It is the one thing the légionnaires think of. They grumble about their food; they grumble about their chief officers and their subordinate officers; they grumble about the hot days and cold nights of Algeria; they grumble about the scarcity of cigarettes, the price of wine, the scarcity of soap, the hardness of their work, the smallness of their pay, but they never grumble about their loss of liberty.
They dream about it.
It is the one idea around which all other ideas revolve, and it is kept alive and active less perhaps by the general hardness of life in the Legion than by the fact that escape is, though seemingly feasible, next to impossible.
No man can buy his discharge from the Legion. No man, once he has signed the fatal paper, can escape from the consequences of his act by influence. You may be the son of a prince—it does not matter, or of a Rockefeller—it does not matter, you have to dree your weird for five years and carry your rifle and knapsack under the blazing sun to the last day of your term of enlistment.
After all, you have signed a contract, and signed it with your eyes open, and should you fight against fate and try to break your contract, you find that the system you are struggling with has provided against that.
Twenty thousand men or so, distributed in Algeria, Indo-China and Morocco, and most of them willing to escape on the slightest chance, require a pretty definite and complete system of restraint.
Corporal Jacques had very clear views on this matter. Bitter personal experience had convinced him of the futility of all attempts at evasion. Where he had failed he could not see the chance of anyone else succeeding. Nor did he wish anyone else to succeed. Such a success would have cast extra discredit on his own attempt, an attempt that was fast fading from the memory of the regiment, but not from the memory of Corporal Jacques.
One bright morning, Jacques, who had returned to the barrack yard with his squad after three hours' practice on the ranges, turned from lighting a cigarette to watch the arrival of a column of recruits just arrived from France by way of Oran.
There were forty men in the column, men of all heights and ages, all nationalities, a sinister-looking crowd, dusty, tattered, limping, many of them most evidently underfed and nearly all of them wearing that look of dejection common to lost dogs and lost men.
Most of these new recruits had joined the Legion to escape starvation; a few were of the active criminal type and had evidently been given the choice of the Legion or the Penitentiary. Jacques' keen eyes sorted them out and classified them at once, but there was one man he could not classify, a man of middle height, dark, clean-shaven, youthful and of military bearing.