those of the ordinary piou-piou of the French line are low--he folded his uniform in elbow-to-finger-tip lengths, placed it with the paquetage on the shelf above his bed, and began to dress for his evening walk-out. The Legionary's time is, in theory, his own after 5 p.m., and the most sacred plank in the most sacred platform of all his sacred tradition is his right to promenade himself at eventide and listen to the Legion's glorious band in the Place Sadi Carnot.
Having laid his uniform, belt, bayonet, and képi on his cot, he stepped across to the next but one (the name-card at the head of which bore the astonishing legend "Bucking Bronco, No. 11356. Soldat 1ère Classe), opened a little sack which hung at the head of it, and took from it the remains of an ancient nail-brush, the joint property of Sir Montague Merline, alias Jean Boule, and Hiram Cyrus Milton, alias Bucking Bronco, late of Texas, California, Yukon, and "the main drag" of the United States of America.
Even as Sir Montague's hand was inserted through the neck of the sack, the huge American (who had been wrongfully accused and rashly attacked by Legionary Hans Schnitzel) entered the barrack-room, caught sight of a figure bending over his rag-sack, and crept on tiptoe towards it, his great gnarled fists clenched, his mouth compressed to a straight thin line beneath his huge drooping moustache, and his grey eyes ablaze. Luckily Sir Montague heard the sounds of his stealthy approach, and turned just in time. The American dropped his fists and smiled.
"Say," he drawled, "I thought it was some herring-gutted weevil of a Dago or a Squarehead shenannikin with my precious jools. An' I was jest a'goin' ter plug the skinnamalink some. Say, Johnnie, if yew hadn't swivelled any, I was jest a'goin' ter slug yew, good an' plenty, behind the yeer-'ole."
"Just getting the tooth-nail-button-boot-dandy-brush, Buck," replied Sir Montague. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm feelin' purty mean," was the reply. "A dirty Squarehead of a dod-gasted Dutchy from the Farterland grunted in me eye, an' I thought the shave-tail was fer rough-housin', an' I slugged him one, just ter start 'im gwine. The gosh-dinged piker jest curled up. He jest wilted on the floor."
The Bucking Bronco, in high disgust, expectorated and then chid himself for forgetting that he was no longer on the free soil of America, where a gentleman may spit as he likes and be a gentleman for a' that and a' that.
"I tell yew, Johnnie," he continued, "he got me jingled, the lumberin' lallapaloozer! There he lay an' lay--and then some. 'Git up, yew rubberin' rube,' I ses, 'yew'll git moss on your teeth if yew lie so quiet; git up, an' deliver the goods,' I ses, 'I had more guts then yew when I was knee high to a June bug.' Did he arise an' make good? I should worry. Nope. Yew take it from Uncle, that bonehead is there yit, an' afore I could make him wise to it thet he didn't git the bulge on Uncle with thet bluff, another Squarehead an' a gibberin' Dago put up a dirty kind o' scrap over his body, gougin' and kickin' an' earbitin' an' throttlin', an' a whole bunch o' boobs jined in an' I give it up an' come 'ome." And the Bucking Bronco sat him sadly on his bed and groaned.
"Cheer up, Buck, we'll all soon be dead," replied his comrade, "don't you go getting cafard," and he looked anxiously at the angry-lugubrious face of his friend. "What's the ordre du jour for walking-out dress to-day?" he added. "Blue tunic and red trousers? Or tunic and white? Or capote, or what?"
"It was tunic an' white yesterday," replied the American, "an' I guess it is to-day too."
"It's my night to howl," he added cryptically "Let's go an' pow-wow Carmelita ef thet fresh gorilla Loojey Rivoli ain't got 'er in 'is pocket. I'll shoot 'im up some day, sure...."
A sudden shouting, tumult, and running below, and cries of "Les bleus! Les bleus!" interrupted the Bronco's monologue and drew the two old soldiers to a window that overlooked the vast, neat, gravelled barrack-square, clean, naked, and bleak to the eye as an ice-floe.
"Strike me peculiar," remarked the Bucking Bronco. "It's another big gang o' tenderfeet."
"A draft of rookies! Come on--they'll all be for our Company in place of those poumpists,5 and there may be something Anglo-Saxon among them," said Legionary John Bull, and the two men hastily flung their capotes over their sketchy attire and hurried from the room, buttoning them as they went.
Like Charity, the Legionary's overcoat covers a multitude of sins--chiefly of omission--and is a most useful garment. It protects him from the cold dawn wind, and keeps him warm by night; it protects him from the cruel African sun, and keeps him cool by day, or at least, if not cool, in the frying-pan degree of heat, which is better than that of the fire. He marches in it without a tunic, and relies upon it to conceal the fact when he has failed to "decorate" himself with underclothing. Its skirts, buttoned back, hamper not his legs, and its capacious pockets have many uses. Its one drawback is that, being double-breasted, it buttons up on either side, a fact which has brought the grey hairs of many an honest Legionary in sorrow to the cellules, and given many a brutal and vindictive Sergeant the chance of that cruelty in which his little tyrant soul so revels. For, incredible as it may seem to the lay mind, the ingenious devil whose military mind concocts the ordres du jour, changes, by solemn decree, and almost daily, the side upon which the overcoat is to be buttoned up.
Clattering down the long flights of stone stairs, and converging across the barrack-square, the Legionaries came running from all directions, to gaze upon, to chaff, to delude, to sponge upon, and to rob and swindle the "Blues"--the recruits of the Légion Étrangère, the embryo Légionnaires d'Afrique.
In the incredibly maddeningly dull life of the Legion in peace time, the slightest diversion is a god-send and even the arrival of a batch of recruits a most welcome event. To all, it is a distraction; to some, the hope of the arrival of a fellow-countryman (especially to the few English, Americans, Danes, Greeks, Russians, Norwegians, Swedes, and Poles whom cruel Fate has sent to La Légion). To some, a chance of passing on a part of the brutality and tyranny which they themselves suffer; to some, a chance of getting civilian clothes in which to desert; to others, an opportunity of selling knowledge of the ropes, for litres of canteen wine; to many, a hope of working a successful trick on a bewildered recruit--the time-honoured villainy of stealing his new uniform and pretending to buy him another sub rosa from the dishonest quartermaster, whereupon the recruit buys back his own original uniform at the cost of his little all (for invariably the alleged substitute-uniform costs just that sum of money which the poor wretch has brought with him and augmented by the compulsory sale of his civilian kit to the clothes-dealing harpies and thieves who infest the barrack-gates on the arrival of each draft).
As the tiny portal beside the huge barrack-gate was closed and fastened by the Corporal in charge of the squad of "blues" (as the French army calls its recruits6 ), the single file of derelicts halted at the order of the Sergeant of the Guard, who, more in sorrow than in anger, weighed them and found them wanting.
"Sweepings," he summed them up in passing judgment. "Foundlings. Droppings. Crumbs. Tripe. Accidents. Abortions. Cripples. Left by the tide. Blown in by the wind. Born pékins.7 Only one man among them, and he a pig of a Prussian--or perhaps an Englishman. Let us hope he's an Englishman...."
In speaking thus, the worthy Sergeant was behaving with impropriety and contrary to the law and tradition of the Legion. What nouns and adjectives a non-commissioned officer may use wherewith to stigmatise a Legionary, depend wholly and solely upon his taste, fluency and vocabulary. But it is not etiquette to reproach a man with his nationality, however much a matter for reproach that nationality may be.
"Are you an Englishman, most miserable bleu?" he suddenly asked of a tall, slim, fair youth, dressed in tweed Norfolk-jacket, and grey flannel trousers, and bearing in every line of feature and form, and in the cut and set of his expensive clothing, the stamp of the man of breeding, birth and position.
"By
