"And that's all right," he said. "That's a 'paquetage,' how it should be. It's 'fantasie,' pure 'fantasie,' Dutchy dear. Making 'fantasie'[2] it is called in the Legion, if one tries to be always 'très chic' and 'parfaitement propre,' to be a swell. Yes, that's the Legion. We are lazy by preference, but we're always neat. Always!" [2] This curious expression of the Foreign Legion is, of course, an imitation of the Moorish "fantasia." The "paquetage" was not the only miracle. I was very much impressed by the way every bit of available space was put to the utmost use. A légionnaire keeps his linen in his haversack. For his letters, his books, for the few other articles of private property he possesses, he finds room in his knapsack; his brushes and his polishing-rags are carefully stored away in a little sack which hangs on the wall. Even the most trivial of his belongings has its appointed place. A légionnaire keeps his kit in such perfect order that he can find everything in the dark. While I was making my bed, the bugler looked on for a while, grinning all the time. Finally he couldn't stand it any longer. He pulled the blankets and the sheets I had spread out away again and started showing me how to make a bed "à la Légion." Bed-making was another of the Legion's tricks. In a few seconds Smith had arranged the bed-clothes in wonderful accuracy, blankets drawn tight as a drum, pillows placed in mathematical exactness. "Merde!" he said, "that's how we légionnaires fix our bunks. It's easy enough." "Merde?" I asked, "what does 'merde' mean, anyway?" It was a French word unknown to me. Smith used it continually, underlining his remarks with it, so to speak. He seemed to like it. He pronounced it with much care, lovingly. Naturally I thought that it must be some especially forceful invective, the more so as the sergeant-major in the storeroom (who certainly had not been in good humour) had said "merde" about five hundred times in ten minutes. And the other légionnaires in the room liked it apparently no less. The "merdes" were always flying about.... "Well, what is this 'merde'?" Smith nearly had a fit. "Merde?" he yelled, laughing as if he had suddenly gone crazy, "what 'merde' means? Why, you owl, 'merde' is ----." He used a word which certainly does not exist in the vocabulary of polite society, an old Anglo-Saxon substantive, describing a most natural function and expressing huge disgust when used as an invective.