A poor crippled Arab, bent with age, stopped when he saw us. He was evidently on his way to the kitchen buildings to beg for food. In his hands he carried a Standard oil-can. A Standard oil-tin as receptacle for food in connection with an Arab, Algeria and the Foreign Legion struck me as something distinctly new. But there was more to follow. In very broken German the Arab addressed us: "Gut' Tag, légionnaires. Cigarette! Ick sein deutsch--Magdeburg gewesen--1870." The man had fought in the great Franco-German war and had been in Magdeburg as a prisoner of war! Hardly had I recovered from my surprise when a passing légionnaire made me stare in horror. The man had the grinning image of a skull tattooed on his forehead! He smiled at my frightened face and was evidently very pleased at the impression he had made. I remember saying to the bugler how horrible it was that a man should disfigure his face for life in such a manner, and I remember that Smith only shrugged his shoulders in reply. "Why, that's nothing," he said. "Tattooing of that kind is quite customary in the Battalion of the Disciplined." I could not agree with the bugler, I could not see a mere freak in this horrible tattoo-mark. To me it spoke of hope lost for ever, of a life so dreadful that a man no longer cared whether he was disfigured or not. Pleased with the notice he attracted, the légionnaire with the skull on his forehead walked up to us and spoke to me: "Eh, recruit, do you want to see something that very old légionnaires only have got?" He showed me a tobacco-pouch, apparently made of fine soft leather: "This is made of the breast of an Arab woman," said the man of the skull. "It is a very good tobacco-pouch. Made it myself. There are only seven in the whole regiment now. Chose--n'est-ce pas? That is something worth seeing!" With a grin of vanity he walked away. "Tobacco-pouch--an Arab woman's breast--my God, what is the meaning of this?" I asked of the bugler. Smith told me all about those horrible pouches. The man of the skull had not lied. During the last insurrection of Arabs in Algeria, in grim warfare far in the South, Arabian women had horribly mutilated the bodies of légionnaires and inflicted horrible tortures on the wounded. The soldiers of the Legion, maddened, thirsting for revenge, gave quarter to no Arab woman during those times. They retaliated in kind.... Of the horrible deeds they committed the dreadful tobacco-pouches gave evidence. On the same day I witnessed for the first time the prisoners' march of punishment. I stood aghast. Behind the quarters of the fourth company, in a small square between barrack building and wall, about thirty men were marching in a continuous circle, to the sharp commands of a corporal: "À droit--droit; à droit--droit; right about, march; right about, march."