“There is always a place in the Foreign Legion for someone who is down in the world,” he told me. “Directly after the court martial, when the result appeared in the papers, I said I must do something; that I could not sit at home doing nothing, and that as I could not serve England I would serve France. Yes, I did offer my services again to England, but it is military law that no man who has been cashiered can be employed again for the King while the sentence stands. So there was nothing for it but the Foreign Legion—that home for the fallen man.” Of that strange and famous corps Colonel Elkington cannot speak without a glint of pride in his keen blue eyes. Splendid men, the best in the world, he calls them, “and every one was as kind as possible to me.” Many there were who had become legionaries because they, too, had failed elsewhere, “lost dogs like myself,” the Colonel called them; but the majority of the men with whom he served were there because there was fighting to be done, because fighting was second nature to them, and because there was a cause to be fought for. The officers he describes as the “nicest fellows in the world and splendid leaders.” When Colonel Elkington first joined there were many Englishmen included in its ranks, but most of these subsequently transferred to British regiments. He enlisted in his own name, but none knew his story, and often he was questioned as to his reason for not transferring—“and I had to pitch them the tale.” He kept away from British soldiers as much as possible, “but one day someone shouted my name. I remember I was just about to wash in a stream when a staff motor drove by and an officer waved his hand and called out. But I pretended not to hear and turned away.... “I don’t think that the men in the Legion fear anything,” he said. “I never saw such men, and I think in the attack at Champaigne they were perfectly wonderful. I never saw such a cool lot in my life as when they went forward to face the German fire then. It was a great fight; they were all out for blood, and, though they were almost cut up there, they got the German trenches.” The time he was recognized, as detailed above, was the only one. At no other time did any of his comrades suspect his identity, or else, if they did, they were consideration itself in keeping it to themselves. Of this recognition and some of his subsequent experiences, the London _Times_ remarks, speaking of its own interview with him: It was the only voice from the past that came to him, and he took it as such. A few minutes afterward he was stepping it out heel and toe along the dusty road, a private in the Legion.