And even when he has money enough to pay his passage on one of the Mediterranean lines, and has his ticket safe in his pocket, he is not yet in safety. Most of the runaways who have succeeded in reaching Algiers make the mistake of taking a passage on one of the German or English lines of steamers, and is arrested at the eleventh hour as he goes on board. It is on the foreign ships that they keep a specially sharp eye. On the French boats, on the other hand, which ply between Algiers and Oran, you don't need any papers or even a passport, because the authorities look upon these boats as an internal French means of communication. The route from Algiers to Tunis is absolutely safe for the deserter. There, nobody notices him in the enormous rush of the Levantine traffic, and he needs no passport to cross to an Italian port. But the expense is enormous. Among the légionnaires who desert, the number of those who can escape in civilian clothes by the comparatively safe way of the railway and the Mediterranean boats is very small. Travelling costs money.... A flight over the town of Algiers needs really quite a little capital--150 francs at least. This is a very low estimate, for the purchase of clothes alone takes about seventy francs. How few of the men in the Legion can raise such a sum like this! In most cases they are poor devils who have no one in the wide world who could or would send them a sum of this sort; most of them never had a franc to their name while they were in the Legion, to say nothing of a gold coin. Men like this are seldom successful in their flight, even when they spend months and months in preparation and discuss their route a hundred times over with the veterans of the Legion. They don't run blindly into the desert like the poumpistes, who don't really want more than a few days of runaway freedom. Their way is also to the coast. In uniform! On foot! In these two expressions there is expressed the deserter's whole difficulty. Although the distance from Sidi-bel-Abbès to the coast is only about one hundred kilometres, not a very great stretch for a légionnaire who is accustomed to long marches, it is beset with danger for every yard of the way. The runaway can be recognised a long way off by his uniform. True, he only marches by night. But the starlit nights of Algeria are very bright, and he has to creep from rock to rock and from hollow to hollow, to avoid being seen by the patrols. By day he lies motionless in the sand. He suffers hunger and thirst for days on end, and lives on fruits, which he steals when hunger drives him to risk discovery.