Then he came at full speed towards the men at the butts. They knew at once. The order for active service had come. They were marched back to barracks, yelling, shouting, whistling and singing. One might have fancied that every man of them had just received news of a fortune having fallen to him. The barracks were humming like a vast beehive, and the word was going round that it was down south the trouble was. Down south, away in the depths of the desert where the whole Arab country was up in revolt, attacking the outpost stations and surging north. The Legion does not take long to mobilize. An hour is sufficient. It was now eight in the morning; by nine, headed by the band and followed by the ammunition carts, the légionnaires in four-deep formation, wheeled out of the barrack yard and marched through Sidi-bel-Abbès, striking the great south road that cuts Algeria like a meridian of longitude. Ten miles south of the town and precisely at eleven o'clock a halt was called, tents were put up, and soup was served. It was the hot season, and unless driven by the direst necessity the Legion does not march under the three hours of terrific sun that withers everything from noon till three o'clock. Night is the time for marching, and the tents are generally struck shortly after midnight. There were also a hundred details to be attended to in the first hours of this big shake-out after six months' rest in barracks. Some of the tents proved to want repairing, and numerous little weaknesses had to be remedied before the great test came. Half an hour after midnight the tents were struck and the long, long column, broken only by the rattling ammunition and baggage carts, got into its stride. Five kilometres an hour is the pace of the Legion, with a five minutes' rest at every tenth kilometre. At dawn the column was marching still, and in the full blaze of day it was still marching, voiceless, tottering, almost broken with weariness. Then it halted at the milestone that marked a distance of fifty kilometres from Sidi-bel-Abbès, the tents were put up by the wayside and coffee was served. The men lay about exhausted in the tents. Under the sun across a great stretch of sand and rubbly ground on the right of the road, lay the city of little tents that had suddenly broken into existence like fungi, and around the city, showing sometimes the flash of a bayonet in the sunlight, could be seen the dark forms of the patrols. Grumbling, smoking, swearing, the population of the tent city filled the air with a murmur, dying at last to silence as sleep took the légionnaires. They had marched forty kilometres. Forty kilometres laden with rifle, ammunition, knapsack, tent and collapsible tent poles. Forty kilometres at the rate of five kilometres an hour, with only four breaks of five minutes each. Forty kilometres with only twenty minutes' rest.