The mess of the Legion is the most cosmopolitan gathering on earth. At the long bare boards are seated men who between them speak half the languages of the world and represent every grade of society; men who have spent their lives amid the slums of great cities and others who have been accustomed to all that goes with evening-dress; men who have worn the shoulder-straps of the Prussian Guard and of the Household Cavalry, who have raised their glasses to the toasts of “Hoch der Kaiser!” and “The King, God bless him!” Here are men who have plunged on the wrong horse, who have been short in their mess-accounts, have been jilted by the girl they loved, have signed to a check a name that was not their own, or have held one ace too many. Some of them have known the inside of Schönbrunn and the Winter Palace, some the inside of Moabit and Dartmoor. Families and friends are waiting and watching for some of them; detectives are waiting and watching for others. Here too are professional soldiers—Germans, Poles, Russians, Belgians, Italians, Greeks, even Turks—to whom the end of the Great War meant the loss of their livelihoods. In all those distant corners of the world where France is engaged in “little wars,” the Legion holds the place of honor—and of death!—on the line of battle. The tunics of its veterans bear ribbons showing that they have fought all the way from Tongking to Timbuktu, from the Niger to the Yser. During the Great War the legionaries, having no votes, were time after time sacrificed in last stands and forlorn hopes in order to save their enfranchised and, therefore, politically influential fellows of the home army. The appalling sacrifices which they thus made on the altar of their adopted country were rewarded by authorization to wear the scarlet _fourragère_ of the Legion of Honor, the Legion being one of the very few units of the French Army to win this coveted distinction. Yet, despite its hardships and perils, or perhaps because of them, it is a real military school and offers the good soldier frequent chances of promotion, decoration, and glory. Some of the most famous soldiers of France have found their marshals’ batons in the knapsacks of the Legion, and most of the officers of the Legion have begun their careers in its ranks. I have in mind the case of one _légionnaire_, an undergraduate at Harvard, who enlisted in the Legion at the outbreak of the Great War and rose to a lieutenancy. After the Armistice the French government sent him back to Harvard to complete his education at its expense, with the promise that upon his graduation he could choose between retiring with a pension or accepting a captain’s commission. [Illustration: THE MOROCCAN IS NOT AFRAID OF MEPHITIC MALADIES The lemonade-seller knows nothing of sanitary drinking-cups and rarely washes the single bowl which he uses for all his customers