Half a hundred miles southwestward from Oran, set in the middle of a fertile plain which is traversed by the Mekerra and overshadowed by the escarpments of Mount Tessala, is Sidi-bel-Abbès. You will pronounce it as though it were spelled Sidi-_bella_-bess, with the accent on the second part, if you please. This fortified garrison town is France’s watch-dog, which guards the west, for it occupies a strategic position of great importance on the railway from Oran to Colomb-Béchar and within striking distance both of Morocco and of the desert. The town is surrounded by a moat and by a tremendous bastioned and crenelated wall pierced by four gates, named after Oran, Daia, Mascara, and Tlemcen respectively. Starting from the gates, two broad streets, shaded by plane-trees, traverse the town from east to west and from north to south, the latter thoroughfare forming a dividing line between the civil and the military quarters. When we arrived, late in the afternoon, an excellent military band was playing in the Place Sadi Carnot, and just beyond, through the bars of great iron gates, we could see a huge three-story building of ocher-tinted plaster rising from beyond a vast parade-ground. At first glance it seemed as though the population of the place was wholly military, so crowded were the streets and squares with loitering soldiery—some in the dust-brown khaki of the _tirailleurs_, others swaggering along in the scarlet cloaks and enormous trousers of the spahi cavalry, but by far the greater number wearing quaint-looking képis with broad flat leather vizors, and rather slovenly-fitting but immaculately neat white uniforms with scarlet _fourragères_ festooned from their left shoulders and broad blue sashes bound about their middles. Then I suddenly remembered that I had seen this uniform before—in Morocco and Madagascar, in the Sudan and Syria and far-off Indo-China. Yes, and on a score of European battle-fields, all the way from the North Sea to the Dardanelles, during the Great War. How could I have forgotten that Sidi-bel-Abbès is the headquarters and recruit depot of the _Ier régiment étranger_, one of the four regiments of that celebrated corps, composed of adventurous spirits of many nationalities, known as the Foreign Legion, perhaps the most famous military body, as it is certainly the most romantic and picturesque, in the world? _La Légion Etrangère!_ The very name is a trumpet-call which stirs the hearts and makes the feet of the young men restless. Ouida, in “Under Two Flags,” has drawn an imaginative but somewhat exaggerated picture of the experiences of a gentleman adventurer in the Legion during the early days of the occupation, but it has remained for Percival Christopher Wren, in “Beau Geste,” to portray the life of a _légionnaire_ with a pen equally facile and colorful and far more convincing. Nor have most of us forgotten the gusto with which, as boys at school, we were wont to declaim the opening lines of “Bingen on the Rhine”: