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. . . .
Chapter II.
Uncle
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
