The words were spoken in a voice which was almost, and with a shrug of the shoulders which was quite, contemptuous. The day was hot, and Lieutenant Laurent unwilling to move from his coffee and the shade into that burning sunlight. Captain Tavernay gazed mildly at his youthful junior. Long experience had taught him to leave much to time and little to argument. For himself he loved his legionaries. He had a smile of indulgence for their faults even while he punished them; and though his face seldom showed the smile, and his punishments were not unjustly light, the culprits none the less knew it was there, hidden somewhere close to his heart. But then he had seen his men in action, and Lieutenant Laurent had not. That made all the difference. The Foreign Legion certainly did not show at its best in a cantonment. Amongst that motley assemblage--twelve thousand men, distinct in nationality as in character, flung together pell-mell, negroes and whites, criminals, adventurers, silent unknown men, haunted by memories of other days or tortured by remorse--a garrison town with its monotony and its absinthe played havoc. An Abyssinian rubbed shoulders in the ranks with a scholar who spoke nine languages; a tenor from the Théâtre de la Monnaie at Brussels with an unfrocked priest. Often enough Captain Tavernay had seen one of his legionaries sitting alone hour after hour at his little table outside a café, steadily drinking glass after glass of absinthe, rising mechanically to salute his officer, and sinking back among his impenetrable secrets. Was he dreaming of the other days, the laughter and the flowers, the white shoulders of women? Was he again placing that last stake upon the red which had sent him straight from the table to the nearest French depôt? Was he living again some tragic crisis of love in which all at once he had learned that he had been befooled and derided? Captain Tavernay never passed such a man but he longed to sit down by his side and say, "My friend, share your secret with me; so will it be easier to bear." But the etiquette of the Foreign Legion forbade. Captain Tavernay merely returned the salute and passed on, knowing that very likely his legionary would pass the night in the guard-room and the next week in the cells. No; the town of Sidi Bel-Abbès was not the place wherein to learn the mettle of the legionary. Away to the south there, beyond the forest of trees on the horizon's line, things were different. Let Lieutenant Laurent see the men in their bivouacs at night under the stars, and witness their prowess under arms, _ces animaux_ would soon become _mes enfants_. Therefore he answered Lieutenant Laurent in the mildest voice.