The woman's back was towards Jacques, and turning on his left side he seized his rifle, found that it was loaded, and then, with an Apache grin on his face, turned on his stomach and lay with the rifle to his shoulder, ready to fire, just as he had often lain on the practice ground. The woman stood up, the shot rang out and she fell. Then Jacques, rifle in hand, rose up, and still rather shaky from the result of his injuries, approached the two figures lying on the sand. Zeiss was dead and the woman was dead, and her plunder lay on the sand in the form of Zeiss' ears, Zeiss' earrings, and other things belonging to Zeiss. She was comely. It only wanted that fact to complete the satisfaction of Corporal Jacques. For the first time since his betrayal he felt at ease. Zeiss was no longer a thorn in his flesh, and he had revenged himself on Mimi. "On Mimi?" you will say. Well, on her sex. It is the same thing--or at least it was the same thing to Jacques. He stood shading his eyes against the sun whilst the wind of the desert blowing in his face brought the far-off bugle calls of the Legion. The hounds were being collected. The battue was over. SCHNEIDER I Stories about the Foreign Legion have, nearly all, the same centre idea and motive--escape or attempted escape. It is the one thing the légionnaires think of. They grumble about their food; they grumble about their chief officers and their subordinate officers; they grumble about the hot days and cold nights of Algeria; they grumble about the scarcity of cigarettes, the price of wine, the scarcity of soap, the hardness of their work, the smallness of their pay, but they never grumble about their loss of liberty. They dream about it. It is the one idea around which all other ideas revolve, and it is kept alive and active less perhaps by the general hardness of life in the Legion than by the fact that escape is, though seemingly feasible, next to impossible. No man can buy his discharge from the Legion. No man, once he has signed the fatal paper, can escape from the consequences of his act by influence. You may be the son of a prince--it does not matter, or of a Rockefeller--it does not matter, you have to dree your weird for five years and carry your rifle and knapsack under the blazing sun to the last day of your term of enlistment. After all, you have signed a contract, and signed it with your eyes open, and should you fight against fate and try to break your contract, you find that the system you are struggling with has provided against that. Twenty thousand men or so, distributed in Algeria, Indo-China and Morocco, and most of them willing to escape on the slightest chance, require a pretty definite and complete system of restraint.