Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

QUITS

I

In Mustapha Street, which lies in the Moslem quarter of Sidi-bel-Abbès, there was some years ago a little hole of a restaurant run by a French girl. It is now a curio shop kept by Abdesslem, a gentleman with a beard of burnt-up black, long finger-nails, and a profound knowledge of the psychology of tourists, but the original use of the place still remains in evidence in the half scratched-out drawings and songs scribbled by légionnaires on the walls. There is also a vague scent of caporal tobacco which persists like a memory.

Mademoiselle Tricot was the name of the girl, she had come from who knows where, planted herself in the little shop and bloomed. She had wonderful hair, coils and coils of hair black as night and bright as polished ebony, eyes black as sloes and a face too practical to be pretty—hard, in fact, with that business hardness one finds so often amongst the women of the small shop-keeping class in France.

But she fascinated the légionnaires, sold them coffee and hideous non-alcoholic drinks made up with syrup of gum, and gave them credit occasionally for cigarettes.

Corporal Jacques of the 10th Company of the second regiment of the Foreign Legion was one of her warmest admirers. Jacques, towards the end of his fifth year's service, had fallen foul of the authorities over the matter of Choc, attempted escape, failed, and lost his discharge. He was now in his seventh year of service and had been promoted to the rank of corporal owing to his bravery and splendid fighting qualities. He had started in life as an Apache and he was still an Apache though of an improved order. A good-humoured scoundrel, brown now as a Brazil-nut and always in his spare time on the look out for profitable plunder. It was said that he had trained his famous dog to thieve for him. He did not want any assistant in that matter, however, if one were to believe the stories about him. But whether he got it by theft or whether he got it by honest means, one thing was certain: he generally had money to spend—and spent it. Spent it in the canteen of the Legion and at Mimi Tricot's "Restaurant"—but more especially of late at the latter place.

He was in love with the lady, yet he kept his passion so well concealed that no one guessed it, except Corporal Zeiss. Zeiss was a German from somewhere near Munich, a good-looking man and Jacques' best friend.

Jacques it was who introduced Zeiss to Mimi Tricot's, and a couple of months later, in the expansion of mind produced by a bottle of heavy Algerian wine, he told Zeiss of the terrible condition his heart was in, and Zeiss being a temperamental German, understood and sympathized and quoted Schiller. Zeiss was a scamp who had left his country to escape the law, but he had rich relations who sent him a good deal of money—as money is reckoned in the Legion. He put most of it by, hid it in some hole or corner, and sponged on Jacques and anyone else who would stand him drinks.

This fact did not alter Jacques' friendliness towards Zeiss. He knew him to be mean and looked on his meanness more in the light of a humorous sort of infirmity than anything else. Zeiss was his friend—and that was enough. Zeiss wore gold earrings. Things quite inconspicuous yet all the same objects of jest among his friends. The only other man in the regiment so adorned was an Italian named Bretano who had once been a Neapolitan fisherman. No one noticed them in the case of Bretano, but Zeiss was a German and that made all the difference.

One day Jacques received a call to the hospital, where a man of his company, Pelletan by name, lay dying.

Pelletan had developed rapid consumption as a result of his life in the Legion acting on an hereditary tendency to the disease. Jacques had been kind to him. This scoundrel of a Jacques had one great quality: he was a man. A bad man, but still a man. Cruel as death to a slacker, his instinct told him that when Pelletan fell out on a march, or when his accoutrements were not absolutely spick and span, the fault was not in the soul of Pelletan but in his body. It was he who had marched Pelletan off to the doctor and he stood before him now, looking down on him and asking what he wanted.

"You see, it's this way, corporal," said the dying man. "By yesterday morning's post I received a money order for six hundred francs. It seems that my father died last month. He had a little vineyard down there by Tarascon, and when everything was sold up and settled six hundred francs was all that was left of his property. I have no mother, brother, sister, or aunt—so you see——"

His breath failed him for a moment. Then he went on: "You see, I have no one to leave the money to. I had the order changed last night and they got me gold at the Crédit Lyonnais for the notes. I'm near done out—and the money is yours."

He put a thin and claw-like hand under his pillow and produced one of the little paper bags of the Crédit Lyonnais. It chinked as he handled it. Then he turned the money out on the quilt.

There was a screen round the bed so that no one saw what was going forward, and a beam of sunlight through the high window lit the thirty gold coins as Pelletan played with them lovingly, whilst Jacques stood fascinated by the sight.

"You will take them?"

"Oh, ay," said Jacques. "I'll take them right enough if you have no one better to give them to. Money is money, and there's no use throwing it away."

Pelletan called out for the hospital orderly, and the man came.

"I've got some money here," said he, holding up the bag in which he had replaced the coins. "It's the money you got me yesterday for that order. I'm just off the hooks as you very well know and I have no one to give the stuff to except my friend here. He has used me well and I give it to him. You are witness."

"Yes," replied the man.

Pelletan handed the bag to Jacques. It was his last act. As though the gold coins had been his last drops of blood he fell back on the pillows and in five minutes he was no longer a soldier of the Legion.

Jacques gave the orderly a louis and marched off with the little bag in his pocket.

He was rich enough now to attempt his escape again from Algeria and to have a fair sum left over with which to begin life in some foreign country, but he was not thinking of escape. He was thinking of Mimi Tricot.

Mimi was always bewailing the fact that she had not enough money to start in a bigger business.

"Even a few hundred francs," she had said, "would help to get credit with and with credit one can get anything—but what can one do with customers like you légionnaires?"

This speech was in his memory as he went back to barracks, and all through the afternoon drill he was thinking of Mimi.

He was greatly torn in his mind, the gold pulling one way and Mimi the other.

The gold meant a lot to him. Twenty-nine pieces of gold, an unthinkable treasure, hauled upon the rope at the other end of which pulled Mimi.

He made two mistakes at drill that day and got reprimanded for the first time since wearing the insignia of corporal. The gold was already beginning to bring him into trouble, but he did not think of this, or take warning.

At six o'clock, when the work of the day was over and the Légionnaires starting off to the town, Jacques left the barracks.

He took his way with the others till he reached the Place Sadi Carnot, where the band of the Legion was already occupying the bandstand, around which the townsfolk and visitors were collecting.

It was a superb evening, the warm wind blowing from the Thessala Mountains and a great moon rising in the east against the setting sun.

Jacques, his pocket bulging with gold, turned from the Place into a narrow lane. It was the Ghetto of Sidi-bel-Abbès.

Sidi-bel-Abbès has its Spanish quarter, its negro quarter—outside the gates—its Arab quarter and its Jewish quarter. It was through the latter that Jacques took his way till he reached Mustapha Street and the café of the charmer.

A half tipsy Spahi was talking to her across the little counter and Jacques took a seat and called for a cup of coffee. He noted with approval how well she kept the Spahi at a distance and at the same time as a customer. Then, the Spahi having taken his departure, he rose, came to the counter and plunged into the business on hand. There was no time to waste as more customers might arrive at any moment.

"Mimi," said Jacques, "you've always been saying how well you could get on but for the want of a few francs. Well, here's something. Open it and see."

He placed the little bag on the counter. Mimi opened it and shook out the coins.

There were twenty-five louis in the bag. He had kept back four for himself, which, with the one he had given to the hospital orderly, made up the six hundred francs of Pelletan's gift.

"Mon Dieu!" cried Mimi. "What bank have you been robbing?"

Jacques laughed, then he explained, and as he explained Mimi counted the money, dropping it back into the little paper bag coin by coin.

"So you see," finished Jacques, "it's yours; and since you are mine, ma mie—it's mine. Take it and use it. In three years I will be a free man, and if you care for me as you say you do, and if you have any luck with the business you start in, we may do well together, you and I. There's not a man knows more of the ins and outs of Sidi-bel-Abbès than myself."

Mimi leaning her arms comfortably on the counter, they began to talk. It was more like the conversation of two business people than two lovers, but it ended in a kiss given across the counter as a seal of the compact.

Jacques had confessed that he had kept four louis back for his own private use. Three of these he handed to Mimi, at her request, to keep for him.

"I will be your banker," said she.

Jacques returned to barracks that night in high good spirits. Strangely enough, the money had weighed on him, making him irritable; he had been afraid of losing it, afraid of being robbed, a hundred plans for spending it had fought with another only to be conquered by the plan he had just carried through. His mind was easy now, and he had the satisfaction not only of knowing that Mimi was now his for certain, but also of the surety that he had made a very good deal in a business way.

With Mimi waiting for him till he came out of the Legion he would have something to live for, and all the time he was serving the completion of his term she would be building up their business. No man knew better than Jacques what possibilities for making money lay in Sidi-bel-Abbès. As cunning as a monkey and as sharp as a weasel, Jacques had plumbed all the depths of the town.

Though the pay of the Legion is only a half-penny a day there is money in the Legion. Nearly every légionnaire who has a friend or a relative in any part of the world becomes a beggar-man, money orders are constantly arriving and the money when it arrives is spent at once. He reckoned on the Legion as a good customer for the new business. Then there was the possibility of money-lending in the town, beginning very small, of course, and increasing by degrees; and there were things to be bought and sold in illicit ways, visitors to be fleeced and natives to be plundered.

Before he went asleep that night he was driving in his automobile through Sidi-bel-Abbès with Mimi at his side.

For a fortnight after that he lived on his twenty francs and in a state of complete happiness, presenting the picture, unnatural and against all reason, of a contented légionnaire; every evening he would call in on Mimi, drink her vile coffee, smoke cigarettes, dream of fortune, and make love to her as well as he could in the presence of the other customers. She would give him no appointment outside for a walk on the ramparts or through the great boulevards and he did not grumble; her strictness and propriety pleased him almost as much as her black coiled hair; this was a proper woman, a woman a man could trust, if not, nom de Dieu! whom could one trust?

One evening at the end of the fortnight, having spent his last copper, he called on this trustworthy woman to draw five francs of his money.

Jacques felt rather shamefaced over the business, but, putting a bold face on the matter, he entered the little café, only to find the bar deserted. It was early in the evening, a bit before the hour when légionnaires might be expected, and the space before the counter, with its rickety chairs and stained marble-topped tables, was also empty.

From the little room at the back of the bar came voices in amicable conversation, Mimi's voice and another—the voice of Corporal Zeiss!

Jacques stood for a moment like a man petrified, then he knocked on the counter with one of the glass cigarette-ash trays and the lady appeared.

Seeing Jacques, she closed the door of the little room and came forward smiling and quite unruffled, and he, white under his sunburning, but showing nothing of his feelings, made his request for the five francs.

She gave it to him without a murmur and he took it, paid for a drink, chatted for a few minutes, and then, saying that he had some business on hand in the town, took his departure.

Outside he hid in the shadow of a doorway. He had not long to wait. Some customers went into the café and almost as soon as they entered out came Zeiss, walking with a light step and with the jaunty air of a man very well satisfied with himself.

He passed so close to Jacques that the latter could see his earrings, or at least the right earring.

Then Zeiss vanished round a corner and Jacques returned to the barracks.

He wanted to be alone, a most dangerous sign in a man of Jacques' mentality and character. He knew that at this hour the barracks would be empty of all but the sentries and the men under sentence of confinement to barracks, and he found no one in the big bedroom where he slept and where now he lay down on his bed to think.

He was thinking of how he should kill Zeiss.

All sorts of tempting ways occurred to him and were played with by his mind, but they had all one fault—they would also inevitably kill Jacques.

He was a very brave man, but he had no fancy at all for facing the firing-squad.

His love for Mimi was not of the nature that makes a man regardless of all things should he be betrayed, but it was strong enough to raise the Apache in him.

His dreams of wealth and motor-cars had been smashed by this scoundrel Zeiss; that fact was almost more powerful with him than the fact that Zeiss had stolen Mimi from him, and more potent than either of these was the fact that Zeiss, his friend, had betrayed him.

Twenty minutes passed and then Jacques, rising from his bed, went off downstairs to the canteen. He had discovered a way to revenge himself, clean and without danger.

Firing practice on the range took place once every three weeks or so, and Jacques had to wait a week till one fine morning when, led by the buglers, his company started out for the butts.

During the whole of that week he had not seen Mimi nor heard from her, nor thought of her, so deeply was his mind engaged with Zeiss. But out here on the firing-ground this blazing morning, just as he had taken a loaded rifle from one of the new recruits to explain its mechanism, the thought of Mimi shot up in his mind like an imp as if to give energy to his purpose.

He was bringing the muzzle of the rifle round in the direction of Zeiss' broad back, whilst Zeiss, all unconscious of the fact, was receiving orders from the captain of the company, when Sergeant Terrail, with a glance at the German, said:

"Have you heard how Zeiss has been let down by that woman at the coffee-shop—Black Mimi—she's bolted with all his savings, nom d'un pétard, what a fool. Savigny met him last night crying for his money. He blurted the whole thing out. She has cleared off. He had close on a thousand francs saved up. He lent it to her to improve her business. Well, he was always a mean pig, close-fisted, but she managed to open his fist. Trust a woman for that."

Jacques said nothing. He handed the rifle back to the recruit and Zeiss' life was saved. Then, getting away by himself, on the pretence that the sun had given him vertigo, he lay down on the sand under the shelter of a tree and laughed. Laughed with a laughter that shook his whole body down to his toes. It was the sudden uplift of the tragic from his mind as well as the facts of the case that caused this extraordinary convulsion of merriment.

Then he rose up, dusted the sand from his tunic, and returned to the firing-ground.

But the laughter had not cleared his mind of anger. He had spared Zeiss' life, but his enmity towards Zeiss remained, though Mimi now shared it. Those two. That is how he thought of them.

II

As he took up his position again, a horseman spurring at full speed came across the plain from the direction of the barracks. As he passed the drill ground where a couple of thousand légionnaires were at exercise, a hurricane of cheering followed him and the message which he had evidently shouted to them.

Then he came at full speed towards the men at the butts. They knew at once. The order for active service had come.

They were marched back to barracks, yelling, shouting, whistling and singing. One might have fancied that every man of them had just received news of a fortune having fallen to him. The barracks were humming like a vast beehive, and the word was going round that it was down south the trouble was. Down south, away in the depths of the desert where the whole Arab country was up in revolt, attacking the outpost stations and surging north.

The Legion does not take long to mobilize. An hour is sufficient. It was now eight in the morning; by nine, headed by the band and followed by the ammunition carts, the légionnaires in four-deep formation, wheeled out of the barrack yard and marched through Sidi-bel-Abbès, striking the great south road that cuts Algeria like a meridian of longitude.

Ten miles south of the town and precisely at eleven o'clock a halt was called, tents were put up, and soup was served.

It was the hot season, and unless driven by the direst necessity the Legion does not march under the three hours of terrific sun that withers everything from noon till three o'clock. Night is the time for marching, and the tents are generally struck shortly after midnight. There were also a hundred details to be attended to in the first hours of this big shake-out after six months' rest in barracks. Some of the tents proved to want repairing, and numerous little weaknesses had to be remedied before the great test came.

Half an hour after midnight the tents were struck and the long, long column, broken only by the rattling ammunition and baggage carts, got into its stride. Five kilometres an hour is the pace of the Legion, with a five minutes' rest at every tenth kilometre.

At dawn the column was marching still, and in the full blaze of day it was still marching, voiceless, tottering, almost broken with weariness.

Then it halted at the milestone that marked a distance of fifty kilometres from Sidi-bel-Abbès, the tents were put up by the wayside and coffee was served.

The men lay about exhausted in the tents. Under the sun across a great stretch of sand and rubbly ground on the right of the road, lay the city of little tents that had suddenly broken into existence like fungi, and around the city, showing sometimes the flash of a bayonet in the sunlight, could be seen the dark forms of the patrols. Grumbling, smoking, swearing, the population of the tent city filled the air with a murmur, dying at last to silence as sleep took the légionnaires. They had marched forty kilometres. Forty kilometres laden with rifle, ammunition, knapsack, tent and collapsible tent poles. Forty kilometres at the rate of five kilometres an hour, with only four breaks of five minutes each. Forty kilometres with only twenty minutes' rest.

But this was nothing to the fantastic labours before them. Next day, and the day after, and the day after, the march went on, ever south, and ever through more desolate country. They reached the region of the small outpost stations, where men of the penal battalion were at work road-making and fort-building. Here wind came to them that the trouble had shifted more to the east, where a great army of Arabs was at work breaking, pillaging and murdering. Three outpost stations had been sacked and the soldiers put to death, and with this news the Legion, setting its teeth, struck on to the south-south-east.

They were entering now the real desert. The great yellow desert that lies burning in the sun for ever. Now voiceless, now sighing and shifting its sand to the wind that blows from nowhere. Here there are no roads, only caravan tracks marked by the skeletons of men and animals, an horizon hard like burnished brass, a thirst that drains even the water in the oasis wells.

Jacques, old campaigner that he was, had never grown used to the desert, no white man ever does. There is a spirit here that daunts the soul and haunts the heart for ever.

As they marched, sometimes, came marching abreast of them, miles away, vast sand devils, recalling the D'jin released from the bottle in the Arabian tale. Sometimes the devils would move as though waltzing with viewless partners, but the Legion scarcely cast an eye upon them. The Trumpet of Doom alone could have arrested the attention of that vast centipede, sun-dazzled, or moon-lit, exhausted, dead to everything but the necessity of movement. The water ran short, but still they marched; men fell out only to be tied to the tails of the ammunition carts, where they had either to be dragged along the sands or march; feet bled, eyes were blinded, brains reeled, but the purpose of the mechanism never failed, nor did the movement falter.

Five kilometres an hour was the inexorable pace to which the machine was set.

A longer halt than usual whilst waiting for despatch bearers had shifted the starting hour of each march to one o'clock in the morning.

Then, under the stars and in the perishing cold of the desert night, the bugles would ring out, the city of little white tents shrivel up and vanish, and the great centipede reform itself out of all its incongruous elements.

Criminals, soldiers of fortune, clerks, once men of learning, men from all the quarters of the world and all the walks of civilization, woke from profound sleep or troubled dreams and became, once again, the Legion.

As they marched under the stars, not a voice broke the silence of the ranks, half-awake; still under the opiate weariness of the last march, the night seemed to them like a blue veil tangling their feet. The sound of the vast moving column filled the night, not with the tramp of men, but with a noise like the shuffling of a great snake—the shuddering, shuffling sound of sand trodden upon and tossed aside by the feet of the Legion.

Men marched as they pleased, there was no keeping in step. It did not matter how rifles were carried—so that they were carried; how men marched—so that they marched.

One thing alone mattered—the pace. Five kilometres an hour.

Then a pale light would appear in the east and flicker out, and then, vague blue and luminous, dawn would show and tinted fingers along the sand rim begin to lift the veil.

It was day far up in the sky before the first sun-flash struck the sands.

Then came the blaze, and like Memnon the Legion would find its voice.

Mixed with the creak and rattle of the baggage and ammunition carts, above the dull pounding and scuffling of feet, you would hear the growl of voices breaking out all down the line. A grumble half a mile long; the voice of the bruised, battered, and bedevilled soul of the Legion. This centipede with a brain for every pair of legs possessed a single soul. Artist, Author, Bank Clerk, ex-soldier or Apache, Optimist, Pessimist, Grumbler or Man of Fortitude, all were subdued to the same medium. Like the oars of the Trireme or the bricks for the Pyramids, the rifles of the Legion linked the minds of their holders in a common bondage of thought—or want of thought, gave them a common tongue to express the suffering common to all.

The cutting of the gun-straps, the weight of the knapsacks, the weariness of the march, all were voiced in that awful grumble, more akin to the grumble and groan of the baggage and ammunition carts than the voices of human beings.

Then the sound would die out, and the moving column resume its garment of silence, and so it went on till on the morning of the twelfth day, just after sunrise, the sands right in the sun-blaze suddenly became alive and moving; the people of the desert, mysterious as the desert itself, had declared themselves.

It was like the springing to life of D'jins. The Legion had come to attack, and lo! it was attacked, its movements had been watched by scouts, keen-eyed as vultures. All to eastward and southward the swarming sands showed like sea foam beneath the fluttering green flags and the blaze of spears; drums beat, and on the wind came the crying of that vast, sun-born host like the crying of far-off sea-birds on a quarrelling beach.

The voice of the Legion made answer like the roar of the tiger that is sure of its prey.

Then silence for a heart-beat, followed by a few sharp orders, and the column, no longer moving, undulated, broadened, became formless, and then, click! became a geometrical figure.

A hollow square, with the baggage and ammunition carts in the centre, the girding straps of the ammunition boxes flying loose.

Far above, a dot in the blue, hovered a vulture. From that height, the dark, rigid square would have the appearance of a pattern traced on the sands.

III

The Legion waited as the storm surged towards it, crescentic, a host of the Past armed with the weapons of Saladin; then the great square broke into flame and smoke on three of its sides and the crash of rifles shook the silence of the desert far away beyond the reach of the voices of the attackers.

The vulture, larger now, saw the dead piling before the guns, and the waves of the living lapping over the ridges of the slain—then, in a flash, came the great break-up.

Allez, schieb Los! The Legion, no longer in square formation, was pursuing, attacking, bayoneting. That solid, silent fort of men behind the speaking rifles had burst its bonds of formation and silence. The cries of the fallen, the falling and the dying were drowned out by the piercing yell of the légionnaires, mad with the cafard of Blood.

At last the Legion had found its voice.

The voice of its rage against the world, of its hatred of itself, of its lust for blood and its desire to hack, and hack, and slay.

Stayed up for a moment and held by the very imminence of destruction, the enemy turned upon its pursuers and fought hand to hand.

This lasted but a very little time, and then came the second débâcle, worse than the first, and not to be recovered from.

The pursuit conducted by detached companies spread fan-wise to the south, the south-east and the south-west.

The Legion always drives its bayonet home, keeps on striking when once it has struck, and makes an end where it has made a good beginning.

IV

An hour after noon, Jacques, wounded in the arm and knocked out by a blow on the head, lay on the sands recovering his scattered wits. A hundred paces or so away lay Corporal Zeiss, whilst advancing towards the two men came the form of a woman.

An Arab woman.

Her tribe was half destroyed.

She had followed close on the heels of the attacking hosts with others of her kind, sure of victory and the delightful prospect of mutilating the wounded in unnameable ways.

Caught in the débâcle and, by a miracle, unscathed, she was now pursuing her true vocation in life, just as, close to battlefields, one may see the peasant ploughman at work or the gleaner gleaning. She was in search of plunder without the least idea as to how the plunder would profit her or how she was ever to regain her tribe. She knelt down beside Zeiss.

Jacques, now fully recovered, watched.

He knew Zeiss at once by his flax-coloured hair.

The woman's back was towards Jacques, and turning on his left side he seized his rifle, found that it was loaded, and then, with an Apache grin on his face, turned on his stomach and lay with the rifle to his shoulder, ready to fire, just as he had often lain on the practice ground.

The woman stood up, the shot rang out and she fell.

Then Jacques, rifle in hand, rose up, and still rather shaky from the result of his injuries, approached the two figures lying on the sand. Zeiss was dead and the woman was dead, and her plunder lay on the sand in the form of Zeiss' ears, Zeiss' earrings, and other things belonging to Zeiss.

She was comely. It only wanted that fact to complete the satisfaction of Corporal Jacques. For the first time since his betrayal he felt at ease. Zeiss was no longer a thorn in his flesh, and he had revenged himself on Mimi.

"On Mimi?" you will say.

Well, on her sex.

It is the same thing—or at least it was the same thing to Jacques.

He stood shading his eyes against the sun whilst the wind of the desert blowing in his face brought the far-off bugle calls of the Legion.

The hounds were being collected.

The battue was over.