The mental attitude of the man who regards the Foreign Legion as a _pis aller_ is a common trait among its members; it is often, indeed, the last resource of those who have met with life's disappointments. There was once an officer of the German army who had invented a new type of cannon, and could not get its merits recognised, either by his own country or by France, as rapidly as he would have liked, or receive prompt remuneration for his work. Straightway, therefore, he went and joined the Légion Etrangère. Some little time later, in 1895, the French authorities, waking up to the possibility of the value of the work of so eminent an engineer, approached him on the subject, but by then he had become thoroughly soured. He declined to have anything to do with them, and with the air of one whose genius has been recognised too late hastily returned to his kitchen, where he had long carried out the duties of regimental cook. In the barracks at Sidi-bel-Abbes, where the most cordial and frequently rowdy _bonne camaraderie_ reigns, failures in art, science, literature, and every other walk in life may be found by hundreds. Special cases like that of the gallant Lieutenant-Colonel Elkington, who, after being cashiered by general court-martial, joined the Legion as a simple private at the beginning of the present war and won his way to distinction, are rare. He was in the thick of the fighting in the Champagne country, lay for ten months in hospital badly wounded, and before regaining the confidence of his King and country was personally decorated with the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre by an officer attached to General Joffre's staff. To find an exact parallel to this instance of reinstatement in the British Army would be difficult. Among the legionaires, however, there have been quite a number of men of the type of the American Daly, an artist and pupil of Gérôme, who lost at Monte Carlo everything his father had given him to pay for his art training in Europe; scores, too, of such enigmas as that fine young fellow who joined the Legion in 1893, served in Tongking, and left in 1898, at the end of his time, when by chance his superiors discovered that he had been first tenor at the Theâtre de la Monnaie at Brussels. Not a note had he sung, not a single reference to music had he made whilst in the regiment! Ah, what stories some of these ne'er-do-wells, drunkards, comedians, and gentlemen with fine manners could tell if only they would consent to open their lips! V--WHY GERMANS HATE THE FOREIGN LEGION