, his chin resting on his arm, the fact that he was cornered and at the mercy of the other appeared before him in all its bleak simplicity.

Mansoor, when he had rested sufficiently and gauged the possibilities of the situation, would come straight to the cave mouth and then all would be over with Jacques.

But the man with the pistol showed no signs of such an intention yet, he seemed content to wait and watch, keeping a strict blockade till his energy and resolution found themselves again.

Jacques wondered what it would be like when he was dead and lying there always in the cave. Mansoor would not bother to bury him. He thought of what his companions in the Legion would say and think. They would fancy that he had deserted and had succeeded in making his escape. Then appeared before him the blue sea at Oran and Oran itself, with the barracks away up on the heights just as he had seen it on the first day of his arrival in Algeria, more than seven years ago. Then the sea, from a thought, became a vision and shimmered up to him and over him. Mansoor vanished, the cave, the sunlight at its door and the fact that he was held for Death.

Jacques had fallen asleep.

Had you fired a cannon in the ravine he would not have heard it. It was the sleep that follows on high excitement or profound exhaustion.

He was awakened by the bugles of the Legion sounding the réveillé, so it seemed to him for a moment, then the bugles of the Legion became the crying of birds.

Birds were flocking about the ravine, great birds whose shadows swept the ground in front of the cave. With the return of consciousness to Jacques came the return of full mental energy. He remembered everything, and recognized to his astonishment that it was evening, towards sundown, and that Mansoor was still in exactly the same position, his face half sheltered by his arm, taking aim.

Yet it was morning when Jacques had fallen asleep. All the burning day the murderer must have lain like this, watching—or had sleep taken him too?

Suddenly one of the great birds whose shadows had been flitting across the ground swept down and lighted on the head of Mansoor. It stood there for a second, fiery-eyed and swaying, like a funeral plume, then, shooting its head forward and downward, it peeped up into the face of the watching one and plucked out an eye.

The birds of the desert always attack the eyes of a man first. The vultures will haul at a fallen man's head till they get the face sideways. Jacques, who knew all about the birds of the desert and their ways, gave a shout; next moment he was kneeling beside the dead man.

Mansoor had been dead for hours, death had struck him most likely the moment he had changed the upright for the recumbent position, giving him only just time to lie down and take aim. His heart had given out owing to his exertions and the excitement of the chase, or a blood vessel had broken in his brain.

Jacques took the pistol from the dead hand, not without a struggle. Then he saw why the pursued man had not fired on him. The magazine was empty.

Mansoor must have been unable to obtain ammunition after the murder. He had used bluff. It is almost as good sometimes.

The birds had now drawn off. They could be seen perched here and there on the rocks and waddling on the ground. Jacques shook his fist at them. Then, taking a clasp knife out of his pocket, a knife as keen as a razor, he did that unto the body of Mansoor which would ensure the reward of five hundred francs.

As he stood up the sun was setting, and the half-moon, like a ghost in the east, was strengthening in outline. From that eastern sky, warm blue and infinite in depth, a gentle wind was blowing, shaking the leaves of the few stunted plants that grew in the ravine.

Jacques, having finished his business, came out of the ravine and stood shading his eyes with his hands.

The land far and wide lay glowing in the sunset light, all hardness had vanished from it, and the desolation was almost masked by the colours that spread the distance.

The légionnaire was looking now to the east. He had determined to make for the great south road and strike along it back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. He was stiff and so exhausted from want of food that he could take little pleasure in his triumph and the prospect of the reward.

His one idea was rest and food and drink. As he tramped along, making due east, he found by good chance one of those tiny oases which occur here and there in this part of the Algerian desert. Here, by a well scarcely bigger than a slop basin, grew a prickly pear bush with ripe fruit on it. He drank from the well and cut some of the pears, taking care to avoid the prickles, then, having smoked a pipe, he started again by the light of the moon, which was now burning white and clear.

By the well he had heard the far-off crying and quarrelling of the birds from the ravine; he could hear it still as he walked, the sound growing ever fainter, till it ceased altogether before he struck the road just at the milestone that marked the forty-first kilometre from Sidi-bel-Abbès.

Here he was lucky enough to fall in with a cart going in the direction of the town, and obtained a lift to the rest-house, which lay five miles ahead and where for a couple of francs, which he had taken from the pocket of Mansoor, he obtained a bed for the night and some food.

At four o'clock the next afternoon, Jacques, in the highest of spirits, dusty and tired, yet stepping out vigorously, saw the roofs and mosque minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès breaking up before him against the sky.

He was going to enter that town as a conqueror. He gloated over the idea. What a good joke! His name by this had without doubt been posted as the name of a deserter, the Legion would be speculating on his escape, they would see him returning, jeer over the fact—and then!

Besides, what a smack it would be at the Arab police. The police and the légionnaires are not friends. The police have the power to arrest an escaped légionnaire, and more than that, they receive a reward for his capture. You can fancy, then, how sharp they were on the look-out for prey of this sort, and the ill-feeling that results.

Jacques, trudging along, had quite forgotten the police, also the fact that he had no doubt been posted as a deserter by this. All of a sudden the sound of horse-hoofs on the road behind him made him turn his head. Two horsemen were approaching at full speed. They had been scouting amongst the broken ground on the eastern side of the road, and the dusty figure of the légionnaire tramping along had attracted their attention.

They overhauled him, recognized him at once as the man for whom a reward was out, and whilst one of them held him under the muzzle of a pistol, the other clapped a handcuff on his right wrist. The handcuff was attached to a couple of fathoms of thin steel chain, and next moment they were mounted and trotting for Sidi-bel-Abbès, Jacques running behind them in the dust of the road.

A nice triumphal entry for a corporal of the Legion.

They passed the gates, and then down the main boulevard they came, the infernal police, like boys returning from fishing, only too proud to exhibit their catch.

They were bringing him through the town on purpose. He knew it, but he did not care. He was promising himself a fine revenge, and the onlookers in the street were treated to a new sight, an escaped légionnaire being brought in bursting with laughter and shouting ribald remarks to his captors.

At the barracks the police dismounted, and leaving their horses in charge of one of the légionnaires on duty, they marched their still laughing prisoner off to the guard-room, Five minutes later they were standing before Colonel Tirard, waiting for their reward, Jacques between them.

The Colonel was in a temper. Jacques was one of the best men in the regiment, and one of the best marchers. He had been well treated. Desertion on the part of a man like that was a big crime in his eyes.

"So, you scamp," said he, "they've brought you back. A nice thing truly, for you, a man in authority over others. Well, I will teach you—what's in that bundle tied to your belt?"

"A present for you, mon Colonel," replied Jacques.

He took the bundle, which consisted of something wrapped up in the dead man's shirt, placed it on the table, opened it, and exposed the grinning head of Mansoor.

"There are things that explain themselves," said Jacques that night, as he told the story of his interview with Colonel Tirard to his companions.

He spent the money in diverse ways, but he bought no cigarettes. Jahāl supplied him with cigarettes gratis during the next three months. He had said nothing about Jahāl's part in the business of hiding Mansoor, and he managed to impress Jahāl with the importance of his silence and its commercial value. That was Jacques all over.