All that afternoon Jacques was engaged on scout-patrol manoeuvres, and at six o'clock, spick and span, he left the barrack yard for the town.
Choc was waiting for him at the gate, but not close to it. The sentry, having his orders, had tried to lure him in, but Choc, alarmed by this unaccustomed civility, had removed himself a full hundred yards away, where he was sitting with his stump of a tail sticking out straight behind him.
He followed Jacques.
But Jacques did not make direct for the town. He skirted the ramparts till he came to the western side, where the great rough yellow wall was blazing in the light of the sinking sun, then, getting into the ditch, he followed the wall a certain distance, stopped, glanced up and down the ditch to make sure that no one was observing him, and then drew a stone from the wall, disclosing a hole in which was seated, like a squat gnome, a little fat linen bag.
This was his cache. The money he had collected by one means or another during the last four years and ten months. It was a fair sum, partly in gold, partly in silver, and he had intended it for that day, now only two months distant, when, to use his own words, he would walk out of the Legion like a gentleman. He was going to use it for a different purpose now, and placing the bag in his pocket, without troubling to close the cache, he turned, and, followed by the dog, came back along the ditch.
Stars like the points of needles were piercing the pansy-coloured sky when Jacques and his companion reached the Place Sadi Carnot. The Place was crowded, légionnaires, visitors and townsfolk crowding around the bandstand, some seated, others standing about in groups. The warm air was filled with the scents of jessamine and garlic, the African earth, caporal and cigar smoke, all vague and blended to form the smell of Sidi-bel-Abbès en fête.
Then the electric lights blazed out and the band struck up. They were playing the Sambre et Meuse, that splendid march of the French Army, spirited enough almost to raise the slain, but Jacques did not beat time with his foot, nor, when Choc glanced up at him, did he give the dog the signal to start his tricks.
He walked about for a while, showing himself to his companions, then he disappeared from the Place and, followed by the dog, sought the native streets.
Sidi-bel-Abbès is slashed across by two great boulevards running north and south, and east and west. Here you find plate glass windows and Paris jewellery, motor-cars, cocottes, American women in blue veils. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London and New York all represented by some fragment of their social life, just as in the Legion they are represented, each, by some form of the universal diseases that prey on society.
Behind these gay boulevards you find the real Sidi-bel-Abbès.