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Updated: June 14, 2025
Max had resigned himself days ago to Juan Garcia's desertion from the Legion, since the girl must be saved. But he was far from happy about his own position. The danger was that the day when he was due to report himself at Sidi-bel-Abbés would come and he would be absent. His letter of explanation ought to have arrived by that time, but it might be considered the trick of a deserter.
If a man felt that he had borne all he could, and was desperate enough to risk death by starvation or worse, why let him go with his comrades' blessing and his blood on his own head! If he had money he might get through. If not, he was lost; but that, too, was his own business. March was bitterly cold in wind-swept Sidi-bel-Abbés.
Not an echo of all this play of cross purposes reached Max at the nursing home in Cairo, where he had been carried by Sanda's orders after breaking down. But Sanda, who took in a dozen papers to see what they had to say about the "deserter," read what was going on at New York as well as in Rome and at Sidi-bel-Abbés.
"Yes, dear." "Then Chanzy is coming back from Oran. I know you dread it. We shall talk of nothing but Abd-el-Kader and Spahis and Turcos, and how we lost our Kabyle tobacco at Bou-Youb." She had heard all about it, too; she knew every étape of the 48th of the Line from the camp at Sathonay to Sidi-Bel-Abbès, and from Daya to Djebel-Mikaidon.
He told her, with more detail, about his acquaintance with Valdez, whose face she had remarked at the railway station at Sidi-bel-Abbés; and then claimed her promise. She began by asking a question. "Didn't you think it queer that no one but a servant came out to see me off?" "I did a little, but I put it down to Arab manners." "It was because I left in disgrace. Oh! no one was ever rude!
Immediately the recollection of a book he had read flashed into Max's brain. Why, yes, of course, Sidi-bel-Abbés was a place in Algeria, the headquarters of the Foreign Legion, that mysterious band of men without a country, in whom men of all countries are interested. What was there in the subject of the Foreign Legion to attract such a girl?
How he had got there, and what he was doing, he could not tell. It ought to be a town, but it was not. There were no houses nor buildings of any kind in this strange Sidi-bel-Abbés. He could see only waves of yellow sand, billowing and moving all around him like sea waves; and it was sea as well as desert.
Dressed as an Arab, Max made a parcel of his uniform with its treasured red stripes of a corporal; and having addressed it for the post, paid the camel-driver to send it off for him from Touggourt to Sidi-bel-Abbés. The unpardonable sin of a deserting Legionnaire is to rob France of the uniform lent him for his soldiering.
I was coming along nicely, in spite of the handicap of having come from the dregs of Sidi-bel-Abbes up among the gold stripes. And I came along faster when the war gave me an opportunity to show what I could do. But, unfortunately for me, it also presented to me certain things neither I nor any other man could do.
The shrine of Sidi-bel-Abbés stood neglected in the Arab graveyard. Even the meaning of the name, once sacred to his followers, was well-nigh forgotten; and all that was Arab in Sidi-bel-Abbés had been relegated to the Village Négre, strictly forbidden as Blue Beard's Room of Secrets, to the Soldiers of the Legion.
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