Many of them, of course, have no tale worth telling, and among these are the deserters from other armies. If we include the Alsatians and Lorrainers who join to avoid service under the hated German flag, they form a very big class indeed. Nearly every year more than a thousand men of the annexed provinces and more than a thousand Germans flocked to the French standard, with the result that the Legion has always been disliked and slandered by Germans. We have before us seven closely-printed pages forming a list of books and pamphlets written by German writers, who, filled with Pan-Germanist hatred and inspired by the virulent libels of anonymous scribes, have endeavoured for the past twenty years to throw mud at a military organization into which so many of their countrymen escaped. This prompts new thought. If German soldiers are so glad to join a body in which life is "a veritable hell upon earth," where men "never taste meat, but only bread and rice," where they "sleep on the bare ground," where "noses, ears, and fingers are cut off for the slightest fault," where they are "buried in the sand to the waist with an iron cage over them filled with hungry rats"--the last idea was stolen by the German slanderers from Octave Mirbeau's "Jardin des Supplices"--what must their life in their own army be like? As a matter of fact, many Germans who have served in the Legion have had, on their return home, nothing but good to say about it, and have become voluntary recruiting agents for France, hence an increased bitterness on the part of the Huns. A few years ago deserters from the German army became so numerous that a society was formed at Munich, bearing the name "The German Protection Society Against the Foreign Legion." Several times men were arrested for trying to persuade their comrades to join the Legion, but they had to be released, as it was found that they were pure-born Teutons. And now let us apply the supreme test and look into the fighting record of the legionaries. As military experts are agreed that they are among the finest fighters in the world. Innumerable instances of their stubbornness can be given, and it is the quality which has made them, time after time, invaluable as a "stiffening" whenever it has been considered necessary to draft a number of soldiers of the Legion into a regiment of less experienced troops. "The most pusillanimous of them," said an old French officer, who had seen much service in Africa, to us, "will hold out to the death when side by side with a legionary and inspired by his superb courage."