"Merde!" he said, "that's how we légionnaires fix our bunks. It's easy enough."
"Merde?" I asked, "what does 'merde' mean, anyway?"
It was a French word unknown to me. Smith used it continually, underlining his remarks with it, so to speak. He seemed to like it. He pronounced it with much care, lovingly. Naturally I thought that it must be some especially forceful invective, the more so as the sergeant-major in the storeroom (who certainly had not been in good humour) had said "merde" about five hundred times in ten minutes. And the other légionnaires in the room liked it apparently no less. The "merdes" were always flying about….
"Well, what is this 'merde'?"
Smith nearly had a fit.
"Merde?" he yelled, laughing as if he had suddenly gone crazy, "what 'merde' means? Why, you owl, 'merde' is ——."
He used a word which certainly does not exist in the vocabulary of polite society, an old Anglo-Saxon substantive, describing a most natural function and expressing huge disgust when used as an invective.
This little word is the favourite substantive of the Foreign Legion. It is the substantive of the Legion! The English Tommy rejoices in his time-honoured adjective "bloody," the American revels in his precious "damned," the Mexican cavalryman enjoys his malignant hissing "caracho," and the légionnaire is distinctly unhappy without his well-beloved "merde." It's the most used word in the Foreign Legion. It has suffered curious derivations: Merdant, merdable…. It has a happy home in all French regiments—it is part and parcel of the French army's soldier-talk. The Legion worships it. Out of it the légionnaire has even fabricated a verb. When an officer gives him a "dressing down," the légionnaire says simply and devoutly:
"Il m'enmerde!"
The French army's primitive substantive of disgust is very ancient. It is time-honoured, it is classical.