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Colonel DeLisle waved his hand toward some of the pictures which showed soldiers fighting the Legion's most historic battles. "I am rather proud of our music and our men. This room, too, and the things in it most of all the flag. My daughter has spent hours in the Salle d'Honneur looking over our records. Presently she will join us. But I wanted to thank you before she came.
"I take back those words of mine about poetry and romance. You've got the right point of view, after all. And you are the kind of man the Legion wants, the born soldier, lover of adventure for adventure's sake. That's the Legion's motto, for the Legion itself must be Dieu et Patrie for most of its sons. I've done my duty as a friend in warning you to go where life is easier.
But nothing, not even exciting prospects of a march, can be allowed to spoil the Legion's rest; and so it was that in half an hour the raging avengers had become once more stone figures carved on narrow tombs in a moonlit mausoleum. For the first and only time since he had joined Max thoroughly hated the Legion and wished wildly that he had never come near Sidi-bel-Abbés. Yet did he wish that?
Until then, she could not and would not leave him. But at last she was sure; and she was waiting only to find out if her father could help; or if not, till his leave was over and she was left to act for herself without compromising the Legion's colonel. If Sanda had loved her father in their days together at Bel-Abbés, she loved him a thousand times more in those few days of his visit at Cairo.
Bayonets flashed in the moonlight; blood spouted red, for a soldier of the Legion may "decorate" himself with a comrade's belt, or bit of equipment, if another has annexed his: that is legitimate, even chic; but money or food he must not steal if he would live. It is the Legion's law. All was over inside two minutes.
As the companies formed up, the "Legion's March" was played, and the young soldiers who had never heard it, unless whistled sotto voce by old Legionnaires, felt the thrill of its tempestuous strains in the marrow of their bones. Nowadays the great marches of the Foreign Legion are not what they once were, unless for government maneuvers.
Max Doran could not go into the street without meeting at least a dozen men in the Legion's uniform, who seemed akin to him because of the look in their eyes; the look of those cut off from what had once meant life and love. What they were enduring was unknown to him, but he was somehow at home among them.
Its Roman name was, beyond doubt, Diva, the station on the Dee as Doncaster is the station on the Don, and Lancaster the station on the Lune. Its proper modern form ought, therefore, to be Deechester. But it would seem that in certain places the neighbouring rustics knew the great Roman town of their district, not by its official title, but as the legion's Camp Castra Legionis.
But the singularity in Legion's mind is this: it never occurs to him that everybody else is doing the same thing, and that I the patient must perforce say, in sheer self-defence, like Rosalind, "I could not do with all." "Chattering Hopes" may seem an odd heading. But I really believe there is scarcely a greater worry which invalids have to endure than the incurable hopes of their friends.
Go, earn Rome's chain to load thy neck, Her gems to deck thy hilt; And blazon honour's hapless wreck With all the gauds of guilt. "But wouldst thou have ME share the prey? By all that I have done, The Varian bones that day by day Lie whitening in the sun, The legion's trampled panoply, The eagle's shattered wing, I would not be for earth or sky So scorn'd and mean a thing.
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