CORPORAL JACQUES
CHOC
I
The first rays of the morning sun were stealing up the palm-bordered roads towards Sidi-bel-Abbès, above whose ramparts the minaret of the great mosque blazed white in the sky. Eighty miles from Oran on the coast, and the headquarters of the Foreign Legion, Sidi-bel-Abbès is surely one of the strangest cities on earth.
It was built by the Foreign Legion, it is swept and garnished by the Foreign Legion, it is held against the Arabs by the Foreign Legion. At night the electric lights round the bandstand of the Foreign Legion on the Place Sadi Carnot blaze against the Algerian stars, whilst the Muezzins on the balconies of the minarets keep watch over Islam and their voices send north, south, east and west the cry that was old in the time of Sindbad the Sailor!
All' il Allah—God is great.
But the marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès is not the fact that here Edison and Strauss face Mahommed in the form of his priests, nor the flower gardens blooming on the face of the desert, nor the roads along which the Arabs stalk and the automobiles dash. The marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès lies in the Legion.
When France found herself faced with the problem of Algeria, that is to say, the problem of infinite wastes of rock and sand inhabited by a foe mobile and ungraspable as the desert wind, she formed the Legion.
She called to the wastrels, the criminals, the despairing and the impoverished of every country and every city—and they came.
Men of genius, street sweepers, artists, doctors, engineers—it would be difficult to touch a profession, a race or a grade of intellect not to be found in the Legion.