'A touch of sun -- it does queer things.'

Blue Book was the main market for H. Bedford-Jones' serial anthologies of thematically-related stories. The gimmick gave him an excuse to surround each actual story with some framing device when they could well have stood well on their own, but his approach certainly paid more. HBJ had two separate series going on in the July 1937 issue: "Ships and Men," written in collaboration with Captain L. B. Williams -- that is, in collaboration with himself -- and "Warriors in Exile," represented in this issue by "A Touch of Sun." The framing narrative includes an apparent nod to Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday, as it introduces an impossibly old Foreign Legion veteran to narrate a tale from the early days of the Legion, in the 1830s, that he claims to have witnessed. The tale itself concerns Pan Andrei, a Polish nobleman who was exiled from his homeland by its Russian overlords and ended up with the Legion in Algeria, only to desert to the natives two years later. He takes up the Touareg cause under the name El Mohdi, alongside a Turkish veteran and his daughter Khattifa, with whom Andrei falls in love. The old narrator attributes the Pole's desertion and his transformation into a renegade "Arab" to too much sun, but apart from that insinuation that he had to be mad to do it all, the story treats his new Muslim friends in relatively respectful fashion. Khattifa, who dons a youth's uniform to remain at her beloved's side, is particularly contrasted with Andrei's Polish wife, who appears in Algeria bearing tidings of his pardon and his reinstatement to nobility. He hears of this indirectly, having infiltrated the French base in native guise in order to learn the Legion's plans. The prospect tempts him briefly, but once he leaps to the conclusion that his wife is more interested in her own reinstatement to high society, he remembers all of Khattifa's virtues.

Allah! What a contrast between that woman, a princess, and this Turkish girl who loved him, rode with him, was going to bear him a child within a few more months! Here was life -- warfare, hard living, privation, and love that sweetened it all. Here was the proper destiny for a man; not back there on the estates of a prince.

Alas, in the next engagement El Mohdi is knocked unconscious and separated from his army, waking up alone in the sun. He had set the Legion up to be ambushed, but now, hearing the songs of the Polish battalion and feeling the sun again, his alignment is scrambled once more. Now he rushes to warn the Poles of the attack but they, seeing him approach in Touareg garb, shoot him dead. This last detail confuses one of the audience in the framing story, because it's all supposed to be based on Pan Andrei's diary, and how could he have written up his own demise? The old narrator suggests that he might have thrown that last part in himself, but that disclaimer reads more like an authorial shrug of the shoulders.

'No fool but yourself made you enlist, Waldemar.'

I like the way Georges Surdez backs his way into the actual meat of his Foreign Legion story, "By Special Request" (Adventure, January 1, 1932). Lieutenant Framyr volunteers to hold Bou-Mabrouk, a Moroccan post overrun and then abandoned by the Riffi rebels, because his best friend had commanded the Senegalese infantry who had been killed to the last man. Surdez lets us see Framyr through the eyes of Sergeant Kellburger, only to have Kellburger become the protagonist when Framyr is abruptly killed. The real story is the war of wills within the insurgent war between Kellburger and Private Waldemar. Of the latter, Surdez writes: "His chief fault was one rare in Germans, if common enough in Frenchmen and Belgians. He loved to argue with his superiors, to show off before a crowd -- in a word, to be different." This is significant in a unit that is disproportionately German. Waldemar fled Germany after getting "mixed up in a counterrevolution in Germany soon after the armistice." The changing political situation in Germany -- it's unclear when exactly this story is set -- encourages Waldemar to think of returning home to his family now that his term of service is almost up. In fact, it expires while the post is under siege by the Riffi, as the ranks of Legionnaires are steadily whittled down and the survivors are tempted to quit by Megandank, a deserter who promises safe passage and pretty much whatever men want, while threatening utter destruction, by air power if necessary, to those who hold out. Kellburger refuses to let Waldemar leave, fearing that others would follow him, and as his fellow sergeants and corporals fall one by one the ad hoc commander is forced to trust Waldemar with responsibility. There's some unseemly pride at stake, at least from our modern perspective. Kellburger is determined to hold out longer than the Sengalese, who after all "were unimaginative men who suffered only physically, from thirst, hunger and wounds." His men hold out one day longer, and then Kellburger is seriously wounded when Megendank, approaching under a truce flag, lures him into sniper's range. At last, if inevitably, Waldemar rises to the occasion, taking out Megandank and rallying the remaining defenders until relief arrives. Surdez doesn't go overboard and have Waldemar reenlist, but his experience clearly has changed the ertswhile malcontent for the better. Again, Surdez keeps his Legion material fresh by foregrounding a clash of  personalities. His characters aren't very sophisticated, to be honest, but Surdez has a knack for making the reader feel that he's encountering distinctive individuals with every new story. It's a rare one of his that I haven't enjoyed.

'Say the word, pal, and nothing will come back but me and the field order book.'

Frederick C. Painton was an air-story specialist before becoming more of an espionage writer until World War II, when he became a war correspondent. It's unusual to find him writing a Foreign Legion story, and in fact "Gold Galons" (Adventure, March 1937) isn't much of a story. It features two Americans who joined the Legion to get off the proverbial beach, one becoming a corporal, the other making sergeant and aspiring to officer's training school at St. Cyr. Corporal Lacey and Sergeant Connery remain buddies, though their different career tracks and the impact on their friendship might have made a story in its own right. The story here, however, is the threat to Connery's advancement presented by a onetime romantic rival, Lieutenant Latour. The American beat up the Frenchman off duty after Latour tried to flog the woman who had been his but had become Connery's. At first, heading into a battle, all seems professional between the two men as Latour gives Connery the coordinates for an artillery barrage. Something goes wrong, however, and Connery discovers Latour's error when he sees that he's firing on his own men. Of course, Latour insists that the error is all Connery's. "You species of merde -- you have killed twelve of my men and wounded twenty," the lieutenant protests, promising to have Connery court-martialed. The American's only hope is getting hold of Latour's field-message book, which he believes will vindicate him by showing that Latour gave him the wrong coordinates in the first place. Lacey basically offers to frag Latour to get the book, -- see the header -- but Connery demurs. After the next engagement the sergeant faces a dilemma when he discovers that both Latour and Lacey have been wounded. There's a bit of sloppy writing her that the editor missed, since Connery appears to discover twice over that Latour has been wounded. In any event the enemy is closing in with bad intentions for the wounded, and Connery can't carry both men to safety. He has to choose between his buddy and his superior officer, with Latour promising to clear Connery's name by admitting his error, even though someone has stolen the precious book. In the end, he decides that Lacey is more badly wounded and more in need of help. Taking his buddy to the medic, he leaves Latour to a cruel fate at the hands of Chlueh tribesmen, and throws away his only chance of redemption in the absence of the field-message book. It turns out, of course, that he made the right choice after all, for in the between Latour's wounding and Lacey's, the American corporal "glommed" the book off the Frenchman. Painton writes well as a matter of style, but his story is resolved too neatly for its own good. It's a story that probably could have been told in any military setting, and making it a Legion story only exposes its inferiority to the good stuff put out by the likes of Surdez, Newsom, Carse, etc. Painton was better off sticking to the genres he did well, and for the most part, with exceptions like this, he did so.

'He talks of the tickle! By the blimey, I do not play with you.'

J. D. Newsom was one of pulpdom's leading writers of Foreign Legion stories, along with Georges Surdez and Robert Carse, but he had probably the least reverent attitude toward the Legion (if not colonialism in general) of the three. It's certainly hard to imagine Surdez writing anything like "Mumps" (Adventure, Jan. 10, 1926), a pure burlesque so indifferent to the usual Legion tropes that a battle with Arab raiders is mentioned only in passing, as a minor point in a letter written home to his girl by Withers, a Cockney legionnaire tasked with being an orderly and English teacher for the abusive martinet Captain Trudaine in Algeria. It's pure vaudeville when the suspicious Trudaine performs a body-search on the ticklish Withers. The Cockney's only friend, or at least the only fellow-English speaker, is the American goldbricker Curialo, who's always happy to share Withers' hard-earned three-sou bottle of red wine. Learning from Withers that Trudaine has come down with the mumps ("Imbecile, do you not perceive that I am in the grip of a grave malady? My head boils!"), Curialo convinces him to steal the captain's uniform as part of an elaborate practical joke to ruin the Captain's reputation. The American's plan is to put the uniform on Krause, a crazy German ("You know 'ow he goes about saluting lamp-posts and such-like"), get him drunk on bapeli, a native alcohol, and send him to a swanky party to make a fool of himself.

"Bapeli is a firey, vile decoction, specially distilled to appeal to the native palate, which is non-corrosive and heat-proof," Newsom explains, "Its effect on the white man's brain is immediate and lethal." After two rounds, Krause's eyes "glittered more coldly than ever." Bapeli's effect on the already-addled German is to convince him that he really is Trudaine, and that he should close the shanty saloon he's been drinking in. Krause/Trudaine is now determined to denounce the husband of Madame Chaillot, the hostess of the party, for selling the Legion tainted meat. Curialo finally has to KO Krause for the second time that night before he continues his rampage in the native village, where "I will listen to the flute and the tomtom and watch the wriggle-wriggle dance." However implausibly, his imposture has the desired effect. The real Trudaine is sacked, though not before he clobbers poor Withers once more.

"Mumps" reads like the work of a writer temporarily impatient with his chosen genre, though Newsom would write fine Legion tales to the end of his pulp career and his appointment to direct the Federal Writers' Project. A lot of it is silly accents, both Trudaine's Franglish and Withers' Cockney, but unlike some pulp writers Newsom is trying to be funny here and more or less succeeds by piling absurdity on absurdity. It's an oddly structured story, setting up Withers as the protagonist but putting Curialo in charge of Krause for the climactic comedy, but the story's just amusing enough for me to forgive that slight awkwardness.

'From first to last, I punished Laurens justly.'

Many of Georges Surdez's Foreign Legion stories strike me as having split personalities. At heart, many of them are essentially character studies. But knowing his pulp audience, Surdez always finds a way to resolve his character conflicts through combat situations. "Clay in Khaki" (The Big Magazine, 1935) is a good example of this. The first half of it hardly has action in it, describing the fatal incompatibility of Verlinden, a veteran German sergeant, and Laurens, a popular recruit from a higher class background than was typical for Legionnaires. The story's told largely from the point of view of their new commander, Lieutenant Chamber, who sees Laurens as a decent kid unjustly goaded into desertion, and eventual death, by Verlinden. His attitude toward Verlinden is mild, however, compared to that of Laurens' buddies, who are ready to tear the sergeant apart when Laurens' body is returned to base. Still, Surdez lets Verlinden tell his side of the matter. The veteran found Laurens conceited; the younger man "thought himself my superior" and openly made fun of the sergeant, undermining his authority. That might just be an authoritarian talking, but this is the Foreign Legion, where discipline is everything. Seeing Verlinden's point, but also seeing that his position under his command is no longer tenable, Chamber arranges for his transfer to Indo-China, accepting the sergeant's suggestion that he, Verlinden, apply for the transfer himself in order to save face. But before the transfer can be finalized, Chamber's unit must go out in pursuit of a strong force of bandits. In the middle of battle mutiny breaks out as men refuse to take orders from Verlinden, and Chamber finally has to disarm him in order to have any hope of rallying his men. Then comes the ironic twist. Mocked by the men and believing his career ruined, Verlinden decides to commit suicide-by-Berber, charging the enemy position armed only with his automatic pistol.

He was a true Legionnaire, in love with the spectacular and, his life being sacrificed, he granted himself the luxury of exacting admiration from the very Legionnaires who had laughed. To die was nothing -- if it meant that he would be remembered.

Inevitably he goes down in a hail of gunfire, but when some Berbers venture from their position to plunder the body, them men who had scorned Verlinden moments before now go berserk in defense of his corpse. "Verlinden's personality had fled wherever the spirit travels after death, but there remained his clay and his uniform," Surdez writes, "His head, taken as a trophy through the market places of desert villages, would be a reproach to his Legionnaires." By sacrificing himself for purely selfish reasons, Verlinden inadvertently wins the day for the Legion. The question of whether Verlinden was justified in his treatment of Laurens has been forgotten, proof that the story was more about Verlinden all along. Surdez doesn't really imply that Verlinden's conduct vindicates him, and his reluctance to pass final judgment is a nice touch from an author I've only rarely disliked.

They March From Yesterday

In the golden age of Adventure, when Arthur Sullivant Hoffman was the editor, star writers like Georges Surdez could publish something like a genuine novel of 60 or more dense two-column pages in a single issue. Later editors may not have liked to see one writer take up so much space, even in a 192 page magazine. That might explain Surdez's "They March From Yesterday," which totals 56 pages, being split between the March 1 and March 15, 1930 issues. Having read both parts, thanks to Foreign Legion fan Jack Wagner's Mon Legionnaire blog, I suspect that Surdez may have been asked to pad his story into a two-parter. The story in its basic form follows the American Peter Kempton, who joins the Legion under the name Edouard Maguil to escape the gangsters who killed his stepfather back in New York City. As one might expect in such a story, one of those gangsters has joined the Legion himself to escape the law. This gives Surdez an opportunity to refute the legend, exploited by other writers, of the Legion sheltering fugitives from justice. Contrary to "the most false among the false tales told of the Legion," if his superiors learned Legionnaire Recki's true identity they'd turn him over upon his government's request. What really protects Recki, alias Siskow, is that "if there was scorn for the assassin, there was scorn for a denouncer." In other words, no one likes a snitch. In fact, Kempton/Maguil finds himself almost liking Siskow/Recki because the onetime criminal is so guileless in his homesick desire to befriend anyone who speaks English, and especially a fellow American, even after he learns Maguil's true identity. "Recki, endowed with human speech, was nevertheless an animal," Maguil thinks of him, "Here was a fortunate organism in which remorse finds no place." Yet Recki proves a sympathetically enigmatic character, willing to risk his life alongside Maguil on a rescue mission because they'd agreed to let the fortunes of battle decide whether Maguil will be around to denounce Recki, or whether Recki will be around to be denounced.

Unlikely male bonding is at the core of Legion pulp, but smack in the middle of "Yesterday" an episode that reads as if Surdez was trying to break into Fight Stories. On leave, Maguil is trying to raise money so his American girlfriend, who had foolishly come to Africa looking for him, can go home. Two Legion "buddies" talk him into entering the ring to replace an American contender in a bout with a local hero. "They'll want to see an American take it on the chin for a change," the promoter says of the local fans, but a Legionnaire is no mere pug and, despite a cliffhanger ending the first installment, Maguil wins the fight, only to be robbed by his deserting buddies and left to be framed for murder. He's court-martialed, acquitted and returned to the Legion, ending the story's superfluous middle section. The rest of it on either side is all right, though its more a sequence of set pieces than a truly novelistic story. You get a long march through the desert, the distance measured by telegraph poles and a big battle scene in each installment. By the end you get the feeling that Recki interested Surdez more than Maguil, who is almost a generic hero toughened and refined by Legion duty and discipline. Surdez is always very readable, and the Foreign Legion genre as a whole intrigues me both in its mostly unapologetic imperialism and its rite-of-passage aspect of manhood discovered through ordeal. "They March From Yesterday" isn't top-flight Surdez, but Surdez himself is nearly always top-flight pulp, and this wouldn't be a bad introduction to him.

The March 1, 1930 Adventure is available in its entirety online through Yahoo's Pulpscans group, but the Mon Legionnaire blog has Part One of "They March From Yesterday" as a separate file here. Wagner scanned Part Two from his own collection and made it available here.

'This is Russia. You can jump into the sea or get a Cossack lance through your gizzard -- no other choice.'

H. Bedford-Jones was one of the more plausible claimants to the title "King of the Pulps." Versatile in many genres, and under many names, he perfected the gimmick of creating themed series of stories. Blue Book published many of these series, under HBJ's own name or using his favorite alias, Gordon Keyne. These anthologies often ranged all over history, but the "Warriors in Exile" series had a more narrow focus on the French Foreign Legion. "Leather-Bellies in the Crimea" (Blue Book, October 1937) reads a little like one of Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday tall tales, introducing an element of the supernatural into an otherwise conventional Legion story. Like many of Bedford-Jones' anthology stories, the meat of this one is the story within the story. He often wrote in a once-removed style typical of an earlier era, in which we have to be introduced to the narrator of the main story as a character in a framing device. The narrator is Casey, a retired Irish Legionnaire and, predictably enough, a drunk. He recounts an eerie experience he had while serving with the Legion in support of the Whites against the Reds in the Russian civil war. In the Crimea Casey encountered a big man who was the spitting image of his long-lost uncle who had served in Russia with the Legion during the Crimean War in the 1850s. Sight of this surprising figure inspires a vision that Casey takes to be an actual episode from the life of his Uncle Teague, and this is the true meat of the story, told by an omniscient narrator rather than present-day Casey.

Teague Casey isn't a good fit with the Foreign Legion. He'd started out with the British Army, apparently, but had deserted. "He was the type of man who rebels at discipline; and he was in the most highly disciplined corps in the world, as he had found to his sorrow, Little they cared whether he were a British deserter or not -- they needed every man they could get." On the other hand, "A Legionnaire, as he had found, could get away with anything." He has no trouble sneaking out of camp to fraternize in a nearby Russian village where the food and drink are better, where a Cossack peddler speaks English suspiciously well, and the peddler's daughter is pretty. The peddler is happy to get stray Legionnaires drunk and pump them for information about their troop strength, but his daughter is smitten with Teague and warns him to call "tails" any time her father invites him to wager anything on a coin flip. The peddler proves a good sport about this and warns Teague, who plans to desert once more, to play sick at his post next morning. Hung over, Teague nevertheless forgets to do this, for otherwise Bedford-Jones could not describe the battle so vividly. Teague can't help but distinguish himself in combat, earning a promotion, but he deserts anyway.

This seems like a simple story without a moral, but there remains the question of whether the story is true. Present-day Casey's two interlocutors debate whether it's possible for him to have had an authentic vision, or whether this was all a drunken yarn. They finally determine that it probably was the truth, since Casey had included a detail very few people (apart from H. Bedford-Jones and anyone who read the same sources he had) would have known, namely that Legionnaires in the Crimea wore wooden sabots rather than proper boots. Since Casey isn't "the sort to probe into [the Legion's] history and traditions," the agree patronizingly, he must have seen a ghost, or possibly the then-still-living and very old man. These stories (HBJ's, that is) seem tailor made for radio anthology shows, and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd tried to get such a thing going at some point. I'm not sure why he or Blue Book needed this excuse to write stories, but the gimmick seemed to work for them, as he kept at it (in Short Stories as well) until his death. Sometimes the framing devices are worse than superfluous (e.g. the recurring narrator of "Famous Escapes," a deaf-mute convict who somehow communicated the details through sign language) but the stories themselves are usually good samples of Bedford-Jones' effortless, often-engaging style. You might get impatient for the actual story to start, but once it did it usually was pretty good.