The batteries were at any rate excellently masked. It was quite impossible to detect their positions. Even when the old sergeant showed me where they were mounted, I could see nothing. High up on the crags the heavy cannon had been built in, behind little sandhills, flanked by large rocks, the whole arrangement looking so very much like nature that none could have suspected that it was artificial. The positions of the guns were perfect. We gained the harbour. Suddenly the cliffs opened out East and West, leaving an enormous gap. Out jumped, as from a conjurer's box, the fortress of Oran, a maze of flat-roofed houses on hilly ground. The inner harbour was ridiculously small, just a little square, its room quite taken up by twelve torpedo-boats, two small cruisers and half a dozen merchant ships. We had hardly touched the pier when a corporal jumped on board. The famous corporal of the French army, the maid-of-all-work, the busy French corporal who attends to everything and has more real work to do than all the officers of a company together. He read off our names from a list and marched us off to quarters. It was a novel scene that met our gaze. Negroes, sparingly attired in loin-cloth and red fez, hurried past in a strange shuffling quickstep, carrying enormous loads on their heads; taciturn Arabs stood around, wrapped from head to foot in white burnous-cloth; officers promenaded with their women-folk and occasionally some fine lady would give us a look of curiosity and compassion. A Spahi orderly galloped by on a foaming horse and yelled in high amusement: "Bonjour, les bleus!" We were marched across the city square. The surroundings and houses had nothing typical about them until we began to pass through little alleys and byways, where naked black children were playing and rolling in the dirt and filth. Then the sand came. The fine African sand that plays such a rôle in a légionnaire's life. But the road was an ideal road, hard as stone under its sandy covering. A generation of légionnaires, now long dead, had built this road leading to the barracks high up in the hills. The road swept in mighty curves along the cliffs. After an hour of marching we came to some very antiquated barracks. They were a counterpart of Fort St. Jean in Marseilles, one of the military hostelries for the many men needed to feed France's colonial stomach. In the courtyard a lieutenant called the roll and seemed very much amused when the new French soldiers answered to their names with a stentorian German: "Hier!" We were assigned a nasty little hole of a room. A long wooden bench ran along one side. The bare boards, fifteen feet long and six feet broad, were to form our bed. There was a pitcher of water in one corner and a pile of thin brown blankets lay in another. The earthen floor was covered with half-smoked cigarettes and rubbish.