The Legion has coined a special expression for this kind of desertion: "Going on pump"--in French, "Aller au poump." An extraordinary word of unknown origin. You "go on pump." One evening as we sat in quarters cleaning our leather equipment, an old légionnaire, an Austrian, suddenly got up. "You damned set of fools," he cried, "I'm going out. I'm going on pump." As he spoke he buckled on his bayonet. "I hope I'll never see the blasted lot of you again." He went out and never returned. Several weeks afterwards there was shown to us at roll-call the photograph of a body that had been horribly maimed. It was the Austrian. A patrol had found him by the Morocco frontier. The officer in command, to whose equipment according to regulation a camera belonged, had taken the photograph. Each company in the Legion got a copy of this awful picture, in order to identify the corpse. The regiment has quite a series of these pictures, all showing a man's naked body, hacked about in the most appalling fashion. This is the work of the Moroccan brigands, to whom the légionnaire, staggering hither and thither under the influence of the cafard, is a real source of joy. His uniform and bayonet are priceless possessions, easily won with a few sword-strokes. Besides, there is the consideration that Allah and his prophet reward a pious deed like torturing a dog of a Christian. Hundreds of légionnaires who have started out in cafard have met with this awful death in the desert, martyred, maimed and tortured. In general, however, the légionnaire finds going on pump, this flight into the desert, this mad rush for freedom without any real goal and without any sort of preparation, something quite natural that everybody tries once at any rate in the course of his career. In cafard....