The Author would like to anticipate certain of the objections which may be raised by some of the kindly critics and reviewers who gave so friendly and encouraging a chorus of praise to Beau Geste, The Wages of Virtue, and The Stepsons of France.
Certain of the events chronicled in these books were objected to, as being impossible.
They were impossible.
The only defence that the Author can offer is that, although perfectly impossible, they actually happened.
In reviewing The Wages of Virtue, for example, a very distinguished literary critic remarked that the incident of a girl being found in the French Foreign Legion was absurd, and merely added an impossibility to a number of improbabilities.
The Author admitted the justice of the criticism, and then, as now, put forth the same feeble defence that, although perfectly impossible, it was the simple truth. He further offered to accompany the critic (at the latter's expense) to the merry town of Figuig in Northern Africa, and there to show him the tomb-stone (with its official epitaph) of a girl who served for many years, in the Spahis, as a cavalry trooper, rose to the rank of Sergeant, and remained, until her death in battle, quite unsuspected of being what she was--a European woman.
And in this book, nothing is set forth as having happened which has not happened--including the adoption of two ex-Legionaries by an Arab tribe, and their rising to Sheikdom and to such power that they were signatories to a treaty with the Republic.
One of them, indeed, was conducted over a French troopship, and his simple wonder at the marvels of the Roumi was rather touching, and of pleasing interest to all who witnessed it. . . .
The reader may rest assured that the deeds narrated, and the scenes and personalities pictured, in this book, are not the vain outpourings of a film-fed imagination, but the re-arrangement of actual happenings and the assembling of real people who have actually lived, loved, fought and suffered--and some of whom, indeed, live, love, fight and suffer to this day.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
(OUT OF THE UNFINISHED MEMOIRS OF
MAJOR HENRI DE BEAUJOLAIS OF
THE SPAHIS AND
THE FRENCH SECRET SERVICE)
I will start at the very nadir of my fortunes, at the very lowest depths, and you shall see them rise to their zenith, that highest point where they are crowned by Failure.
* * *
Behold me, then, clad in a dirty canvas stable-suit and wooden clogs, stretched upon a broad sloping shelf; my head, near the wall, resting on a wooden ledge, a foot wide and two inches thick, meant for a pillow; and my feet near the ledge that terminates this beautiful bed, which is some thirty feet long and seven feet wide. It is as long as the room, in fact, and about two feet from the filthy brick floor.
Between my pampered person and the wooden bed, polished by the rubbing of many vile bodies, is nothing. Covering me is a canvas "bread-bag," four feet long and two wide, a sack used for the carrying of army loaves. As a substitute for sheets, blankets and eider-down quilt, it is inadequate.
The night is bitterly cold, and, beneath my canvas stable-suit, I am wearing my entire wardrobe of underclothes, in spite of which, my teeth are chattering and I shiver from head to foot as though stricken with ague.
I am not allowed to wear my warm regimentals and cloak or overcoat, for, alas! I am in prison.
There is nothing else in the prison but myself and a noisy, nouveau riche, assertive kind of odour.
I am wrong--and I wish to be strictly accurate and perfectly truthful--there are hungry and insidious insects, number unknown, industrious, ambitious, and successful.
Some of my fellow troopers pride themselves on being men of intelligence and reason, and therefore believe only in what they can see. I cannot see the insects, but I, intelligent or not, believe in them firmly.
Hullo! there is something else. . . . A rat has run across my face. . . . I am glad so rude a beast is in prison. Serve him right. . . . On the whole, though, I wish he were not in prison, for he is nibbling at my ambrosial locks. . . . If I smite at him wildly I shall administer a severe blow to the brick wall, with my knuckles. . . .
The door, of six-inch oak, is flung open, and by the light of the lantern in the hand of the Sergeant of the Guard, I see a man and a brother flung into my retreat. He falls heavily and lies where he falls, in peaceful slumber. He has been worshipping at the shrine of Bacchus, a false god. The door clangs shut and leaves the world to darkness and to me, and the drunken trooper, and the rat, and the insects.
I shiver and wriggle and scratch and wonder whether the assertive odour will conquer, or my proud stomach rise victorious over . . . Yes, it is rising . . . Victorious? . . . No . . .
Again the door opens and a trooper enters, thanking the Sergeant of the Guard, in the politest terms, for all his care and kindness. The Sergeant of the Guard, in the impolitest terms, bids the trooper remove his canvas trousers.
He does so, and confirms what the Sergeant had feared--that he is wearing his uniform trousers beneath them. The Sergeant of the Guard confiscates the nethermost garments, consigns the prisoner to the nethermost regions, gives him two extra days in this particular region, and goes out.
As the door clangs, the new-comer strikes a match, produces half a candle, lights it, and politely greets me and the happy sleeper on the floor.
"Let us put this one to bed," he suggests, sticking his candle on the pillow-shelf; and I arise, and we lift the bibulous one from the hard floor to the harder, but less damp and filthy, "bed."
Evidently a humane and kindly soul this. I stand rebuked for my callousness in leaving the drunkard on the ground.
But he does not carry these virtues to excess, for, observing that the Bacchanal has been cast into prison in his walking-out uniform (in which he was evidently brought helpless into barracks), he removes the man's tunic, and puts it on over his own canvas stable-jacket.
"The drunk feel nothing," he observes sententiously. "Why should the sober feel cold?"
I no longer stand rebuked.
By the light of his candle, I study the pleasing black hole in which we lie, its walls decorated by drawings, poems, aphorisms, and obiter dicta which do not repay study.
It is a reeking, damp and verminous cellar, some thirty feet square, ventilated only by a single grated aperture, high up in one of the walls, and is an unfit habitation for a horse or dog.
In fact, Colonel du Plessis, our Commanding Officer, would not have one of the horses here for an hour. But I am here for fifteen days (save when doing punishment-drill) and serve me jolly well right.
For I have tirée une bordée--absented myself, without leave, for five days--the longest period that one can be absent without becoming a deserter and getting three years hard labour as such.
Mind, I am not complaining in the very least. I knew the penalty and accepted it. But there was a lady in the case, the very one who had amused us with her remark to de Lannec, anent a stingy Jew politician of her acquaintance--"When a man with a Future visits a lady with a Past, he should be thoughtful of the Present, that it be acceptable--and expensive." She had written to me, beseeching me in the name of old kindnesses, to come quickly to Paris, and saying that she knew nothing but Death would keep me from helping her in her terrible need. . . .
And Death stayed his hand until I had justified this brave and witty little lady's faith; and now, after the event, sends his fleas, and odours, and hideous cold too late. . . . Dear little Véronique Vaux! . . .
There is a great commotion without, and the candle is instantly extinguished by its owner, who pinches the wick.
Evidently one foolishly and futilely rebels against Fate, and more foolishly and futilely resists the Guard.
The door opens and the victim is flung into the cell with a tremendous crash. The Sergeant of the Guard makes promises. The prisoner makes sounds and the sounds drown the promises. He must be raging mad, fighting-drunk, and full of vile cheap canteen-brandy.
The humane man re-lights his candle, and we see a huge and powerful trooper gibbering in the corner.
What he sees is, apparently, a gathering of his deadliest foes, for he draws a long and nasty knife from the back of his trouser-belt, and, with a wild yell, makes a rush for us.
The humane man promptly knocks the candle flying, and leaps off the bed. I spring like a--well, flea is the most appropriate simile, just here and now--in the opposite direction, and take up an attitude of offensive defence, and to anybody who steps in my direction I will give of my best--where I think it will do most good. . . .
Apparently the furious one has missed the humane one and the Bacchanalian one, and has struck with such terrific force as to drive his knife so deeply into the wood that he cannot get it out again.
I am glad that my proud stomach, annoyed as I am with it, was not between the knife and the bed. . . .
And I had always supposed that life in prison was so dull and full of ennui. . . .
* * *
The violent one now weeps, the humane one snores, the Bacchanalian one grunts chokingly, and I lie down again, this time without my bread-bag.
Soon the cruel cold, the clammy damp, the wicked flea, the furtive rat, the noisy odour, and the proud stomach combine with the hard bench and aching bones to make me wish that I were not a sick and dirty man starving in prison.
And a few months ago I was at Eton! . . . It is all very amusing. . . .
Doubtless you wonder how a man may be an Etonian one year and a trooper in a French Hussar Regiment the next.
I am a Frenchman, I am proud to say; but my dear mother, God rest her soul, was an Englishwoman; and my father, like myself, was a great admirer of England and of English institutions. Hence my being sent to school at Eton.
On my father's death, soon after I had left school, my uncle sent for me.
He was even then a General, the youngest in the French Army, and his wife is the sister of an extremely prominent and powerful politician, at that time--and again since--Minister of State for War.
My uncle is fantastically patriotic, and La France is his goddess. For her he would love to die, and for her he would see everybody else die--even so agreeable a person as myself. When his last moments come, he will be frightfully sick if circumstances are not appropriate for him to say, "I die--that France may live"--a difficult statement to make convincingly, if you are sitting in a Bath chair at ninety, and at Vichy or Aix.
He is also a really great soldier and a man of vision. He has a mind that plans broadly, grasps tenaciously, sees clearly.
* * *
Well, he sent for me, and, leaving my mother in Devonshire, I hurried to Paris and, without even stopping for déjeûner, to his room at the War Office.
Although I had spent all my holidays in France, I had never seen him before, as he had been on foreign service, and I found him to be my beau idéal of a French General--tall, spare, hawk-like, a fierce dynamic person.
He eyed me keenly, greeted me coldly, and observed--"Since your father is spilt milk, as the English say, it is useless to cry over him."
"Now," continued he, after this brief exordium, "you are a Frenchman, the son of a Frenchman. Are you going to renounce your glorious birth-right and live in England, or are you going to be worthy of your honoured name?"
I replied that I was born a Frenchman, and that I should live and die a Frenchman.
"Good," said my uncle. "In that case you will have to do your military service. . . . Do it at once, and do it as I shall direct. . . .
"Someday I am going to be the master-builder in consolidating an African Empire for France, and I shall need tools that will not turn in my hand. . . . Tools on which I can rely absolutely. . . . If you have ambition, if you are a man, obey me and follow me. Help me, and I will make you. . . . Fail me, and I will break you. . . ."
I stared and gaped like the imbecile that I sometimes choose to appear.
My uncle rose from his desk and paced the room. Soon I was forgotten, I think, as he gazed upon his splendid Vision of the future, rather than on his splendid Nephew of the present.
"France . . . France . . ." he murmured. "A mighty Empire . . . Triumphant over her jealous greedy foes . . .
"England dominates all the east of Africa, but what of the rest--from Egypt to the Atlantic, from Tangier to the Gulf? . . . Morocco, the Sahara, the Soudan, all the vast teeming West . . .
"Algeria we have, Tunisia, and corners here and there. . . . It is not enough. . . . It is nothing. . . ."
I coughed and looked more imbecile.
"Menaced France," he continued, "with declining birth rate and failing man-power . . . Germany only awaiting The Day. . . . Africa, an inexhaustible reservoir of the finest fighting material in the world. The Sahara--with irrigation, an inexhaustible reservoir of food. . . ."
It was lunch-time, and I realized that I too needed irrigation and would like to approach an inexhaustible reservoir of food. If he were going to send me to the Sahara, I would go at once. I looked intelligent, and murmured:
"Oh, rather, Uncle!"
"France must expand or die," he continued. And I felt that I was just like France in that respect.
"The Soudan," he went on, "could be made a very Argentine of corn and cattle, a very Egypt of cotton--and ah! those Soudanese! What soldiers for France! . . .
"The Bedouin must be tamed, the Touareg broken, the Senussi won over. . . . There is where we want trained emissaries--France's secret ambassadors at work among the tribes . . .
"Shall the West come beneath the Tri-couleur of France, or the Green Banner of Pan-Islamism? . . ."
At the moment I did not greatly care. The schemes of irrigation and food-supply interested me more. Corn and cattle . . . suitably prepared, and perhaps a little soup, fish and chicken too. . . .
"We must have safe Trans-Saharan Routes; and then Engineering and Agricultural Science shall turn the desert to a garden--France's great kitchen-garden. France's orchard and cornfield. And the sun's very rays shall be harnessed that their heat may provide France with the greatest power-station in the world. . . ."
"Oh, yes, Uncle," I said. Certainly France should have the sun's rays if I might have lunch.
"But conquest first! Conquest by diplomacy. . . . Divide and rule--that Earth's poorest and emptiest place may become its richest and fullest--and that France may triumph. . . ."
Selfishly I thought that if my poorest and emptiest place could soon become the richest and fullest, I should triumph. . . .
"Now, Boy," concluded my uncle, ceasing his swift pacing, and impaling me with a penetrating stare, "I will try you, and I will give you such a chance to become a Marshal of France as falls to few. . . . Listen. Go to the Headquarters of the military division of the arrondissement in which you were born, show your papers, and enlist as a Volontaire. You will then have to serve for only one year instead of the three compulsory for the ordinary conscript--because you are the son of a widow, have voluntarily enlisted before your time, and can pay the Volontaire's fee of 1,500 francs . . . I will see that you are posted to the Blue Hussars, and you will do a year in the ranks. You will never mention my name to a soul, and you will be treated precisely as any other private soldier. . . .
"If you pass out with high marks at the end of the period, come to me, and I will see that you go to Africa with a commission in the Spahis, and your foot will be on the ladder. . . . There, learn Arabic until you know it better than your mother-tongue; and learn to know the Arab better than you know yourself. . . . Then I can use you!"
"Oh, yes, Uncle," I dutifully responded, as he paused.
"And some day--some day--I swear it--you will be one of France's most valuable and valued servants, leading a life of the deepest interest, highest usefulness and greatest danger. . . . You will be tried as a cavalryman, tried as a Spahi officer, tried as my aide-de-camp, tried as an emissary, a negotiator, a Secret-Service officer, and will get such a training as shall fit you to succeed me--and I shall be a Marshal of France--and Commander-in-Chief and Governor-General of the great African Empire of France. . . .
"But--fail in any way, at anyone step or stage of your career, and I have done with you. . . . Be worthy of my trust, and I will make you one of France's greatest servants. . . . And, mind, Boy--you will have to ride alone, on the road that I shall open to you. . . ." He fell silent.
His fierce and fanatical face relaxed, a sweet smile changed it wholly, and he held out his hand.
"Would you care to lunch with me, my boy?" he said kindly.
"Er--lunch, Uncle?" I replied. "Thank you--yes, I think I could manage a little lunch perhaps. . . ."
Excellent! I would be worthy of this uncle of mine, and I would devote my life to my country. (Incidentally I had no objection to being made a Marshal of France, in due course.)
I regarded myself as a most fortunate young man, for all I had to do was my best. And I was lucky, beyond belief--not only in having such an uncle behind me, but in having an English education and an English training in sports and games. I had won the Public Schools Championship for boxing (Middle-weight) and for fencing as well. I was a fine gymnast, I had ridden from childhood, and I possessed perfect health and strength.
Being blessed with a cavalry figure, excellent spirits, a perfect digestion, a love of adventure, and an intense zest for Life, I felt that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. As for "riding alone"--excellent . . . I was not going to be the sort of man that allows his career to be hampered by a woman!
§ 2
A few weeks after applying at the proper military headquarters, I received orders to appear before the Conseil de Revision with my papers, at the Town Hall of my native district; and, with a hundred or so other young men of every social class and kind, was duly examined, physically and mentally.
Soon after this, I received a notice directing me to present myself at the cavalry barracks, to be examined in equitation. If I failed in the test, I could not enter a cavalry regiment as a one-year Volontaire.
I passed all right, of course, and, a little later, received my feuille de route and notification that I was posted to the Blue Hussars and was to proceed forthwith to their barracks at St. Denis, and report myself.
I had spent the interval, partly with my mother and her people, the Carys; and partly in Paris with a Lieutenant de Lannec, appointed my guide, philosopher and friend by my uncle, under whom de Lannec was then working at the War Office. To this gentleman I was indebted for much good advice and innumerable hints and tips that proved invaluable. Also for the friendship of the dear clever little Véronique Vaux, and, most of all, for that of Raoul d'Auray de Redon, at a later date.
To de Lannec I owed it that if in my raw-recruit days I was a fool, I was not a sanguinary fool; and that I escaped most of the pit-falls digged for the feet of the unwary by those who had themselves only become wary by painful experience therein.
Thanks to him, I also knew enough to engage permanently a private room for myself at a hotel in St. Denis, where I could have meals and a bath; to have my cavalry boots and uniform privately made for me; and to equip myself with a spare complete outfit of all those articles of clothing and of use, the loss or lack of which brings the private soldier to so much trouble and punishment.
§ 3
And one fine morning I presented myself at the great gates of the barracks of the famous Blue Hussars, trying to look happier than I felt.
I beheld an enormous parade ground, about a quarter of a mile square, with the Riding School in the middle of it, and beyond it a huge barracks for men and horses. The horses occupied the ground-floor and the men the the floors above--not a nice arrangement I thought. (I continued to think it, when I lived just above the horses, in a room that held a hundred and twenty unwashed men, a hundred and twenty pairs of stable-boots, a hundred and twenty pairs of never-cleaned blankets--and windows that had been kept shut for a hundred and twenty years, to exclude the exhalations from the stable (because more than enough came up through the floor).
I passed through the gates, and a Sergeant came out from the Guard-Room, which was just beside them.
"Hi, there! Where d'ye think you're going?" he shouted.
"I have come to report myself, Sergeant," I replied meekly, and produced my feuille de route.
He looked at it.
"One of those anointed Volontaires, are you?" he growled. "Well, my fine gentleman, I don't like them, d'you understand? . . . And I don't like you. . . . I don't like your face, nor your voice, nor your clothes, nor anything about you. D'you see? . . ."
Mindful of de Lannec's advice, I held my tongue. It is the one thing of his own that the soldier may hold. But a good Sergeant is not to be defeated.
"Don't you dare to stand there and sulk, you dumb image of a dead fish," he shouted.
"No, Sergeant," I replied.
"And don't you back-answer me either, you chattering baboon," he roared.
"You have made a bad beginning," he went on menacingly, before I could be either silent or responsive, "and I'll see you make a bad end too, you pimply pékin! . . . Get out of this--go on--before I . . ."
"But, Sergeant," I murmured, "I have come to join . . ."
"You will interrupt me, will you?" he yelled. "That's settled it! Wait till you're in uniform--and I'll show you the inside of a little stone box I know of. That'll teach you to contradict Sergeants. . . . Get out of this, you insubordinate rascal--and take your feuille de route to the Paymaster's Office in the Rue des Enfants Abandonnés. . . . I'll deal with you when you come back. Name of an Anointed Poodle, I will! . . ."
In silence I turned about and went in search of the Rue des Enfants Abandonnés, and the Paymaster's Office, feeling that I was indeed going to begin at the bottom of a fairly steep ladder, and to receive some valuable discipline and training in self-control.
I believe that, for the fraction of a second, I was tempted to seek the train for Calais and England, instead of the Street of the Abandoned Children and the Office of the Paymaster. (Were they Children of Abandoned Character, or Children who had Been Abandoned by Others? Alas, I knew not; but feeling something of a poor Abandoned Child myself, I decided that it was the latter.)
Expecting otherwise, I found the non-commissioned officer who was the Paymaster's Clerk, a courteous person. He asked me which Squadron I would like to join, and I replied that I should like to join any Squadron to which the present Sergeant of the Guard did not belong.
"Who's he?" asked the clerk.
I described the Sergeant as a ruffianly brute with a bristly moustache, bristly eyebrows, bristly hair, and bristly manners. A bullying blackguard in fact.
"Any private to any Sergeant," smiled the clerk; "but it sounds like Blüm. Did he swear by the name of an Anointed Poodle, by any chance?"
"That's the man," said I.
"Third Squadron. I'll put you down for the Second. . . . Take this paper and ask for the Sergeant-Major of the Second Squadron. And don't forget that if you can stand well with the S.S.M. and the Adjudant of your Squadron, you'll be all right. . . ."
§ 4
On my return to the Barracks, I again encountered the engaging Sergeant Blüm at the Guard-Room by the gates.
"To what Squadron are you drafted?" he asked.
"To the Second, Sergeant," I replied innocently.
"And that's the worst news I have heard this year," was the reply. "I hoped you would be in the Third. I'd have had you put in my own peloton. I have a way with aristocrats and Volontaires, and macquereaux. . . ."
"I did my best, Sergeant," I replied truthfully.
"Tais donc ta sale gueule," he roared, and turning into the Guard-Room, bade a trooper do some scavenging work by removing me and taking me to the Office of the Sergeant-Major of the Second Squadron.
I followed the trooper, a tall fair Norman, across the great parade-ground, now alive with men in stable-kit, carrying brooms or buckets, wheeling barrows, leading horses, pumping water into great drinking-troughs, and generally fulfilling the law of their being, as cavalrymen.
"Come along, you gaping pig," said my guide, as I gazed around the pleasing purlieus of my new home.
I came along.
"Hurry yourself, or I'll chuck you into the manure-heap, after the S.S.M. has seen you," added my conducting Virgil.
"Friend and brother-in-arms," said I, "let us go to the manure-heap at once, and we'll see who goes on it. . . . I don't know why you ever left it. . . ."
"Oh--you're one of those beastly bullies, are you?" replied the trooper, and knocked at the door of a small bare room which contained four beds, some military accoutrements, a table, a chair, and the Squadron Sergeant-Major, a small grey-haired man with an ascetic lean face, and moustache of grey wire, neatly clipped.
This was a person of a type different altogether from Sergeant Blüm's. A dog that never barked, but bit hard, Sergeant-Major Martin was a cold stern man, forceful and fierce, but in manner quiet, distant, and almost polite.
"A Volontaire!" he said. "A pity. One does not like them, but such things must be. . . ."
He took my papers, asked me questions, and recorded the answers in the livret or regimental-book, which every French soldier must cherish. He then bade the trooper conduct me to Sergeant de Poncey with the bad news that I was to be in his peloton.
"Follow me, bully," said the trooper after he had saluted the Sergeant-Major and wheeled from the room. . . .
Sergeant de Poncey was discovered in the exercise of his duty, giving painful sword-drill to a punishment-squad, outside the Riding School. He was a handsome man who looked as though life held nothing for him but pain. His voice was that of an educated man.
The troopers, clad in canvas uniform and clogs, looked desperately miserable.
They had cause, since they had spent the night in prison, had had no breakfast, and were undergoing a kind of torture. The Sergeant would give an order, the squad would obey it, and there the matter would rest--until some poor devil, sick and half-starved, would be unable to keep his arm, and heavy sword, extended any longer. At the first quiver and sinking down of the blade, the monotonous voice would announce:
"Trooper Ponthieu, two more days salle de police, for not keeping still," and a new order would be given for a fresh form of grief, and another punishment to the weakest.
Well--they were there for punishment, and they were certainly getting it.
When the squad had been marched back to prison, Sergeant de Poncey attended to me. He looked me over from head to foot.
"A gentleman," said he. "Good! I was one myself, once. Come with me," and he led the way to the quartiers of the Second Squadron, and the part of the room in which his peloton slept.
Two partitions, some eight feet in height, divided the room into three, and along partitions and walls were rows of beds. Each bed was so narrow that there was no discomfort in eating one's meals as one sat astride the bed, as though seated on a horse, with a basin of soupe before one. It was thus that, for a year, I took all meals that I did not have at my hotel.
At the head of each bed hung a cavalry-sword and bag of stable-brushes and cleaning-kit; while above each were a couple of shelves bearing folded uniforms covered with a canvas bag on which was painted their owner's matricule number. Crowning each edifice was a shako and two pairs of boots. Cavalry carbines stood in racks in the corners of the room. . . . As I stared round, the Sergeant put his hand on my arm.
"You'll have a rough time here," he said. "Your only chance will be to be rougher than the time."
"I am going to be a real rough, Sergeant," I smiled. I liked this Sergeant de Poncey from the first.
"The worst of it is that it stays, my son," replied Sergeant de Poncey. "Habit becomes second nature--and then first nature. As I told you, I was a gentleman once; and now I am going to ask you to lend me twenty francs, for I am in serious trouble. . . . Will you?"
"No, Sergeant," I said, and his unhappy face darkened with pain and annoyance. "I am going to give you a hundred, if I may. . . . Will you?"
"You'll have a friend in me," was the reply, and the poor fellow positively flushed--I supposed with mingled emotions of gratitude, relief and discomfort.
And a good friend Sergeant de Poncey proved, and particularly valuable after he became Sergeant-Major; for though a Sergeant-Major may not have power to permit certain doings, he has complete power to prevent Higher Authority from knowing that they have been done. . . .
A Corporal entering the room at that minute, Sergeant de Poncey called him and handed me over to him with the words:
"A recruit for your escouade, Lepage. A Volontaire--but a good fellow. Old friend of mine. . . . See?"
The Corporal saw. He had good eyesight; for the moment Sergeant de Poncey was out of earshot, he added:
"Come and be an 'old friend' of mine too," and led the way out of the quartiers, across the great barrack-square, to the canteen.
Cheaply and greasily handsome, the swarthy Corporal Lepage was a very wicked little man indeed, but likeable, by reason of an unfailing sense of humour and a paradoxical trustworthiness. He had every vice and would do any evil thing--except betray a trust or fail a friend. Half educated, he was a clerk by profession, and an ornament of the city of Paris. Small, dissipated and drunken, he yet had remarkable strength and agility, and was never ill.
In the canteen he drank neat cognac at my expense, and frankly said that his goodwill and kind offices could be purchased for ten francs. I purchased them, and, having pouched the gold piece and swallowed his seventh cognac, the worthy man inquired whether I intended to jabber there the entire day, or go to the medical inspection to which he was endeavouring to conduct me.
"This is the first I have heard of it, Corporal," I protested.
"Well, it won't be the last, Mr. Snipe, unless you obey my orders and cease this taverning, chambering and wantonness," replied the good Lepage. "Hurry, you idle apprentice and worthless Volontaire."
I hurried.
Pulling himself together, Corporal Lepage marched me from the canteen to the dispensary near by.
The place was empty save for an Orderly.
"Surgeon-Major not come yet, Corporal," said the man.
Lepage turned upon me.
"Perhaps you'll let me finish my coffee in peace another time," he said, in apparent wrath, and displaying sharp little teeth beneath his waxed moustache. "Come back and do your duty."
And promising the Orderly that I would give him a cognac if he came and called the Corporal from the canteen as soon as the Surgeon-Major returned, he led the way back.
In the end, I left Corporal Lepage drunk in the canteen, passed the medical examination, and made myself a friend for life by returning and getting the uplifted warrior safely back to the barrack-room and bed.
An amusing morning.
§ 5
I shall never forget being tailored by the Sergent-Fourrier that afternoon. His store was a kind of mighty shop in which the Regimental Sergeant-Tailor, Sergeant-Bootmaker Sergeant-Saddler and Sergeant-Storekeeper were his shop-assistants.
Here I was given a pair of red trousers to try on--"for size." They were as stiff, as heavy, and nearly as big, as a diver's suit and clogs, and from the knees downwards were of solid leather.
They were not riding-breeches, but huge trousers, the legs being each as big round as my waist. As in the case of an axiom of Euclid, no demonstration was needed, but since the Sergeant-Tailor bade me get into them--I got.
When the heavy leather ends of them rested on the ground, the top cut me under the arm-pits. The top of that inch-thick, red felt garment, hard and stiff as a board, literally cut me.
I looked over the edge and smiled at the Sergeant-Tailor.
"Yes," he agreed, "excellent," and handed me a blue tunic to try on, "for size." The only faults in this case were that my hands were invisible within the sleeves, and that I could put my chin inside the collar after it had been hooked. I flapped my wings at the Sergeant-Tailor.
"Yes, you go into that nicely, too," he said, and he was quite right. That there was room for him, as well, did not seem to be of importance.
The difficulty now was to move, as the trousers seemed to be like jointless armour, but I struggled across the store to where sat the Sergeant-Bootmaker, with an entire range of boots of all sizes awaiting me. The "entire range" consisted of four pairs, and of these the smallest was two inches too long, but would not permit the passage of my instep.
They were curious leather buildings, these alleged boots. They were as wide as they were long, were perfectly square at both ends, had a leg a foot high, heels two and a half inches thick, and great rusty spurs nailed on to them.
The idea was to put them on under the trousers.
"You've got deformed feet, oh, espèce d'imbécile," said the Sergeant-Bootmaker, when his complete range of four sizes had produced nothing suitable. "You ought not to be in the army. The likes of you are a curse and an undeserved punishment to good Sergeants, you orphaned Misfortune of God. . . . Put on the biggest pair. . . ."
"But, Sergeant," I protested, "they are exactly five inches longer than my feet!"
"And is straw so dear in a cavalry regiment that you cannot stuff the toes with it, Most Complete Idiot?" inquired the man of ideas.
"But they'd simply fall off my feet if I tried to walk in them," I pointed out.
"And will not the straps of your trousers, that go underneath the boots, keep the boots on your feet, Most Polished and Perfected Idiot?" replied this prince of bootmakers. "And the trousers will hide the fact that the boots are a little large."
As all I had to do was to get from the barracks to my hotel, where I had everything awaiting me, it did not so much matter. But what of the poor devil who had to accept such things without alternative?
When I was standing precariously balanced inside these boots and garments, the Sergent-Fourrier gave me a Hussar shako which my ears insecurely supported; wound a blue scarf round my neck, inside the collar of the tunic, and bade me go and show myself to the Captain of the Week--who was incidentally Capitaine en Second of my Squadron.
Dressed as I was, I would not willingly have shown myself to a mule, lest the poor animal laugh itself into a state of dangerous hysteria.
Walking as a diver walks along the deck of a ship, I plunged heavily forward, lifting and dropping a huge boot, that hung at the end of a huge trouser-leg, at each step.
It was more like the progression of a hobbled clown-elephant over the tan of a circus, than the marching of a smart Hussar. I felt very foolish, humiliated and angry.
Guided by a storeroom Orderly, I eventually reached the door of the Captain's office, and burst upon his sight.
I do not know what I expected him to do. He did not faint, nor call upon Heaven for strength.
He eyed me as one does a horse offered for sale. He was of the younger school--smart, cool and efficient; a handsome, spare man, pink and white above a shaven blueness. In manner he was of a suavely sinister politeness that thinly covered real cruelty.
"Take off that tunic," he said.
I obeyed with alacrity.
"Yes, the trousers are too short," he observed, and added: "Are you a natural fool, that you come before me with trousers that are too short?"
"Oui, mon Capitaine," I replied. I felt I was a natural fool, to be there in those, or in any other, trousers.
"And look at your boots. Each is big enough to contain both your feet. Are you an unnatural fool to come before me in such boots?"
"Oui, mon Capitaine," I replied. I felt I was an unnatural fool, to be there in those, or in any other, boots.
"I will make a note of it, recruit," said the officer, and I felt he had said more than any roaring Sergeant, shouting definite promises of definite punishments.
"Have the goodness to go," he continued in his silky-steely voice, "and return in trousers twice as large and boots half as big. You may tell the Sergent-Fourrier that he will shortly hear something to his disadvantage. . . . It will interest him in you. . . ."
It did. It interested all the denizens of that horrible storeroom, that stank of stale leather, stale fustian, stale brass, and stale people.
("I would get them into trouble, would I? . . . I would bring reprimands and punishments upon senior Sergeants, would I? . . . Oh, Ho! and Ah, Ha! Let me but wait until I was in their hands . . . !")
A little later, I was sent back to the Captain's room, in the identical clothes that I had worn on the first visit. My trousers were braced to my chin, the leather ends of the legs were pulled further forward over the boots, a piece of cloth was folded and pushed up the back of my tunic, my sleeves were pulled back, and a fold or tuck of the cloth was made inside each elbow. A crushed-up ball of brown paper relieved my ears of some of the weight of my shako.
"You come back here again, unpassed by the Captain, and I swear I'll have you in prison within the week," promised the Sergent-Fourrier.
I thanked him and shuffled back.
My Captain eyed me blandly across the table, as I saluted.
"Trousers are now too big," he observed, "and the tunic too small. Are you really determined to annoy me, recruit?" he added. "If so, I must take steps to protect myself. . . . Kindly return and inform the Sergent-Fourrier that I will interview him later. . . ."
Pending that time, the Sergent-Fourrier and his myrmidons interviewed me. They also sent me back in precisely the same garments; this time with trousers braced only to my breast and with the sleeves of my tunic as they had been at first.
My Captain was not in his room, and I promptly returned and told the truth--that he had found no fault in me this time. . . .
Eventually I dragged my leaden-footed, swaddled, creaking carcase from the store, burdened with an extra tunic, an extra pair of incredible trousers, an extra pair of impossible boots, a drill-jacket, a képi, two canvas stable-suits, an overcoat, a huge cape, two pairs of thick white leather gauntlets big enough for Goliath of Gath, two terrible shirts, two pairs of pants, a huge pair of clogs, and no socks at all.
Much of this impedimenta was stuffed into a big canvas bag.
With this on my back-hand looking like Bunyan's Christian and feeling like no kind of Christian, I staggered to my room.
Here, Corporal Lepage, in a discourse punctuated with brandified hiccups, informed me that I must mark each article with my matricule number, using for that purpose stencils supplied by the Sergent-Fourrier.
Feeling that more than stencils would be supplied by that choleric and unsocial person, if I again encountered him ere the sun had gone down upon his wrath, I bethought me of certain advice given me in Paris by my friend de Lannec--and cast about for one in search of lucrative employment.
Seated on the next bed to mine, and polishing his sword, was a likely-looking lad. He had a strong and pleasing face, calm and thoughtful in expression, and with a nice fresh air of countrified health.
"Here, comrade," said I, "do you want a job and a franc or two?"
"Yes, sir," he replied, "or two jobs and a franc or three . . . I am badly broke, and I am also in peculiar and particular need to square Corporal Lepage."
I found that his name was Dufour, that he was the son of a horse-dealer, and had had to do with both horses and gentlemen to a considerable extent.
From that hour he became my friend and servant, to the day when he gave his life for France and for me, nearly twenty years later. He was very clever, honest and extremely brave; a faithful, loyal, noble soul.
I engaged him then and there; and his first job in my service was to get my kit stencilled, cleaned and arranged en paquetage on the shelves.
He then helped me to make myself as presentable as was possible in the appalling uniform that had been issued to me, for I had to pass the Guard (and in full dress, as it was now noon) in order to get out to my hotel where my other uniforms, well cut by my own tailor, were awaiting me, together with boots of regulation pattern, made for me in Paris.
To this day I do not know how I managed to waddle past the Sergeant of the Guard, my sword held in a gloved hand that felt as though cased in cast iron, my big shako wobbling on my head, and the clumsy spurs of my vast and uncontrollable boots catching in the leather ends of my vaster trousers.
I did it however, with Dufour's help; and, a few minutes later, was in my own private room and tearing the vile things from my outraged person.
As I sat over my coffee, at a quarter to nine that evening, after a tolerable dinner and a bottle of Mouton Rothschild, dreaming great dreams, I was brought back to hard facts by the sudden sound of the trumpeters of the Blue Hussars playing the retraite in the Place.
That meant that, within a quarter of an hour, they would march thence back to Barracks, blowing their instant summons to all soldiers who had not a late pass--and that I must hurry.
My return journey was a very different one from my last, for my uniform, boots, and shako fitted me perfectly; my gauntlets enabled me to carry my sword easily ("in left hand; hilt turned downwards and six inches behind hip; tip of scabbard in front of left foot," etc.), and feeling that I could salute any officer or non-commissioned officer otherwise than by flapping a half-empty sleeve at him.
Once more I felt like a man and almost like a soldier. My spirits rose nearly to the old Eton level.
They sank to the new Barrack level, however, when I entered the room in which I was to live for a year, and its terrific and terrible stench took me by the throat. As I stood at the foot of my bed, as everybody else did, awaiting the evening roll-call, I began to think I should be violently unwell; and by the time the Sergeant of the Week had made his round and received the Corporal's report as to absentees (stables, guard, leave, etc.) I was feeling certain that I must publicly disgrace myself.
However, I am a good sailor, and when the roll-call (which has no "calling" whatever) was finished, and all were free to do as they liked until ten o'clock, when the "Lights out" trumpet would be blown, I fled to the outer air, and saved my honour and my dinner.
I had to return, of course, but not to stand to attention like a statue while my head swam; and I soon found that I could support life with the help of a handkerchief which I had had the fore-thought to perfume.
While I was sitting on my bed (which consisted of two trestles supporting two narrow planks, and a sausage-like roll of straw-mattress and blankets, the whole being only two feet six inches wide), gazing blankly around upon the specimen of my fellow-man in bulk, and wondering if and when and where he washed, I was aware of a party approaching me, headed by the fair trooper who had been my guide to the office of the Squadron Sergeant-Major that morning.
"That is it," said their leader, pointing to me. "It is a Volontaire. It is dangerous too. A dreadful bully. Tried to throw me into the muck-heap when I wasn't looking . . ."
"Behold it," said a short, square, swarthy man, who looked, in spite of much fat, very powerful. "Regard it. It uses a scented handkerchief so as not to smell us."
"Well, we are not roses. Why should he smell us?" put in a little rat-like villain, edging forward.
He and the fat man were pushed aside by a typical hard-case fighting-man, such as one sees in boxing-booths, fencing-schools and gymnasia.
"See, Volontaire," he said, "you have insulted the Blue Hussars in the person of Trooper Mornec and by using a handkerchief in our presence. I am the champion swordsman of the Regiment, and I say that such insults can only be washed out in . . ."
"Blood," said I, reaching for my sword.
"No--wine," roared the gang as one man, and, rising, I put one arm through that of the champion swordsman and the other through that of Trooper Mornec, and we three headed a joyous procession to the canteen, where we solemnly danced the can-can with spirit and abandon.
I should think that the whole of my peloton (three escouades of ten men each) was present by the time we reached the bar, and it was there quickly enriched by the presence of the rest of the Squadron.
However, brandy was only a shilling a quart, and red wine fourpence, so it was no very serious matter to entertain these good fellows, nor was there any fear that their capacity to pour in would exceed mine to pay out.
But, upon my word, I think the combined smells of the canteen--rank tobacco-smoke, garlic, spirits, cooking, frying onions, wine, burning fat and packed humanity--were worse than those of the barrack-room; and it was borne in upon me that not only must the soldier's heart be in the right place, but his stomach also. . . .
The "Lights out" trumpet saved me from death in the canteen, and I returned to die in the barrack-room, if I must.
Apparently I returned a highly popular person, for none of the usual tricks was played upon me, such as the jerking away (by means of a rope) of one of the trestles supporting the bed, as soon as the recruit has forgotten his sorrows in sleep.
De Lannec had told me what to expect, and I had decided to submit to most of the inflictions with a good grace and cheerful spirit, while certain possible indignities I was determined to resist to the point of serious bloodshed.
With Dufour's help, I inserted my person into the sausage precariously balanced on the planks, and fell asleep in spite of sharp-pointed straws, the impossibility of turning in my cocoon, the noisy illness of several gentlemen who had spent the evening unwisely, the stamping and chain-rattling of horses, the cavalry-trumpet snoring of a hundred cavalry noses, and the firm belief that I should in the morning be found dead from poisoning and asphyxiation.
All very amusing. . . .
I found myself quite alive, however, at five o'clock the next morning, when the Corporal of the Week passed through the room bawling, "Anyone sick here?"