by null
A dozen volunteers of various nationalities, wearing the same laceless Chinese sneakers and dirty denim overalls, dozed or fidgeted or stared into space in rickety wooden chairs arranged in even rows at the center of the room. This bunch looked half starved and crazy and their immediate environment stank of cheap wine, urine, sweat. One of them, a large hairy man who might be an Arab or a Turk, displayed a disturbing visible twitch—one side of his face curling into a ferocious grin then uncurling two or three times a second. A sleeping African, his face showing vivid tribal scars, snored loudly, head back, mouth wide open.
Smith sat down in the chair farthest away from anyone else and tried not to make eye contact and tried also not to think about what he was doing. Doom gathered like a cloud in the pigeon-haunted rafters. Smith knew he had just willingly thrown himself into the lower depths, like a suicide off a cliff. His nearest neighbor, a vile-smelling rat-faced kid, maybe eighteen, with a mop of uncombed red hair, suddenly leaned forward and gushed thick streams of wine vomit all over the floor. The stench was immediate and awful. Disgusted, Smith picked up his chair and moved it across the gym.
The other volunteers stared. It was as if Smith, by moving himself away from them, had committed an outrageous act. A moment later, the mop-headed kid stood, wiping puke from his mouth with the back of his hand, and approached.
“Peut pas supporter le bordel?” he said with a sneer.
“Sorry,” Smith said, warily. “My French is not so good.”
“Fock’n hell!” the man exclaimed in a thick Scots accent not much easier to understand than his French. “You fock’n U.S.A.?”
“U.S.A. all the way,” Smith said.
“What’s a fockn’ ’merican doing here? Fock’n daft or what?”
Smith shrugged. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m fock’n mad as a hatter,” the kid said. “Absolutely daft. An’ a bludy fock’n dipso to boot. One more year on the outside, I’ll drink m’self to death.”
“Oh,” Smith said.
An abrupt silence followed. The kid’s eyes drifted, eerily unfocused, and Smith got the impression of a childhood head injury that hadn’t been properly treated.
“Legion’s bludy fock’n hell,” the kid persisted. “Y’know that, right? Wors’ kind o’hell yur ever gonna experience.”
“I’ve been through a couple different kinds of hell already,” Smith said. “One more . . .” He shrugged.
“Fat cunt like you . . .” The kid spit, his tone suddenly insulting, his bony hands curling into fists. “You don’t know what the fock hell is!”
Smith tensed himself for a fight and felt a jolt of fear course through his guts, but was at the same time curiously exhilarated. Isn’t this what men were supposed to be doing? Fighting each other over nothing?
The kid drew closer and Smith could smell the vomit on his stale breath. “We’re talkin’ terrible beatings,” he hissed. “Fifty-k marches on an empty stomach. Marche ou crève—that’s what they say. Forget all that Legion Is My Country shyte. March or Die, that’s th’ unofficial motto, an’ it’s the fock’n truth! You stop marching and they leave you behind for the fock’n jackals an’ the bludy savages to finish you off.”
“Hold on a minute,” Smith said. “How do you know all this? You’ve been in the Legion before?”
The kid’s eyes drifted again. Five long seconds later they drifted back. “I read a book,” he admitted.
“A book?” Smith couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“That’s right.” The kid seemed offended. “What’s wrong with that? Legion of Lost Souls. Fock’n good read.”
“O.K., kid,” Smith said. “See you at the library.”
“Listen, y’ass,” the kid said. “I come over t’do y’a good turn—better move your chair back with the rest of us pissers, whether you can stand the smell o’ vomit or not.”
“Go away,” Smith said, and he crossed his arms, closed his eyes, arranged himself as comfortably as possible and, overcome with a pleasant drowsiness, was almost asleep when he felt the chair knocked out from under him. He snapped awake in midair, just before he went crashing hard to the stone floor. He scrambled up, swinging, only to find himself knocked down again by the heel of a military boot. The next blow caught him exactly on the cheekbone and closed his left eye, swelling it shut in an instant. Another kick caught him in the ribs and knocked the wind out of him. He rolled back to his feet and found himself confronting a pock-faced Arab Legionnaire whose Velcro tag read CAPORAL-CHEF AHMAD.
“Tête de noeud!” the caporal-chef shouted. “Salope!” And he balled up his fist and brought a crashing left hook against Smith’s jaw. Smith went over in a shatter of stars, then felt himself dragged across the room by the collar of his overalls and through the pool of wine vomit on the floor. Then he was heaved to his feet again and Caporal-chef Ahmad began to scream in his face. Smith didn’t understand a single word of this rant, but he got the general point.
“I tried to warn ye,” the kid whispered, when Caporal-chef Ahmad had turned away, wiping his hands. “You wouldn’t listen. Man said Legionnaires, they eat, sleep, an’ breathe in each other’s puke an’ shyte. Man said—”
“Just shut the fuck up!” Smith said. “All right?”
“Soot y’self,” the kid mumbled sullenly and subsided into silence.
Smith could feel gobbets of the kid’s puke drying on his neck, down his back. His face felt on fire, his ribs ached from the blows. This must be the beginning of the punishment Colonel de Noyer had talked about.
A few minutes later, Caporal-chef Ahmad returned, formed the new engagés volontaires into a line, and marched them out into the high-walled exercise yard. The hopeful morning light had faded. The sky now showed a rainy slate gray over the Fort de Nogent. The volunteers were then put to the task of moving the enormous piles of cobbles from one corner of the yard to the other. Each cobble weighed about fifty pounds. After an hour of this pointless, Sisyphean labor, Smith’s fingers were torn and bloody, his back and shoulders painfully stretched. Another two hours passed. The worst part wasn’t the physical pain, but the effect of mindless routine on his mental faculties. He felt himself growing dull, blunt with repetition, and he knew many months, perhaps years of such utterly grueling, deadening activities lay ahead.
He paused for an exhausted beat and found the kid panting at his side.
“Sketch,” the kid murmured. “Bludy Legion sketch.”
“What?” Smith said.
“It’s what they do to ye,” he said. “Work ye like a nigger, just to work ye, just to break your balls. Sketch they call it. That’s the word. Means other things too—like stupid bludy incompetence, like send’n ye out t’fight with outdated equipment or no equipment a’tall. With guns that don’t fire, rott’n food in yer belly. Shyte like that.”
“You read all that in your book?” Smith said.
“Fock you,” the kid said, turning away.
“Hey,” Smith said. “Name’s John Smith.”
The kid looked at him skeptically. “That yer real name?”
“Yes,” Smith said.
“Iian McDairmuid.” The kid grinned, and they shook hands. “But I told ’em my name was John Smith.”
Smith laughed at this and his laughter brought Caporal-chef Ahmad across the yard and a flurry of close-fisted blows to Smith’s back and neck.
“Ta gneude!” the caporal-chef shouted, flailing away. “Silence! On ne rigole pas! On travail ici!”
“Work, not talk, the man says,” Iian whispered.
“I got that,” Smith whispered back, and he straightened, rubbing a growing knot on the back of his head, and they worked on, side by side, in silence for the remainder of the day, shifting the fifty-pound cobbles with no food forthcoming and nothing to drink except for a few sips of rusty-tasting water ladled out of an old jerry can.
At five in the afternoon, it began to rain. The cobbles became slippery, unmanageable. Smith turned his face to the sky
in despair and let the rain pour down on him, washing the dried vomit from his clothes, and he knew—without a doubt—that he wouldn’t long survive this ordeal, that he was too old for such harsh treatment, that he had made the greatest, the last mistake of his life. But, smiling to himself, he suddenly recalled the mildly successful musical version of Beckett’s Malone Dies he’d done at the Community Playhouse in Utica a few years back, and humming a line from that show—I can’t go on, I’ll go on—he hauled up another block, slippery with rain and blood, and heaving it to his shoulder, stumbled across the yard and dropped it on the pile with the rest in the lowering dusk.
6
PUNISHMENT
1.
Not enough time to bathe, barely enough time to eat and shit, and only four hours of sleep in between; only rocks and wind and rain and no talking from darkness to darkness. The lights of Paris tinted the wet sky a sickly yellowish-green above the high walls of the exercise yard as Smith heaved the equivalent of forty tons of fifty-pound cobbles from one side to the other and back again with his bare hands. A word, a joke, the slightest pause would earn terrible beatings from Caporal-chef Ahmad. After two weeks of this gruelling labor, they were without warning marched out through the gates of the fort in the dark, put on a bus with steel mesh covering the windows, transferred to a similarly sequestered train, and shipped south. The ride ended at Legion headquarters in Aubagne, a dry garrison town in the Bouches-du-Rhône, surrounded on all sides by the arid slopes of mountains—the Garbalan, the Sainte Baume, the Douard—more prison walls!—and blasted by the Cers, a dry powdery wind. Here, the Legion had made its permanent home after being expelled from Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria in 1961.
The hot Provençal summer passed slowly—the worst summer of Smith’s life, a season once devoted to mediocre summer stock productions of Pajama Game and Cats in Vermont—now full of more beatings, hunger, thirst, and sadistic discipline. Not even Cats had been this bad. October came, bringing a few days of relief from heat, then all at once, biting cold. There seemed to be no autumn in this part of the world. The miserable corps of engagés volontaires were marched one snowy morning into the mountains in the instant winter, over frozen trails and down trackless valleys to the Legion farm at Castelnaudray a hundred kilometers away. There, training continued in a freezing, exhausted nightmare.
In these purgatories, in Aubagne and at Castelnaudray, Smith witnessed again and again the spectacle of his fellow volunteers driven beyond the limits of endurance: fifty-kilometer hikes up steep mountain trails loaded with seventy-five pounds of gear, their feet raw with blisters, their boots full of blood. Punishing sit-ups with railroad ties balanced on the stomach. Droning hours of rifle breakdown and reassembly, the last bit blindfolded. Daily doses of corvée and la pelote—onerous kitchen patrols and penalty duties—designed to break the individual will. Men so worn out they couldn’t unbutton their pants and so lay in their sleeping bags gibbering like imbeciles, pissing themselves. Men forced to hack out latrine trenches with tiny shovels in frozen ground on a blasted hillside after two relentless days on the march, only to be ordered to fill the trenches up again and start over in another location ten kilometers away.
The standard Legion training regimen included lack of food and basic supplies, little water for drinking or bathing, no toilet paper, no access to television, personal mail, cell phone, or Internet, incomprehensible French lessons, and the roughest, arbitrary discipline. Men were expected to march all day on little more than a mouthful of liquid and a morsel of bread, then present themselves in spotless, meticulously prepared uniforms—thirteen carefully ironed creases per shirt—for full dress inspection. Once, at Aubagne, Smith got himself beaten unconscious by the caporal-chef in charge of his barracks—a sadistic Polish drill instructor named Ostwronski—for neglecting to shine the bottoms of his shoes. To have raised a hand in self-defense would have meant forty-five days in le trou—a stinking metal tank buried half underground, its dirt floor covered with feces. One might forget the names of lovers and friends, but never the name of one’s torturer. Smith would remember Ostwronski the rest of his life.
But worst of all were the vicious hazings and assaults perpetrated upon the newest volunteers—les rouges—by their supposed comrades in arms—les bleus—whose enlistment date gave them seniority by just a few weeks. A dozen or so Legionnaires of Greek extraction, all petty thieves and extortionists in civilian life, made up a kind of criminal gang. Called le Mafia Grec by their victims, they came to rule the rudimentary barracks at Castelnaudray through the force of collective brutality. These Greek thugs, traveling in packs, terrorized their fellow engagés volontaires at will, extorted money and stole food rations, all with the connivance of the sergent-chef responsible for weapons training, a hulking bruiser named Costas Melis. Another torturer, this one a corrupt Greek with an unforgettable name.
Melis and his Greek mafia quickly singled Smith out for special abuse, resentful of his handsome actor’s face and the fact that he was an American. Smith was assigned thirty-six-hour guard duties (ten hours being the norm); suffered beating after beating at Melis’s instigation—for a mispronounced word, a look, for nothing at all—was given horrific latrine cleaning corvées after Melis ordered the entire training section to piss all over the floors. Melis also forced him to shave nightly with a straight razor while wearing a dirty bucket over his head and singing “La Légion Marche.” This inventive abuse went on for weeks. It stopped only after Smith was rushed to the infirmary gushing blood, a deep gash in his throat millimeters removed from the jugular. His cheek and jaw, once unblemished, actor-model perfect, now bore a dozen barely healed razor cuts, like chevrons. Whitening into scars, they added the kind of character his too-pretty face had formerly lacked.
Many of Smith’s fellow volunteers deserted. They jumped off moving trains, hijacked cars and drove like mad for the Spanish border, vanished during the course of twenty-four-hour hikes across the undulating landscape of the Lauragais. Almost all were dragged back to Aubagne by military police, subjected to beatings and waterboardings and thrown into the trou for nine weeks. If they emerged alive from this ordeal—and some did not—they were immediately expelled from France, penniless and broken. One or two lucky individuals managed to make good their escape; the exact number of these fortunate few would never be known for sure. They were never heard from again—or at least not until publishing a memoir of the hell they’d endured for six months in the Legion. There existed a couple dozen volumes in several languages on this subject, enough to fill a modest shelf in the library: Legion of the Damned; The Damned Die Hard; Mouthful of Rocks; L’Armée du Diable; Die Schwartzenlegion; El Legion del Muerte. . . .
Smith, to his credit, resisted the powerful impulse to run. It helped to imagine the awful stringencies of Legion life as just another acting job, an extreme example of the Method in action. How hard could it be to play an idiot who gets himself stuck in the French Foreign Legion? Remember Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert? The role wasn’t difficult, merely required superhuman endurance, absolute discipline, a prophylactic dose of gallows humor, unquestioning obedience to sadistic authority, and a working knowledge of the French language.
2.
In the end, only two of the volunteers Smith had moved cobbles with that first day at the Fort de Nogent remained: a Nigerian named Mboku and the wiry Scottish kid, Iian McDairmuid (nom de guerre, John Smith), who was tougher than he looked. Over the months, Smith and Iian had become copains, a semi-official relationship in the Legion. A copain was more than a friend, less than a brother. Survival was impossible without a copain to watch your back and shine your shoes and polish your buckles and straighten your kit on days when you were broken down with exhaustion and in too much pain to finish these necessary tasks. Your copain would give you a little extra food from his own rations and lie on your behalf to the caporal-chef if necessary; you would do the same for him tomorrow.
Smith and Iian survived together. They managed to
complete basic training in eight months without major injury, fits of terminal despair, or suicide attempts. Though Iian developed acid reflux and a persistent cough, and Smith broke two toes and lost forty-five pounds of the one hundred and eighty on his frame at enlistment and was now distilled to muscle, sinew, bone. The two of them graduated from rouge to bleu, suffered beatings together (what you got was often meted out to your copain as well), fought the Greek mafia side by side. One stumbling behind the other, they endured the required two-hundred-kilometer march through the Pyrénées in knee-deep snow without provisions or water to the abandoned village of Camurac.
This was their final exam.
On a blustery March day, Smith and Iian were at last presented with their white kepis in a theatrical ceremony on the parade ground at Aubagne, beneath the gaze of four bronze Legionnaires supporting the bronze terrestrial globe—the Monument aux Morts—raised to honor the Legion dead of nearly two centuries. A hundred gold-fringed, gold-wreathed battle flags glittered in the clear, cold afternoon. Wind nattered the leafless plane trees; the shadows of their branches made complicated patterns on the brown grass. Three generals and a cabinet minister stood in the grandstands, hands over their hearts; la Musique Principale played “Le Boudin,”
“La Marseillaise.” Disdainful journalists from provincial papers snapped photographs; colorful Legion ceremonies always made good photo ops, despite the knee-jerk anti-Legion politics of the editorial page. As Smith inclined his head to receive the famous white hat, he felt a half-forgotten emotion swelling in his breast, something he hadn’t felt in years: pride.