_All' il Allah_--God is great. But the marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès is not the fact that here Edison and Strauss face Mahommed in the form of his priests, nor the flower gardens blooming on the face of the desert, nor the roads along which the Arabs stalk and the automobiles dash. The marvel of Sidi-bel-Abbès lies in the Legion. When France found herself faced with the problem of Algeria, that is to say, the problem of infinite wastes of rock and sand inhabited by a foe mobile and ungraspable as the desert wind, she formed the Legion. She called to the wastrels, the criminals, the despairing and the impoverished of every country and every city--and they came. Men of genius, street sweepers, artists, doctors, engineers--it would be difficult to touch a profession, a race or a grade of intellect not to be found in the Legion. General de Négrier said that the Legion could do anything--from the building of a bridge, to the writing of an opera, to the painting of a picture--all the genius that civilization has turned away from its doors is here at command--for a halfpenny a day. The sun had touched the upper border of the huge blank eastern wall of the Legion's barracks and it was still a few minutes before _réveillé_, when in room Number 6 of the tenth company the _garde-chambre_ for the day slipped from his bed, stretched and yawned noiselessly, and glanced round him. The room was like the ward of a hospital, and the likeness was made no less striking by the card above each of the twenty beds, a white card setting out each man's name and number. Jacques' number, as shown by the card on the bed he had just vacated, was 7,083. Jacques Radoub, known always and everywhere as Jacques, _tout court_, was a small and wiry-looking individual with the face of a _gamin_, that is to say, the face of a child who is a jester, who may be a cut-throat, and who is certainly and above all things a Parisian. Jacques had, in fact, been an Apache by profession, and Monsieur Lepine had given him the choice between a penitentiary and the Legion. He chose the Legion, because, as he said, he liked the name better. He was quite aware that life in the Legion was as hard as life in a penitentiary, and he did not care a button about the social difference; he liked the name better, that was all. He was an artist. He stood now, for a second, glancing at the others, nineteen men stretched in all the attitudes of slumber. Germans, French, an Englishman, an American, a Greek and a Russian. Then, shuffling on some clothes, he left the room silently as the shadow of a moving cat. In a moment he was back with a huge jug of steaming coffee, and as he entered shouting to the others to wake up, the _réveillé_ came from the barrack yard. The _réveillé_ of the French Army that sounds every morning across France to find its echo in Algeria. "Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta ta ta ta. Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta, Rat tat tat ta, tat ta."