Chapter II

As he took up his position again, a horseman spurring at full speed came across the plain from the direction of the barracks. As he passed the drill ground where a couple of thousand légionnaires were at exercise, a hurricane of cheering followed him and the message which he had evidently shouted to them.

Then he came at full speed towards the men at the butts. They knew at once. The order for active service had come.

They were marched back to barracks, yelling, shouting, whistling and singing. One might have fancied that every man of them had just received news of a fortune having fallen to him. The barracks were humming like a vast beehive, and the word was going round that it was down south the trouble was. Down south, away in the depths of the desert where the whole Arab country was up in revolt, attacking the outpost stations and surging north.

The Legion does not take long to mobilize. An hour is sufficient. It was now eight in the morning; by nine, headed by the band and followed by the ammunition carts, the légionnaires in four-deep formation, wheeled out of the barrack yard and marched through Sidi-bel-Abbès, striking the great south road that cuts Algeria like a meridian of longitude.

Ten miles south of the town and precisely at eleven o'clock a halt was called, tents were put up, and soup was served.

It was the hot season, and unless driven by the direst necessity the Legion does not march under the three hours of terrific sun that withers everything from noon till three o'clock. Night is the time for marching, and the tents are generally struck shortly after midnight. There were also a hundred details to be attended to in the first hours of this big shake-out after six months' rest in barracks. Some of the tents proved to want repairing, and numerous little weaknesses had to be remedied before the great test came.

Half an hour after midnight the tents were struck and the long, long column, broken only by the rattling ammunition and baggage carts, got into its stride. Five kilometres an hour is the pace of the Legion, with a five minutes' rest at every tenth kilometre.

At dawn the column was marching still, and in the full blaze of day it was still marching, voiceless, tottering, almost broken with weariness.

Then it halted at the milestone that marked a distance of fifty kilometres from Sidi-bel-Abbès, the tents were put up by the wayside and coffee was served.

The men lay about exhausted in the tents. Under the sun across a great stretch of sand and rubbly ground on the right of the road, lay the city of little tents that had suddenly broken into existence like fungi, and around the city, showing sometimes the flash of a bayonet in the sunlight, could be seen the dark forms of the patrols. Grumbling, smoking, swearing, the population of the tent city filled the air with a murmur, dying at last to silence as sleep took the légionnaires. They had marched forty kilometres. Forty kilometres laden with rifle, ammunition, knapsack, tent and collapsible tent poles. Forty kilometres at the rate of five kilometres an hour, with only four breaks of five minutes each. Forty kilometres with only twenty minutes' rest.

But this was nothing to the fantastic labours before them. Next day, and the day after, and the day after, the march went on, ever south, and ever through more desolate country. They reached the region of the small outpost stations, where men of the penal battalion were at work road-making and fort-building. Here wind came to them that the trouble had shifted more to the east, where a great army of Arabs was at work breaking, pillaging and murdering. Three outpost stations had been sacked and the soldiers put to death, and with this news the Legion, setting its teeth, struck on to the south-south-east.

They were entering now the real desert. The great yellow desert that lies burning in the sun for ever. Now voiceless, now sighing and shifting its sand to the wind that blows from nowhere. Here there are no roads, only caravan tracks marked by the skeletons of men and animals, an horizon hard like burnished brass, a thirst that drains even the water in the oasis wells.

Jacques, old campaigner that he was, had never grown used to the desert, no white man ever does. There is a spirit here that daunts the soul and haunts the heart for ever.

As they marched, sometimes, came marching abreast of them, miles away, vast sand devils, recalling the D'jin released from the bottle in the Arabian tale. Sometimes the devils would move as though waltzing with viewless partners, but the Legion scarcely cast an eye upon them. The Trumpet of Doom alone could have arrested the attention of that vast centipede, sun-dazzled, or moon-lit, exhausted, dead to everything but the necessity of movement. The water ran short, but still they marched; men fell out only to be tied to the tails of the ammunition carts, where they had either to be dragged along the sands or march; feet bled, eyes were blinded, brains reeled, but the purpose of the mechanism never failed, nor did the movement falter.

Five kilometres an hour was the inexorable pace to which the machine was set.

A longer halt than usual whilst waiting for despatch bearers had shifted the starting hour of each march to one o'clock in the morning.

Then, under the stars and in the perishing cold of the desert night, the bugles would ring out, the city of little white tents shrivel up and vanish, and the great centipede reform itself out of all its incongruous elements.

Criminals, soldiers of fortune, clerks, once men of learning, men from all the quarters of the world and all the walks of civilization, woke from profound sleep or troubled dreams and became, once again, the Legion.

As they marched under the stars, not a voice broke the silence of the ranks, half-awake; still under the opiate weariness of the last march, the night seemed to them like a blue veil tangling their feet. The sound of the vast moving column filled the night, not with the tramp of men, but with a noise like the shuffling of a great snake--the shuddering, shuffling sound of sand trodden upon and tossed aside by the feet of the Legion.

Men marched as they pleased, there was no keeping in step. It did not matter how rifles were carried--so that they were carried; how men marched--so that they marched.

One thing alone mattered--the pace. Five kilometres an hour.

Then a pale light would appear in the east and flicker out, and then, vague blue and luminous, dawn would show and tinted fingers along the sand rim begin to lift the veil.

It was day far up in the sky before the first sun-flash struck the sands.

Then came the blaze, and like Memnon the Legion would find its voice.

Mixed with the creak and rattle of the baggage and ammunition carts, above the dull pounding and scuffling of feet, you would hear the growl of voices breaking out all down the line. A grumble half a mile long; the voice of the bruised, battered, and bedevilled soul of the Legion. This centipede with a brain for every pair of legs possessed a single soul. Artist, Author, Bank Clerk, ex-soldier or Apache, Optimist, Pessimist, Grumbler or Man of Fortitude, all were subdued to the same medium. Like the oars of the Trireme or the bricks for the Pyramids, the rifles of the Legion linked the minds of their holders in a common bondage of thought--or want of thought, gave them a common tongue to express the suffering common to all.

The cutting of the gun-straps, the weight of the knapsacks, the weariness of the march, all were voiced in that awful grumble, more akin to the grumble and groan of the baggage and ammunition carts than the voices of human beings.

Then the sound would die out, and the moving column resume its garment of silence, and so it went on till on the morning of the twelfth day, just after sunrise, the sands right in the sun-blaze suddenly became alive and moving; the people of the desert, mysterious as the desert itself, had declared themselves.

It was like the springing to life of D'jins. The Legion had come to attack, and lo! it was attacked, its movements had been watched by scouts, keen-eyed as vultures. All to eastward and southward the swarming sands showed like sea foam beneath the fluttering green flags and the blaze of spears; drums beat, and on the wind came the crying of that vast, sun-born host like the crying of far-off sea-birds on a quarrelling beach.

The voice of the Legion made answer like the roar of the tiger that is sure of its prey.

Then silence for a heart-beat, followed by a few sharp orders, and the column, no longer moving, undulated, broadened, became formless, and then, click! became a geometrical figure.

A hollow square, with the baggage and ammunition carts in the centre, the girding straps of the ammunition boxes flying loose.

Far above, a dot in the blue, hovered a vulture. From that height, the dark, rigid square would have the appearance of a pattern traced on the sands.