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By Root 4468 0

assigned to it right out of the gates themselves, the five of them coincidental about the cramped table on the crowded terrace while three of them-including the Norman giant who sat not among them so much as above them, immense and sick and apparently insensate as a boulder save for his flaccid and hungry face and the passionate and hungry eyes-listening while the staff captain, burly blunt brutal heavy-witted and assured and so loud that people at the other tables had begun to turn, talked about the almost-forgotten sublieutenant at his tiny lost post in the depths of Never-Never: who should have been the idol pattern and hope not merely for all career officers but for all golden youth everywhere, as was Bonaparte not merely for all soldiers but for every ancestor-less Frenchman qualified first in poverty, who was willing to hold life and conscience cheap enough: wondering (the staff captain) what could have been out there in that desert to hold for six years above a quartermaster captaincy, the sublieutenant-command of a stinking well enclosed by eight palm trees and inhabited by sixteen un-nationed cutthroats; what out there that Oran or Casablanca or even Paris couldn't match-what paradise within some camel-odored tent-what limbs old and weary and cunning with ancient pleasures that Mon'I'martre bagnios (and even St. Germain boudoirs) knew nothing of, yet so ephemeral, so incipient with satiation and at last actual revulsion, that after only six years the sultan-master must vacate it-'Vacate it?' one of the three said. 'You mean he's gone? He actually left that place at last?'

'Not quite gone,' the staff captain said. 'Not until his relief arrives. After all, he accepted an oath to France, even he, even if he does hold from the Comite de Ferrovie. He failed. He lost a camel. There was a man too, even if he had spent most of his five enlis'I'ments in clink-' telling it: the soldier spawned by a Marseilles cesspool to be the ultimate and fatal nemesis of a woman a girl whom eighteen years ago he had corrupted and diseased and then betrayed into prostitution and at last murdered and had spent the eighteen years since as member of lost frontier garrisons such as this because this-the rim of oblivion-was the one place on earth where he could continue to walk and breathe and be fed and clothed: whose one fear now was that he might do something which would prompt someone to make him a corporal or a sergeant and so compel him back to some post within a day's walk of any community large enough to possess one civilian policeman, Wednesday Night where not he would see a strange face but where some strange face would see him; he-the soldier, the trooper, had vanished along with the camel, obviously into the hands of an adjacent band or tribe of the Riffs who were the excuse for the garrison being where it was and the reason for its being armed. And though the man was a piece of government property too, even if not a very valuable one, that camel was a camel. Yet the commander of the post had apparently made no effort whatever to recover them; whereupon they-his listeners-might say that the commander's only failure in the matter had been that he had prevented a local war. Which was wrong. He had not stopped a war: he had simply failed to start one. Which was not his purpose there, not why he had been tested and found competent for that command: not to fail to start wars, but to preserve government property. So he had failed, and yesterday his official request to be relieved had been forwarded to the Adjutant-General's desk-The Norman was already on his feet while the staff captain was still talking; at least four of them knew how he heard of the command's vacancy but not even these knew how he managed to get the succession to it-a man without family or influence or money at all, with nothing in fact to front or fend for him in his profession save the dubious capacity of his vast ill body to endure, and the rating of Two in his St. Cyr class; already, because of the rating, a sublieutenant of engineers and, because of the rating