This person's clothes though dusty were well-cut, and his boots of brown tan leather were a marvel.
He carried himself easily, with an air of indifference and detachment, as though he were a spectator and not a member of this little company of tragic actors, and when the recruits were dismissed to find their quarters, he lit a cigarette before going to the depot to receive his uniform.
Jacques felt interested in this individual. Here was most evidently a man of superior birth, an aristocrat strayed into the trap of the Legion. Every now and then the net closes on a gorgeous bird of this description. Jacques knew the type and despised it; the young man of good birth gone wrong was, in his experience, a person to be avoided; he had had his soap stolen by a Viennese banker's son and he had been badly treated financially—it was a matter of five francs—by a gentleman with manicured nails and no money morals, who had the reputation of being a Count in his own country—though what that country was no man knew.
But the present specimen was different somehow from the others, as far as one would judge by appearances, and Jacques, falling into talk with him, showed him the way to the depot and then to the dormitory allotted to him.
No place in the world is kept more spick and span than the great barracks of the Foreign Legion. It vies with an English lighthouse or an English man-of-war in the polish of its brasses and the neatness of its poor appointments.
The dormitory to which Jacques led the new-comer had the appearance of a hospital ward. There were twenty beds, and every bed, except one or two that were vacant, had a card with a légionnaire's name and number.
"Here you are," said Jacques. "You can choose your bed from those three near the door; shuffle into your uniform and you can sell your old togs; you won't want them for another five years, and the fashions will have altered by then."
He showed the new-comer, who was carrying all his kit and accoutrements in a huge bundle, how to stow away his things, gave him a few hints as to what to avoid if he wished for a peaceable life, and took his departure.
The new-comer's name was Schneider, at least that was the name he had joined under, a German name, yet he spoke French like a Frenchman.
Jacques saw him next on the drill ground, and noticed that he wore his uniform as though born in it. They had thrown him out of the instructional squad, finding that he was as well up in the business of drill as the oldest légionnaire, and he was attached to Company 4, practising the double with the great column round and round the vast drill ground.