Rassedin, the wealthy Rassedin, was a prince in a surrounding of poor devils. A wide gap parted him from the other men. They flattered him to get into his good graces and accepted gladly his insolence, if there were but a few sous or a few good cigarettes to be had. Of our quarters he was the king. He reigned supreme. He was obeyed in all matters. It was too funny to see how his comrades hurried themselves when this man, the incarnation of the God of Mammon in the Legion, happened to express a wish, and how they then went off with beaming faces to the canteen to change the couple of sous they had earned into wine. The self-confidence with which the Belgian bore the dignity of his wealth (and what enormous wealth are a few thousand francs to a légionnaire!) was, considered by itself, only funny. But many a time I suspected that Rassedin, who knew so well what a frightful death was waiting for him, despised the petty greed of them all from the bottom of his heart. Money rules even in the Foreign Legion! The pay is five centimes daily, which is about one cent or one halfpenny. Exactly the fiftieth part of the daily pay of an American regular. The twenty-fourth part of a British soldier's daily pay. The comparison is grotesque. When one considers, however, that the man who enlists in the Foreign Legion sells his skin and is a "paid" mercenary, the comparison becomes astounding. The average légionnaire finds out in a remarkably short time that he has been a fool to enlist, that he is the victim of a system very near akin to slavery, that he is a working man without wages, a labourer without pay. An old French proverb says: Business is getting the other man's money! And very substantial values is La France getting out of the légionnaire. With this poorly paid Legion, the French Republic protects the boundaries of her territory in Algeria and conquers the southern deserts step by step--in the everlasting wars in French Tonquin the Legion's troops are always ready for service. Fighting is not the only work of the Foreign Legion, however. Only one-half of the légionnaire is a real soldier. The other half of him is workman, carpenter, builder, road-maker. He works hard and he is so cheap a workman that no Chinese coolie can compete with him. He receives board and clothes and a cent a day--the cheap soldier of the Legion, this funny soldier of "fortune." He can be made use of in the most terrible climates, for the most risky operations, simply because nobody troubles his head about him and because his officers have no account to render for his life or death.