P. C. Wren - The Collected Works of P. C. Wren - Complete Beau Geste Series, Novels & Short Stories

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This carefully edited collection of P. C. Wren has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices.
Table of Contents:
The Beau Geste Trilogy
BEAU GESTE
BEAU SABREUR
BEAU IDEAL
Novels:
SNAKE AND SWORD
THE WAGES OF VIRTUE
DRIFTWOOD SPARS
CUPID IN AFRICA (The Baking of Bertram in Love and War)
Short Stories
STEPSONS OF FRANCE:
Ten little Legionaries
À la Ninon de L'Enclos
An Officer and—a Liar
The Dead Hand
The Gift
The Deserter
Five Minutes
"Here are Ladies"
The MacSnorrt
"Belzébuth"
The Quest
"Vengeance is Mine…"
Sermons in Stones
Moonshine
The Coward of the Legion
Mahdev Rao
The Merry Liars
GOOD GESTES:
What's in a Name
A Gentleman of Colour
David and His Incredible Jonathan
The McSnorrt Reminiscent
Mad Murphy's Miracle
Buried Treasure
If Wishes were Horses
The Devil and Digby Geste
The Mule
Low Finance
Presentiments
Dreams Come True
FLAWED BLADES: Tales from the Foreign Legion
No. 187017
Bombs
Mastic–and Drastic
The Death Post
E Tenebris
Nemesis
The Hunting of Henri
PORT O' MISSING MEN: Strange Tales of the Stranger Regiment
The Return of Odo Klemens
The Betrayal of Odo Klemens
The Life of Odo Klemens
Moon-rise
Moon-shadows
Moon-set
Percival Christopher Wren (1875-1941) was an English writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. This was one of 33 novels and short story collections that he wrote, mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa. While his fictional accounts of life in the pre-1914 Foreign Legion are highly romanticized, his details of Legion uniforms, training, equipment and barrack room layout are generally accurate, which has led to unproven suggestions that Wren himself served with the legion.

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And Death stayed his hand until I had justified this brave and witty little lady's faith; and now, after the event, sends his fleas, and odours, and hideous cold too late. . . . Dear little Véronique Vaux! . . .

There is a great commotion without, and the candle is instantly extinguished by its owner, who pinches the wick.

Evidently one foolishly and futilely rebels against Fate, and more foolishly and futilely resists the Guard.

The door opens and the victim is flung into the cell with a tremendous crash. The Sergeant of the Guard makes promises. The prisoner makes sounds and the sounds drown the promises. He must be raging mad, fighting-drunk, and full of vile cheap canteen-brandy.

The humane man re-lights his candle, and we see a huge and powerful trooper gibbering in the corner.

What he sees is, apparently, a gathering of his deadliest foes, for he draws a long and nasty knife from the back of his trouser-belt, and, with a wild yell, makes a rush for us.

The humane man promptly knocks the candle flying, and leaps off the bed. I spring like a--well, flea is the most appropriate simile, just here and now--in the opposite direction, and take up an attitude of offensive defence, and to anybody who steps in my direction I will give of my best--where I think it will do most good. . . .

Apparently the furious one has missed the humane one and the Bacchanalian one, and has struck with such terrific force as to drive his knife so deeply into the wood that he cannot get it out again.

I am glad that my proud stomach, annoyed as I am with it, was not between the knife and the bed. . . .

And I had always supposed that life in prison was so dull and full of ennui . . . .

* * *

The violent one now weeps, the humane one snores, the Bacchanalian one grunts chokingly, and I lie down again, this time without my bread-bag.

Soon the cruel cold, the clammy damp, the wicked flea, the furtive rat, the noisy odour, and the proud stomach combine with the hard bench and aching bones to make me wish that I were not a sick and dirty man starving in prison.

And a few months ago I was at Eton! . . . It is all very amusing. . . .

Chapter II.

Uncle

Table of Contents

Doubtless you wonder how a man may be an Etonian one year and a trooper in a French Hussar Regiment the next.

I am a Frenchman, I am proud to say; but my dear mother, God rest her soul, was an Englishwoman; and my father, like myself, was a great admirer of England and of English institutions. Hence my being sent to school at Eton.

On my father's death, soon after I had left school, my uncle sent for me.

He was even then a General, the youngest in the French Army, and his wife is the sister of an extremely prominent and powerful politician, at that time--and again since--Minister of State for War.

My uncle is fantastically patriotic, and La France is his goddess. For her he would love to die, and for her he would see everybody else die--even so agreeable a person as myself. When his last moments come, he will be frightfully sick if circumstances are not appropriate for him to say, " I die--that France may live "--a difficult statement to make convincingly, if you are sitting in a Bath chair at ninety, and at Vichy or Aix.

He is also a really great soldier and a man of vision. He has a mind that plans broadly, grasps tenaciously, sees clearly.

* * *

Well, he sent for me, and, leaving my mother in Devonshire, I hurried to Paris and, without even stopping for déjeûner , to his room at the War Office.

Although I had spent all my holidays in France, I had never seen him before, as he had been on foreign service, and I found him to be my beau idéal of a French General--tall, spare, hawk-like, a fierce dynamic person.

He eyed me keenly, greeted me coldly, and observed--"Since your father is spilt milk, as the English say, it is useless to cry over him."

"Now," continued he, after this brief exordium, "you are a Frenchman, the son of a Frenchman. Are you going to renounce your glorious birth-right and live in England, or are you going to be worthy of your honoured name?"

I replied that I was born a Frenchman, and that I should live and die a Frenchman.

"Good," said my uncle. "In that case you will have to do your military service. . . . Do it at once, and do it as I shall direct. . . .

"Someday I am going to be the master-builder in consolidating an African Empire for France, and I shall need tools that will not turn in my hand . . . . Tools on which I can rely absolutely . . . . If you have ambition, if you are a man , obey me and follow me. Help me, and I will make you. . . . Fail me, and I will break you. . . ."

I stared and gaped like the imbecile that I sometimes choose to appear.

My uncle rose from his desk and paced the room. Soon I was forgotten, I think, as he gazed upon his splendid Vision of the future, rather than on his splendid Nephew of the present.

"France . . . France . . ." he murmured. "A mighty Empire . . . Triumphant over her jealous greedy foes . . .

"England dominates all the east of Africa, but what of the rest--from Egypt to the Atlantic, from Tangier to the Gulf? . . . Morocco, the Sahara, the Soudan, all the vast teeming West . . .

"Algeria we have, Tunisia, and corners here and there. . . . It is not enough. . . . It is nothing. . . ."

I coughed and looked more imbecile.

"Menaced France," he continued, "with declining birth rate and failing man-power . . . Germany only awaiting The Day . . . . Africa, an inexhaustible reservoir of the finest fighting material in the world. The Sahara--with irrigation, an inexhaustible reservoir of food. . . ."

It was lunch-time, and I realized that I too needed irrigation and would like to approach an inexhaustible reservoir of food. If he were going to send me to the Sahara, I would go at once. I looked intelligent, and murmured:

"Oh, rather , Uncle!"

"France must expand or die," he continued. And I felt that I was just like France in that respect.

"The Soudan," he went on, "could be made a very Argentine of corn and cattle, a very Egypt of cotton--and ah! those Soudanese! What soldiers for France! . . .

"The Bedouin must be tamed, the Touareg broken, the Senussi won over. . . . There is where we want trained emissaries--France's secret ambassadors at work among the tribes . . .

"Shall the West come beneath the Tri-couleur of France, or the Green Banner of Pan-Islamism? . . ."

At the moment I did not greatly care. The schemes of irrigation and food-supply interested me more. Corn and cattle . . . suitably prepared, and perhaps a little soup, fish and chicken too. . . .

"We must have safe Trans-Saharan Routes; and then Engineering and Agricultural Science shall turn the desert to a garden--France's great kitchen-garden. France's orchard and cornfield. And the sun's very rays shall be harnessed that their heat may provide France with the greatest power-station in the world. . . ."

"Oh, yes, Uncle," I said. Certainly France should have the sun's rays if I might have lunch.

"But conquest first! Conquest by diplomacy. . . . Divide and rule--that Earth's poorest and emptiest place may become its richest and fullest--and that France may triumph. . . ."

Selfishly I thought that if my poorest and emptiest place could soon become the richest and fullest, I should triumph. . . .

"Now, Boy," concluded my uncle, ceasing his swift pacing, and impaling me with a penetrating stare, "I will try you, and I will give you such a chance to become a Marshal of France as falls to few. . . . Listen. Go to the Headquarters of the military division of the arrondissement in which you were born, show your papers, and enlist as a Volontaire . You will then have to serve for only one year instead of the three compulsory for the ordinary conscript--because you are the son of a widow, have voluntarily enlisted before your time, and can pay the Volontaire's fee of 1,500 francs . . . I will see that you are posted to the Blue Hussars, and you will do a year in the ranks. You will never mention my name to a soul, and you will be treated precisely as any other private soldier. . . .

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