more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquiline
features. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with
a dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted
of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a
red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R.F." for its
device. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village. Advancing
in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers and
the wooden benches. Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm
against his chest, a native corporal with the features of a desert
tribesman advanced with superb, unconscious stateliness. As the
Algerians sat round the braziers, their uniforms and brown skins
presented a contrast to the pallor of the French in their bedraggled
blue, but there was a marked similarity of facial expression. A certain
racial odor rose from the Orientals.

My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to an
ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into a
hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, just
to one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not been
occupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in through an enormous
door, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering in the torrents of rain,
we found ourselves in an enormous, dark courtyard, where a half-dozen
ambulances were already waiting to discharge their clients. Along one
wall there was a flight of steps, and from somewhere beyond the door at
the end of this stair shone the faintest glow of yellow light.

It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned into the
receiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room was lit by
one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's desk, and
so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly more light than a