to the bench or table), but to borrow certain specified articles permanently and without permission is merely, in the curious slang of the Legion, "to decorate oneself."
Contrary to what the uninitiated might suppose, Le Cercle d'Enfer—the Circle of Hell—is not a dry, but a very wet place, it being, in point of fact, the lavabo where the Legionaries of the French Foreign Legion stationed in Algeria at Sidi-bel-Abbès, daily wash their white fatigue uniforms and occasionally their underclothing.
Oh, that Cercle d'Enfer! I hated it more than I hated the peloton des hommes punis, salle de police, cellules, the "Breakfast of the Legion," the awful heat, monotony, flies, Bedouins; the solitude, hunger, and thirst of outpost stations in the south; I hated it more than I hated astiquage, la boîte, the chaussettes russes, hospital, the terrible desert marches, sewer-cleaning fatigues, or that villainous and vindictive ruffian of a cafard-smitten caporal who systematically did his very able best to kill me. Oh, that accursed Cercle d'Enfer, and the heart-breaking labour of washing a filthy alfa-fibre suit (stained perhaps with rifle-oil) in cold water, and without soap!
Only the other day, as I lay somnolent in a long chair in the verandah of the Charmingest Woman (she lives in India), I heard the regular flop, flop, flop of wet clothes, beaten by a distant dhobi upon a slab of stone, and at the same moment I smelt wet concrete as the mali watered the maidenhair fern on the steps leading from Her verandah to the garden. Odours call up memories far more distinctly and readily than do other sense-impressions, and the faint smell of wet concrete, aided as it was by the faintly audible sound
