Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by Maurice Magnus

THE second class of the _Sidi Brahim_ did not sport any luxuries whatever. The cabins and corridors were narrow and uncarpeted, with four berths in each cabin. The food was of the simplest: _hors d'oeuvres_ à la Hôtel Continental Bel-Abbés, one meat dish with vegetable, and cheese, for luncheon; for dinner, about the same, only instead of the _hors d'oeuvres_ a soup, and instead of the cheese some sweet cakes. There were no second helpings, everything was accurately measured out--small portions--the regular French _bout de chandelle_ business. It was the food one might expect to get in a restaurant of the _petite bourgeoisie_ of a provincial town. But of course the price was not at all _petite bourgeoisie_, and, in fact, considering it was a military transport and specially running for the convenience of the army fighting for _La Patrie_, one might have expected either lower fares or very excellent accommodation. But the same spirit prevailed all through France and Algiers: that the army must pay well, if there is no competition, and, in the case of this steamer, that it must pay doubly well. It was just the reverse in Italy, where every man thought he ought to help a soldier who was righting for his country, knowing he had little money and thinking of his own sons and relatives, hoping that they would be helped likewise. In France every one seemed to be thinking "this is wartime, we must make the best of it, we shall probably never see so many customers again, and certainly not these soldiers, let us make all we can." There is precious little sentiment about the lower class French when it comes to money! Some of the _sous-officiers_ on the boat were quite nice chaps, mostly business-men who had been called to arms when the war broke out, altogether very different from those I had met in the Legion. They were talkative and sociable and pleasant. It was a great surprise to me that they treated me, a common soldier of the Legion, decently, but I think that was due to the fact that they really did not know I was a "Legionnaire" until after they got to know me and I told them. My uniform bore no particular sign to distinguish it from the regular uniform of the "Campagne de France." I had merely a _One_ at my collar. One of the officers, a _sous-lieutenant_, was quite an enthusiast about Germany and the Germans. He claimed that they were a marvellous people with a great culture, great men, and great systems. He admired their towns, their order and cleanliness, their administration and army, the discipline of their troops, their valour and heroism and what not. I had a word to say myself, and, aroused by his partiality, I was carried away in the other direction. Any way I gave him a few points as to what I thought of Germany and the Germans. I had had some experience with them in most spheres of life; I had lived amongst them for four years. I claimed that they have no culture at all--there is no period in their history which produced a creative culture which had a lasting influence on them or the world like the Renaissance in Italy, the times of Louis XIV and Louis XV in France, the Elizabethan period in England, or Ancient Rome or Greece, or the Arabic-Moorish culture. They are a wonderful scientific people, probably the most wonderful, but they have no creative faculties, they are not artists as a race. The flourishing period of German painting, the time of Dürer, Holbein and Cranach, is of the Netherlandish school, their Gothic architecture is of French origin, and in literature they have produced Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Heine, hardly enough to bear comparison with the rich classical periods of France, England, Italy, Greece and Rome. All their other great writers are scientists, philosophers, historians, but not creative poets and dramatists, who go beyond the local spirit and have produced _Welt-Dichtung_.

They have a remarkable talent for assimilation, cribbing other peoples' ideas some call it, and they have a commendable spirit for education. In no country in the world are the best dramatists of the Western nations so often and so well produced as in the German theatre. Their versatility in translating, without losing the spirit or the finest points, is astonishing--this is probably due to the adaptability of their language. Ibsen, Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Hamsun, D'Annunzio, Gorki, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, are as well known to the German theatre-goer as his Goethe, Schiller, Hofmannsthal or Hauptmann. Modern German architecture--surely architecture is a creative art--is beneath contempt.