Word: deserted
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Sheik (Rudolph Valentino). Dear old Rudolph Valentino, the fire eater with editorial writers, is home again. He is heart deep in Sahara sands in a picture obviously and not expertly echoing his famed success in The Sheik. He plays a young desert gentleman enamored of a dancing girl traveling with a cut-throat band. He is attacked, imprisoned, released, chased, and close-uped. The girl turns out brave and pure. There is the usual sand storm. It is a terrible picture, concentrating on a handsome actor of some ability. It will be atrociously popular...
...ride, shoot, drill, sleep, spy, drink, disguise, obey, command and love-his-country better than any one else in that camp, and that his sense of humor had been developed on the famed playing-fields of Eton. So he was soon promoted to posts of great importance, intriguing with desert tribes across the Mediterranean...
...came under his protection during a minor massacre that occurred just at a moment when he was supposed to keep alive himself at all costs. She refused to understand why Duty compelled him to leave the disturbed town, sacrifice his men and sneak down through the desert to see some powerful sheiks. He had to take her along. He fell in love with her. And then of course, when it was a question between her honor and his exalted mission in the sheiks' camp, he scrapped the mission. . . . That is not quite the way the story ends, nor would...
Heat, dust, fever, mosquitoes, mud towns, mangy camels, the hot ever-blowing harmattan, absinthe, loneliness, monotony, forced marches through the desert sand, Africa, loneliness, loneliness, is the dirge of the legionnaire. "J'ai le cafard," announces the soldat and he is amok with a little beetle running round and round in his brains. Sometimes he slices off his sergeant's head, sometimes he wets his jowls with his own red blood, oftener he deserts...
...should a youth volunteer to die in the burning heat of the desert, fighting for five centimes a day in a corps which has left the bones of its soldiers strewn in every quarter of the globe from Indo-China to Mexico? Flotsam recruits never explain their presence beneath the knapsack of the legionnaire, but it is not insignificant that while fighting for the far-flung Tri-color of France these romantic, scarred gentlemen rankers are protected by that banner from all extraditions. Glamorous traditions, adventure, protection...