We did not always lie under canvas on the march. Sometimes we halted at a garrison town or at cantonments, and then some, if not all, of us were placed in huts for the night. We saw all kinds of soldiers there. We met zouaves, chasseurs, turcos, spahis, zephyrs, but with none had we much intercourse. This was due to several reasons. We came in hot and tired and with little desire for anything except food and rest, and besides we had to clean up clothes, boots, and arms for the parade and inspection in the early morning. Then the regular French troops, and even, I must admit, the native Algerian soldiers, looked with contempt upon us, and you may be sure that we of the Legion returned the contempt and the contemptuous words with interest. They never went very far in showing their feelings towards our fellows, for we had an ugly reputation; more than once a company or two of Legionaries had made a desperate attack on a battalion even, and it was well known through Algeria that when the Legionaries began a fight there would be, as was often said, "blood upon shirts" before the fight was over. Therefore the others stood rather in awe of our men, and they did not quite like the idea of having anything to do with us, even though we were only recruits on the way to the battalion, for every soldier knows that the recruit is even more anxious to follow the regimental tradition than the veteran. The latter feels that he is part and parcel of the corps and that his reputation is not likely to suffer; the former is only too eager to show that he accepts, wholly and unreservedly, the ideas handed down to him, and, besides, he has not been altogether brought under discipline. Thus, though we saw men in many uniforms we got to know very little about them—indeed, all our information came from the corporals—and I may add here that the corporals impressed upon us that we were never to fight individually with Frenchmen or natives, but that, if a general quarrel took place, we were to remember our duty to the Legion and make it "warm weather" for our opponents. Afterwards on more than one occasion we followed that advice.
Once or twice a little unpleasantness arose amongst ourselves. It never went very far; the others, who were not desirous of seeing their comrades get into trouble, always put an end to the business before any real harm was done. I had nothing to do with any of these disputes save once, when, in the rôle of peacemaker, I sat with another fellow for more than half-an-hour on an Italian who was thirsting for the blood of a Portuguese. The Portuguese was receiving similar attentions from two others at the opposite side of the tent. It was funny how the thing came about. The Italian had got, somewhere or somehow—I suppose he stole it—a bottle of brandy, and, instead of sharing all round, gave half to his comrade the Portuguese and drank the other half himself. When they returned to the tent they were quarrelling, and evidently drunk. After some time they began to fight, and we left them alone, as they had been so mean about the liquor, until we saw the Italian reaching for his bayonet. Then the rest of us joined in, and the precious pair of rascals, who had forgotten their comrades when they were happy, got something which made them rise in the morning with more aches in the body than they had in the head. They apologised the next day and we forgave them. This was another lesson to me. I saw that when a man got anything outside his ordinary share of good things he was supposed to go share and share alike with the rest of his squad. Many a time afterwards I have seen men who had at one time been of good position at home, and whose relatives could and would send them money, openly show the amount received in tent or hut or barrack room, and we others went out to spend that money when the evening came with just as much belief in our right to do so as if the money had been sent to the squad and not to the man. Well, the rich ones did not lose in the end, for they got many a favour from their comrades which the average soldier would be a fool to expect.
The corporal of my squad on the march south was a rather good fellow. I am not quite sure whether he was a German or an Austrian by birth. He had seen a good deal of Algerian life, and was determined as soon as his term was up to get clear away for ever from Africa. This was not pleasant news. Here was a corporal, a man of over four years' service, whose whole and sole idea it was to leave the Legion and the country. It plainly proved that the life before us was not the most attractive in the world, and the thought often crossed my mind that perhaps I had been a fool to try soldiering in such a corps. With the happy-go-lucky recklessness of youth, however, I quickly got rid of these fancies, and I could console myself that five years would not be long passing, and at the very worst I should have learned more, situated as I was, than if I were to spend the term at school, and at such a school as the one I had been attending.
I got on fairly well with the others of my squad. I have never been inclined to affront people, and I can honestly say that I have never shirked my work, and these qualities, added to a natural cheerfulness of disposition which caused me to look at the bright side of things, helped me very much all through my stay in the Foreign Legion. Indeed, there was only one man who was disliked by all. He was a Pole, a German Pole, I believe, and he had the most sarcastic tongue of all the men I've ever met. His sneering smile was almost as bad as his cutting tongue. While speaking politely he said little things that one could not very well resent, and that, therefore, hurt one the more. It's bad to be an idler, and worse to have a nasty way of openly abusing and insulting people, but the worst gift of God to a man is the gift of sarcasm. The sarcastic man never has a friend. There are, of course, always men who will fawn upon and flatter him, but that will be only through fear of his tongue—even they who most court him rejoice inwardly at his misfortunes. He can't be always lucky, he must take his bad fortune as it comes, and when it does come he cannot help knowing that all who know him are glad.
It was well, I think, for our friend the Pole that the journey did not last a week longer. Somebody or other would be sure to lose his temper, and if one blow were struck, twenty would surely follow, for we all hated him. He said something about a gorilla one day, looking hard all the while at the Italian already mentioned, and it was a wonder that there was no fight. There would have been, I feel sure, but that the bugles sounded the assemble for the last march of the day, and the Italian, who was no beauty, had a few hours of marching to get cool. The Pole was quiet enough for the next couple of days, and by that time we were within six hours' march of our destination.
Before describing the battalion to which I now belonged I must say a few words about the Foreign Legion in general, so that the peculiar characteristics of the corps may be understood. All that I shall mention in this chapter is that one sunny afternoon about four o'clock we marched into camp on the borders of the Sahara amid the cheers of our future comrades, and that within an hour our 200 men were divided amongst the four companies that constituted the 2nd Battalion of the First Regiment of the Légion étrangère.
CHAPTER V
For centuries the armies of France have had a certain proportion of foreign troops. Readers of Scott will remember the Scottish archers, and there is a regiment in the British army to-day which was at one time a Scottish corps in the service of the Most Christian Kings of France. Almost everyone has heard of the Irish Brigade, a force whose records fill many a bloody and glorious page of European history and whose prowess more than once turned the ebb-tide of defeat into the full flood of victory. It has been computed that almost 500,000 Irishmen died in the French service; and we may well imagine that half-a-million dashing soldiers did not yield up their lives for nothing.