And I had to go on waiting, waiting….
This awful suspense seemed to have lasted for hours when the corporal at last came to relieve me. The conventionality of passing orders and sentry instructions was being gone through; we were on service and it was contrary to all discipline—but I could not wait any longer.
"You've a letter for me, corporal?" I asked.
"Yes, there is a letter for you," he answered. "You can have it as soon as I have done relieving the sentries. En avant—marche!"
A new period of anxious waiting and torturing expectation…. At last the corporal of the guard came back and put his hand in his pocket:
"Voilà!"
On the white envelope I saw the characters of the handwriting I knew so well. I went out into the square which was now empty, as the prisoners had been locked up in their cells again. I read and read—again and again….
Love stretched out its hand to the lost soldier of the Legion and spoke to him of happiness to come. Long years hence when the légionnaire would be no longer a légionnaire. The letter's many pages bore traces of tears. I wanted to tear off my uniform, that brand of slavery condemning me to inactivity. Within me all was in a whirl. In the darkness of the ugly court I dreamed dreams of the past and hopes of the future so hopelessly far off. During the four hours from watch to watch I sat motionless in the prison-yard.
In these few hours there came to me that energy which meant the beginning of a new life. Then it was my turn for sentry duty again. And then I sat down at the small table in the guard-room while the corporal and the other men slept, and wrote an endless letter with the corporal's pencil on the back of report forms. Page upon page….
The next day a letter from my mother came; a letter that neither asked questions nor held reproaches. It only spoke of love and anxiety for me. This letter solved the riddle of how my whereabouts had been discovered. After long months of waiting and wondering the people who loved me got the idea that I might be in the Foreign Legion, since the last letter they received from me had been dated from the French fortress, Belfort. My mother wrote to the general in command of the fortress and to the French Secretary of War. The answer was long delayed, but at last the news came that I had joined the Foreign Legion at Sidi-bel-Abbès—that I was the légionnaire number 17889!