It is all natural enough. Most men who had come to know them as I have would feel as I do. You must reckon the good with the evil. You must remember their comradeship, their _esprit de corps_, their pathetic eagerness to serve France, the sole country which has offered them asylum, the country which has shown them confidence, mothered them, and placed them on an equal footing with her own sons. These things mean something to a man who has led the life of an outcast, and the Légionnaires have proved their loyalty many times over. At Arras there are more than four hundred kilometres of trench-line which they have restored to France. The Legion has always boasted that it never shows its back, and the Legion has made good. In my own section there were men of all races and all nationalities. There were Russians and Turks, an Annamite and a Hindu. There were Frenchmen from God knows where. There was a German, God only knows why. There were Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks, negroes, an Italian, and a Fiji Islander fresh from an Oxford education,--a silent man of whom it was whispered that he had once been an archbishop,--three Arabians, and a handful of Americans who cared little for the quiet life. As Bur-bekkar, the Arabian bugler, used to say in his bad French, "Ceux sont le ra-ta international"--"They're the international stew." Many of the men I came to know well. The Italian, Conti, had been a professional bicycle-thief who had slipped quietly into the Legion when things got too hot for him. When he was killed in Champagne he was serving his second enlistment. Doumergue, a Frenchman who was a particularly good type of soldier, had absconded from Paris with his employer's money and had found life in the Legion necessary to his comfort. A striking figure with a black complexion was Voronoff, a Russian prince whose precise antecedents were unknown to his mates. Pala was a Parisian "Apache" and looked the part. Every man had left a past behind him. But the Americans in the Legion were of a different type. Some of us who volunteered for the war loved fighting, and some of us loved France. I was fond of both.