Too Tough to Kill by J.D. Newsom

Book Details

Fate rewards a businessman with a rotten hand so he joins the Foreign Legion. Thinking he will be assigned to combat and die in battle, Fate hands him another role and he becomes too tough to kill.

Too Tough to Kill was the cover story of the October 01, 1928 issue of Adventure magazine.

John Dimmock Newsom (??-1954) was born in Shanghai, China. Brought up in France and educated at Cambridge University, Newsom worked as an anthropologist in Melanesia and later spent time in Morocco. He served as a captain in the British Army in France in World War I and as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy in World War II. He was the author of several novels about the French Foreign Legion. Newsom was about 60 years old when he died in 1954.

Too Tough to Kill has 2 illustrations.

1. Newsom-TooToughToKill.epub

Excerpt: Too Tough to Kill

THE RAYS of the sinking sun brushed the houses of Sidi-bel-Abbes with gold. Even the drab walls of the barracks of the First Regiment of the French Foreign Legion glowed as if plated with burnished brass.”

Out of the guardhouse by the gateway, where the shadows were gathering, stepped a bugler in a white uniform. He advanced six paces, clicked his heels together and, with a flourish, carried his instrument to his lips.

A shrill call rang out once, and again, and before the last note died away every window looking out on the parade ground filled with gesticulating, cheering men. Hoots, yells and catcalls blended together into one mighty shout.

For it was payday, and the bugler had just finished sounding “la sortie”, which set several thousand Legionaires free to go downtown and to do what they liked until midnight. Downtown there was wine to be had—wine, women, cheap cognac, sawdust gin—a diversity of drinks, drugs and vices dear to the Legionaire’s heart.

In the barrackroom of No. 5 Platoon a tall, thick set man with a haggard face struggled and sweated as he wound his six foot long cummerbund around his waist. The confounded thing writhed like a snake, caught under his heels, or wedged itself beneath the bedposts with devilish persistence.

Outwardly Soldier of Second Class Charles Bland showed no signs of the tumult which seethed in his brain. Everything was conspiring to keep him back, and yet that night he meant to desert. He was through with the Legion! Before dawn he would have reached Oran and stowed himself away on board the first steamer he could find.

He was in a desperate hurry, for the Jew Moktar was waiting for him at half past six. He had barely twenty minutes left in which to finish dressing and reach the Jew’s house in the Rue de Tlemcen.

His heart bumped and thudded against his ribs, and his mouth was as dry as dust. The Jew, he knew, would not wait a minute past the half hour—and the black cummerbund, coiling about his legs, acted as if it meant to keep him chained for all eternity to the life he hated.

He had learned by bitter experience that there was no sense in attempting to go out wearing an improperly adjusted uniform; the orderly sergeant would stop him if the cummerbund showed so much as a single unauthorized wrinkle.

The barrackroom was crowded with men, scrambling hurriedly into their clothes but not one of them would lend him a hand. For the past three months they had been tormenting the life out of him. They despised him because he was not like them, because he didn’t drink like a fish, nor curse, nor brawl, nor revel in dirt as they did.

The whole business had been a mistake; he was not cut out to be a Legionaire.

FOR TWENTY-EIGHT years he had lived an honest, blameless life, doing all those things, and only those things, which a self-respecting citizen will do. And Fate, instead of rewarding him according to his merits, had smashed him to little bits.

It happened while he was spending a few weeks in Paris for strictly business reasons. While his back was turned his wife ran away with his boss, and his boss had the delicacy to suggest by cable that he resign at once, so that what with one thing and another Bland found himself suddenly stranded, without a home to go back to and nothing to do when he got there.

The blow was more than he could bear, for, though he searched his conscience to its nethermost depths, he could find no trace of guilt attaching to his conduct. He was blameless, altogether blameless, and he cursed God and wanted to die. He thought of suicide, but he had too many moral scruples to think about it long. For seven days and seven nights he wallowed in misery in a gaudy hotel bedroom which resounded with the squeak and blare of motor horns and a moaning gurgle of nouveau art plumbing.

At last he reached a decision which made him shudder. Nevertheless, having reached this decision he acted upon it. He made his will, forgave his wife, paid his hotel bill, and took a taxi to the Central Military Depot where, after a brief medical inspection and the affixing of his signature at the foot of a printed document, he ceased to be Charles H. Bland, and became Soldier of the Second Class Bland C, of the French Foreign Legion.

Somewhere or other he had read that the Legion was the next best thing to a suicide club, and his one desire at the time was to get himself killed in an expeditious manner. All the way from Paris to Africa he went on believing that he was headed for oblivion, and this belief made him tolerant of the rowdy vagabonds who traveled with him. He saw himself, rifle in hand, charging across sand dunes toward a row of rifles. He saw himself bowled over, lying on his face, coughing up his lifeblood. Perhaps Alice would hear about it—perhaps she would be sorry.

All the way to Sidi-bel-Abbes such thoughts kept him company—and then he woke up in a matter of fact world where there was absolutely no demand for heroes.

Instead of sending him out as a target for the nearest rebels to shoot at, the Legion put him to work learning his new trade. The process was utterly devoid of romance so far as Bland was concerned. Day by day a few more of his illusions were shattered. The first thing he discovered was that there wasn’t a rebel within several hundred miles of the town. It stood on a high plateau in the center of a thriving agricultural district. All about there were wheat farms and vineyards and olive groves. The nearest approach to a desert was the parade ground, where he ate dust by the peck while he crawled about on his belly practising “the attack in open formation of a fortified position”.

The natives he met in town were about as fierce as sheep; either they cringed when he looked at them, or else they fawned on him and whispered mysterious addresses in his ear.

HOWEVER, he had extraordinarily little time to waste downtown. He worked and sweated as he had never worked before in his life. Truculent sergeants drilled him until he wilted. Then they drilled him some more. They loaded him down like a donkey with a monstrous great pack festooned about with cooking pots, shoes, tents and tent pegs; they hung clumsy cartridge pouches and an entrenching tool and a water bottle and a bayonet and a haversack about his waist; they put a Lebel rifle on his shoulder and made him march forty kilometers a day along straight roads that led absolutely nowhere.

When he was neither marching nor drilling he had to do innumerable chores. There were uniforms of coarse canvas to be washed and kneaded and washed again until they were as soft and as white as fine linen; there were his weapons and his accouterments which had to be cleaned and polished with minute attention. And he had to mount guard, to sweep out the barrackroom, to fetch coffee at half past four in the morning, to peel vegetables, to salute his chiefs, to fold his blankets and his pack according to pattern.

There was no end to the list of things he had to do. He who wanted to die! And if he did any of these things in a slipshod manner he was clapped into the guardroom with uproarious drunks and was compelled to sleep on bare but verminous boards.

It was an appalling existence, and to make matters worse he managed to arouse the antagonism of his room-mates. It was not his fault—in those days nothing was his fault—if he was different from other Legionaires. As a matter of fact he did not want to associate with them; they were, without exception, the finest bunch of scoundrels he had ever met. They were tough beyond belief, crude, common and rather terrifying to a man of Bland’s upbringing.

Whether they hailed from Hamburg or Warsaw, Brussels or Milan, they were tarred with the same brush. Most of them boasted openly of the foul crimes they had committed, and Bland did not know enough about human nature to distinguish between truth and falsehood. He seemed to have been pitchforked in with a gang of assassins, thugs, burglars and other enemies of society, not one of whom exhibited the least signs of repentance. On the contrary, they lived with joyful gusto, drinking themselves silly when they had enough money, fighting like fiends among themselves, working when they were told to work, and never appearing to care a whoop whether they died tomorrow or fifty years hence.

Among such men Bland didn’t stand a chance. He had enlisted for altogether different motives and he saw no reason why he should degrade himself to their level. Very politely he refused their invitations to drink with them at the canteen, and with equal politeness he refused to go downtown and visit the disreputable grogshops which catered to Legionaires. He didn’t like that sort of thing.

Nor did No. 5 Platoon like him. His room-mates began by calling him “that species of a Yankee”, and ended up by punching his nose. He suffered in silence for a long time, because he did not want to get mixed up in a vulgar brawl, but at last he could stand it no longer. He was as far as ever from the merciful bullet which was to put him out of his misery, and he bitterly repented the folly which had driven him into the Legion. Getting into the army had been as easy as rolling off a log. Getting out again was quite a different matter.

Excerpt From: J.D. Newsom. “Too Tough to Kill.”