THE BEETLE
When Max had served four months in the Foreign Legion he felt older by four years. He looked older, too. There were faintly sketched lines round his mouth and eyes, and that indefinable expression which lies deep down in eyes which have seen life and death at grip: a Legion look.
In some ways he had been a boy when he took his sudden resolve in the Salle d'Honneur to prove what the Legion could do for a nature he himself doubted. Now he was no longer a boy. He realized that, though he had never found time to study the success of his experiment, and had no idea that it was being studied day after day by his colonel. Had he guessed, some dark hours might have been brightened by gleams of hope, for in spite of his luck in the Legion there were times when Max felt himself abandoned, a creature of as small consequence to any heart on earth as a half-drowned fly. A more conceited man would have been happier, but Max had not joined the Legion with the object of finding happiness, and one who was watching believed that it would be good for him to wait.
Max and Manöel Valdez (alias Garcia) had looked forward to the great march, already vaguely talked of when they joined. But it had not been a march for marching's sake: its real purpose was more grave. A band of Arab thieves and murderers on the border of the M'zab country had to be caught and punished. No recruits were taken: disappointment for Max and despair for Valdez. He had hoped everything from that chance, and, in his rage at losing it, made a dash for liberty from Sidi-bel-Abbés. He got no farther than the outskirts, the forbidden Village Négre, where he risked a night visit in search of the man bribed to hide a certain precious bundle. Fortunately he was arrested before securing it, for had he been trapped with civilian clothes not even his marvellous voice (the talk of the garrison since it had been heard in the soldier's theatre) could have saved him from the fate of caught deserters: the penal battalion for months, if not a year; death, perhaps, from fever or hardship. As it was, he escaped with the penalty for a night visit to the Arab quarter: eight days cellule. But the clothes were safe. He would try again. Nothing on earth, he said, should keep him from trying again; because he might as well be a "Zephir" in the dreaded "Batt d'Aff," if he could not answer the cry for help he seemed always to hear from across the desert.
Since his first failure and imprisonment nearly four months had passed, and he had tried again and failed in the same way. The second time his sentence was twice as long; but before it was over the medecin major sent him into hospital. He came out emaciated, sullen, dangerous, caring for nothing, not even to sing. Max yearned over him, but could do nothing except say, "It isn't too late yet. Maybe, if we brace up, we'll be taken on the big march that they talk of for the first of September. Even then there'll be time."
He said "we," because it was more comforting to Valdez that their names should be bracketed together as friends; but as Legionnaires they were already far apart. Max had never been censured, had never seen the inside of the prison building (that low-roofed, sinister building that runs along the walls of the barrack-yard). He was in the school of corporals. Soon he would wear on his blue sleeve the coveted red woollen stripe. Garcia, on the contrary, was constantly falling into trouble. He had even drunk too much, once or twice, in the hope of drowning trouble, as Legionnaires do. The September march to the south was ostensibly for road-laying; but there was again a rumour of other important work to be done. The great secret society of the Senussi threatened trouble through a new leader who had arisen, a young man of the far south called the "Deliverer." And when there was prospect of fighting in the desert or elsewhere for the Legion, recruits—even those who had served for six months—were seldom taken if a long list of black marks stood against their names. Max feared that there was little hope for Valdez, though he meant to do what he could to help. And he found it strange that he, a born soldier as he knew himself to be, should think of tacitly aiding another to desert, no matter on what pretext. At home in the same position it could not have been so; but in the Foreign Legion recruits talked freely, even before old Legionnaires to whom the Legion was mother and father and country. There was no fear of betrayal. The whole point of view seemed different. If a man felt that he had borne all he could, and was desperate enough to risk death by starvation or worse, why let him go with his comrades' blessing—and his blood on his own head! If he had money he might get through. If not, he was lost; but that, too, was his own business.
March was bitterly cold in wind-swept Sidi-bel-Abbés. April was mild; May warm; June hot; July and August a furnace, but Legionnaires drank no less of the heavy, red Algerian wine than before the summer heat engulfed them. Max had heard men say jokingly or solemnly of each other, "He has the cafard." Vaguely he knew that cafard was French for beetle, or cockroach; that soldiers who habitually mixed absinthe and other strong drinks with their cheap but beloved litre were often affected with a strange madness which betrayed itself in weird ways, and that this special madness was familiarly named le cafard. When the hot wave arrived he saw for himself what the terrible insect could do in a man's brain.
In the canteen it was bad enough on pay nights—so called "the Legion's holidays"—but there reigned Madame la Cantiniere, young, good looking, a respected queen, who would go on march with the Legion in her cart, and who must at all times to a certain extent be obeyed. But in dim side-streets of the town, far from the lights of the smart, out-of-doors cafés, were casse croutes kept by Spaniards who cared nothing for the fate of Legionnaires when they had spent their last sou. The cafard grew and prospered there. He tickled men's gray matter and kneaded it in his microscopic claws. There his victims fought each other, for no reason which they could explain afterward, or mutilated themselves, tearing off an ear, or tattooing a face with some design to rival Four Eyes; or they sold parts of their uniforms to buy a little more drink, or tried to blow out their brains, or the brains of some one else. Afterward, if they survived, they went to prison; but if it could be proved that they were indeed suffering from cafard, they got off with light sentences.
Officers of the Legion old enough to have won a few medals seemed to respect the cafard and make allowances for his deadly work. If the men did not survive, they—what was left of them—went to the cemetery to rest under small black crosses marked with name and number, their only mourners the great cypresses which sighed with every breath of wind from the mountains.
One August night of blazing heat and moonlight Max could not sleep. There had been a scene in the dormitory which had got every man out of bed, but an hour after the tired soldiers were dead to the world again—all save Max, who felt as if a white fire like the moonlight was raging in his brain.