Heat, dust, fever, mosquitoes, mud towns, mangy camels, the hot ever-blowing harmattan, absinthe, loneliness, monotony, forced marches through the desert sand, Africa, loneliness, loneliness, is the dirge of the legionnaire. "J'ai le cafard," announces the soldat and he is amok with a little beetle running round and round in his brains. Sometimes he slices off his sergeant's head, sometimes he wets his jowls with his own red blood, oftener he deserts.
Word came, early in June, that one Bennet J. Doty of Memphis, Tenn., legionnaire, had left the French lines in southern Syria...
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