Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law. Georges Darien in using the first person, both in _Biribi_ and in _Bas les Coeurs_, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness, simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by pride and cruelty and folly. The name _Biribi_ sounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a joke; but the joke is grim indeed, grim as the dance of skeletons round a gallows-tree. In actual fact _Biribi_ is the nickname given by French and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the Franco-African army; a slangy _petit nom_ given in jest to one of the most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally, very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual, comes to light, and rouses public indignation. _Biribi_ is one of those rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding flesh.