It would never occur to the barber, who plies his trade in the open street, to sterilize his tools; to do so would be to thwart the will of Allah] The story of the French occupation of North Africa is largely the story of the Legion. During the last hundred years the legionaries have not only fought the Turks, the Arabs, the Kabyles, and the Moors, the Touaregs of the Sahara and the Berbers of the Riff, but throughout Algeria and Morocco they have built roads and railways, strung telegraph-wires, helped in the construction of towns, established outposts, sunk wells in the oases, drained, tilled, and planted agricultural districts, and policed a region twice the size of France. To the legionary might aptly be applied the lines of Kipling: For there isn’t a thing on the face o’ the earth The beggar don’t know—nor do ... You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead To paddle his own canoe. When history grants it the justice of perspective, France’s reclamation of North Africa will be recognized as one of the most remarkable achievements of our time, and that achievement has been very largely due to the patience, energy, and courage displayed by the soldiers of the Foreign Legion. So, as I stood on the parade-ground at Sidi-bel-Abbès and watched the bronzed battalions swing past at a quick-step to the lilting music of the Legion’s splendid band, I thought what a commentary it was on civilization that so large a share of the great task of redeeming the Dark Continent from blood, bondage, and barbarism—a task to which saints and martyrs, cardinals and emperors, great statesmen and great captains have devoted their lives—should have been borne by these friendless men, these soldiers of misfortune, for whom society has no use and whom it has abandoned to their fate. * * * * * Far to the west, beyond Sidi-bel-Abbès and barely two score miles from the frontier of Morocco, the holy city of Tlemcen looks down from the slopes of the Lella Setta Hills toward the shimmering Mediterranean, twenty-five hundred feet below and thirty miles away. Once a seat of empire and of learning, a place of such sanctity that it drew pilgrims from the uttermost corners of the Moslem world, it has sunk to the status of a third-rate provincial town, its inhabitants more concerned with cereals than ideals, more engrossed in the exportation of esparto grass and olive-oil than in the dissemination of religion and knowledge.