In the Foreign Legion

by Erwin Rosen

Any of these cells would at once be condemned by a veterinary as unfit even for a pigsty!

Before réveillé at five o'clock in the morning all the sentries on guard were marched up to the prison, and the sergeant opened the cells, whereupon an awful stench streamed out. He read out the names from the prison register, and the prisoners came out of the cells into the passage as their names were called. Then they began to clean up. The pails were carried by two men, accompanied by a sentry, to the sewer openings in the barrack-yard. When the bigger cells were over-filled (and this was almost always the case) they looked awful. The room was like a sewer, flooded, pestilential…. To clean the cells there were only a couple of old brooms in the prison. A few pails of water were flooded over the floor, carelessly and hurriedly, for the sergeants did not care about wasting too much time on the "prisonniers." A little water and a few strokes with the broom! What is not washed away trickles through the cracks and crannies in the stone floor and forms a new basis for pestilence.

The bowl of black coffee which forms the légionnaire's breakfast is not given to the prisoners. They get no breakfast. They are allowed to wash themselves at the basin in the corridor. Then they are led out to work, on an empty stomach, frozen through by the chilly African night spent uncovered on a hard wooden bench, and faint from breathing in that pestilential atmosphere.

All those who were sentenced to short terms of imprisonment were commandeered to clean up the barrack-yard, to split wood, and to break stones. The prisoners with longer sentences, and those in cellule, had to go out to the "march of punishment," marching round in a small circle for two hours on end, carrying heavy bags of sand, now and then doubling for the sake of variety. When the corporal in command was in bad temper he made them go through a course of Swedish gymnastics into the bargain. This was tremendous work when burdened with the heavy sack, and it strained the muscles and nerves in a way that nothing else could.

At ten o'clock the prisoners were given soup. They never got full rations, since as long as they were in prison their mess allowance ceased as well as their pay.

The soup is thin, and the piece of meat which swims in it is as small as may be…. Their bread rations consist of half of what they get in the company. The prisoners in solitary confinement are placed on starvation diet. Their soup consists of hot water with little bits of potatoes and bread-crusts, and they only get this every other day. In the interval they have to live on bread—on a quarter of the Legion's bread rations. One must have seen how terribly emaciated these poor fellows become in a few days to be able to do justice to the barbarity of a system which has three main ideas: undernourishment, overwork, frightful sanitary conditions.

After they have finished "dinner," their work begins again. The drill suits had got dirty, and bore signs of the nights they had gone through. The operation, too, of emptying the tin pails cannot be performed without the suits being considerably the worse for it. But the drill suits were only changed when an inspection by the colonel was imminent, and clean underclothes were a luxury absolutely unknown in prison.

The sergeants on guard always considered it an important part of their duties to treat the prisoners as badly as possible. In the prison it simply rained curses. Many sergeants took an especial delight in inspecting the prisoners every three hours throughout the night. They had to come out into the yard, and the sergeant read their names and numbers by the light of the lantern, taking as long about it as he could, while the poor wretches had to stand there motionless in their thin clothes for half an hour in the cold night air. This would be repeated three or four times a night. In this way the sergeant manages to while away his dreary night on guard, and had in addition the pleasing sense of having played his little part in the regiment's system of justice. Under discipline in the Foreign Legion they understand a series of variations, improvements or otherwise, on the mediæval systems of torture.

It is merely the petty offences against discipline that are punished in these hovels.

I was on the watch in the narrow corridor of one of these prisons, pacing to and fro on the cold flags with fixed bayonet. Eight hours before the poumpistes, Rader and the rest of them, had been brought in. Through the narrow opening between the wall and the prison, a little strip of starlit sky could be seen, and down the narrow passage the cold night wind howled. But it could not drive away the pestilential stench which hung heavy over the prison and which was perpetually being increased by the vapours from the ventilation holes and the tiny openings in the cellules. This awful smell tortured my nerves and rendered sentry-go in the prison anything but pleasant.