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I couldn't see more than a division of them that we would have to reckon with nearly all Algerians and they looked dead-weary. I guess they had forced the pace in advance of the main body in order to take advantage of the treason of Feisul's officers. They came slouching forward with their rifles at the trail and a screen of skirmishers thrown out a quarter of a mile or so ahead.
I said nothing about what had happened and returned to the cookhouse to find six Algerians devouring the officers' rations in such fashion as to make one think of the man in the side show who was advertised in letters twenty feet deep as the original snake-eater of South America; there wasn't enough left for a one-man meal.
On the wharves swarmed all kinds of Mediterranean men, Greeks from the continent and from the islands, Levantines from the coast of Asia, Spaniards, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians. Many had kept their original costume and to this varied picturesque garb was united a diversity of tongues, some of them mysterious and well-nigh extinct.
Just as we got immediately opposite the looters a burst of shell fire from the German guns, followed by a hail of shrapnel, blazed all about us, and the hero-cook jumped like a bullfrog, bumping plumb into one of the Algerians, and he and the cook and the pig tumbled over and over, the pig squealing like mad, the Algerian rolling out deep-throated oaths in his native tongue, and Scotty cursing as only a redheaded gabby Scotchman can, all amid an ear-splitting din of shrieking shells and flare-gleams completing a mise en scène as striking as anything ever created by a master artist of stagecraft.
"An inoculation proclamation," explained the Commandant. "There is typhoid here, so the civilians are to be inoculated. They are very much excited about it. It appears to them worse than a bombardment." We passed a file of Spahis, native Algerians who speak Arabic. They come from Tunis and Algeria, and, as may be imagined, they were suffering bitterly from the cold.
One man had heard the sergeant saying so in the next bay of the trench; it meant exactly as much to them as it would to Australian troops to hear the corps opposite them was Bavarian or Saxon or Hanoverian. They knew the English and the French possessed some of these colonial corps. They had been opposite the Algerians in the Champagne before they came to this part of the line.
A certain racial odor rose from the Orientals. My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to an ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into a hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, just to one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not been occupied since its seizure by the State.
Mabel Ticknor, who never saw Lawrence and wouldn't recognize him if you did." "They'll ask why I'm wearing man's clothes, and masquerading as an Arab." "Well, you're a woman, aren't you? You answer with another question ask them just how safe a woman would be! They may claim that their Algerians are baby-lambs, but they can't blame you for not believing it! Anything else?"
Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm against his chest, a native corporal with the features of a desert tribesman advanced with superb, unconscious stateliness. As the Algerians sat round the braziers, their uniforms and brown skins presented a contrast to the pallor of the French in their bedraggled blue, but there was a marked similarity of facial expression.
The European colonists are of all nationalities, and the proportion which is not French is astonishingly large, but every inducement is held out for naturalization as Algerians, and all legitimate obstacles are thrown in the way of those who maintain fidelity to their fatherlands. Every effort is made to render Algeria virtually part of France, as politically it is already considered to be.
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