The average strength of the two battalions varies between 8000 and 12,000 men. The percentage of deaths from illness, above all fever, is extraordinarily high, and when to this we add the many thousands killed in battle, and consider that desertions are very frequent, we come to the astounding conclusion that in eighty years a good deal over a hundred thousand men have served under the Legion's flag. In giving this figure I make no claim to accuracy. It may be far below the mark or again it may be a few thousands too high. Be that as it may, a mighty army of men of all nations has served in the Foreign Legion, working hard and suffering the most awful hardships under an iron discipline that punishes even the most trivial offences with the hardest of punishments. The pay has never been higher than it is now; not enough to purchase even the trifles which a soldier needs to clean his uniform and equipment, to say nothing about his personal needs, be they ever so small. The assertion that these hundred thousand men have made the French Government a present of their work and strength during all these years, and all too often of their lives, is no exaggeration. Even though the history of the Foreign Legion, the history of that ever-fighting band of men, reads like a romance of mediæval times, one is easily led to look at the matter from the French standpoint and to make the pharisaical assertion so commonly believed in France, that the Foreign Legion is the scum of humanity, useless human rubbish which has been turned into useful dung for colonisation, if one may use the expression, in the service of improvement. The modern thinker is much more inclined to ask himself in wonderment how it came that year after year so many men were willing to sell their lives for a country that was not their own. These thousands have not even had the inducement of high wages. Here we stand before a riddle, before some mysterious force which convinced these thousands of desperate men that the African Foreign Legion was their last refuge. The mighty deeds of the Legion are still more of a riddle. All these men have been clever enough to discover sooner or later what a very poor sort of bargain they made when they enlisted, and the Legion has always been a hotbed of seething discontent. As it is to-day, so has it always been; the only subject of conversation in the Legion is an endless discussion of that all-important question: how and when to desert. The légionnaire has enriched the French language with a variety of strange curses to give expression to his rage at the tyranny and infamous treatment of which he is the victim. It is really a marvel that these discontented fellows, soldiers who were always on the eve of deserting, always forgot their grievances when they came under fire.