They had, of course, been treated pretty badly by the gendarmes. They looked round them shyly, ashamed of their helplessness and of their fetters. Herr von Rader alone had not lost his sense of humour.
"How are you? Glad to see you!" he said to the sergeant! "I am back again all right."
In the little bureau of the officer of the day the two gendarmes had their depositions taken and received the usual receipt from the regiment for the safe delivery of the deserters. They withdrew looking very pleased with themselves, for this receipt was worth 25 francs, entitling them to their reward.
The poumpistes were kept waiting in front of the guard-room, still joined together by the chain. When Herr von Rader noticed me, he greeted me with many head-shakings:
"Damned rotten business!" he said quite loud. "Mein Freund, they didn't make me a medicine man after all. The conjuring didn't work! All at once five damned Arab gendarmes rode up to us, holding their revolvers under our noses. I couldn't conjure them away…. Positively couldn't! Well, and then we had to walk back. Say, I don't care much about promenading when I am tied to a horse's tail. And the beggar of a horse did run, I can tell you—and I behind it—because I was tied to its tail, see?"
"Silence!" commanded the sergeant. "No talking here."
When the formalities of the surrender were over, the six deserters (I was one of the guard who escorted them with fixed bayonets) were marched off to prison.
The keys rattled. The sergeant of the guard considered it necessary to give vent to his bad humour in many superfluous remarks about "the dirty, ragged, good-for-nothing lot of poumpistes, whom the penal battalion would soon cure of skinning out," and gave Rader, who was the last to cross the cell's threshold, a mighty kick. Rader fell at full length. Then the heavy door swung to behind them….
A few years ago Herr von Rader and his companions would have been sentenced to quite a curious kind of punishment which was at that time considered in the Foreign Legion to be a radical cure for deserters—a kind of mediæval torture which, by the way, was not kept for deserters solely, but came into use very often. This was the "silo" and the "crapaudine."
The silo consisted of a funnel-shaped hole in the ground, broad at the top and pointed towards the bottom. A regular funnel. Into this hole, used as a cell for solitary confinement, the misdoers would be thrown, clad only in a thin suit of fatigue clothes, without a blanket or any protection at all against the rain or against the sun, at the mercy of the heat by day and the cold by night. The poor devils would be left for several days in this "prison." They could not lie down, for the bottom part of the hole was only one or two feet square. They spent day and night alternately standing and crouching, now in pouring rain, now in the burning sun. They very soon became ill from the foul vapours. When at length they were taken out of the silo, they could neither walk nor stand and had to be carried into hospital. Now and then a silo prisoner died in his hole.