ss
carriages had stopped, a group of officers in full dress were collected
round a man who wore civilian clothes awkwardly, as an old soldier
wears them. There was the sensationally splendid costume of the Spahis;
scarlet cloak and full trousers; the beautiful pale blue of the
Chasseurs d'Afrique, and a plainer uniform which Max guessed to be that
of the Foreign Legion. The boxer had his committee _de reception_ also;
a dozen or more dark, fat, loud-talking proprietors of cafes, or
tradefolk keen on "_le sport_." These, and the lounging Arabs, might
have interested strangers to Sidi-bel-Abbes, if there had been nothing
better worth attention. But owing to the lateness of the train, it had
come in almost simultaneously with another made up of windowless wagons
for men, horses or freight, which had not yet discharged its load. Out
from the wide doorway of the long car labelled "_32 hommes, 6 chevaux_,"
was streaming an extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the
high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond,
round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in
Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been
collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were
nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a
brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the
sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab,
and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, yet with one
likeness which bound them together like a convict's chain: weariness and
stains of long, hard travelling, which thrust the few well-dressed men
down to the level of the shabbiest. Some were almost middle aged; some
were youths hardly yet at the regulation enlistment age of eighteen; a
few one might take for broken-down gentlemen; more who looked like
workmen out of a job, and one or two unmistakably old soldiers,
eager-eyed as lost dogs who had found their way home: a strange
gathering of individuals to find stumbling out of a freight train at a
country station of a French colony; but this was Sidi-bel-Abbes,
headquarters of _La Legion Etrangere_: and as the tired, dirty men
tumbled out on to the platform, everybody stared openly as a corporal
with a high kepi, a buttoned-back blue overcoat, and loose, red trousers
tucked into military boots, formed the crew into lines of four.

Even the officers at the end of the platfo