A Modern Samson

A little more and Jean Rasteaux would have been a giant. Brittany men are small as a rule, but Jean was an exception. He was a powerful young fellow who, up to the time he was compelled to enter the army, had spent his life in dragging heavy nets over the sides of a boat. He knew the Brittany coast, rugged and indented as it is, as well as he knew the road from the little cafe on the square to the dwelling of his father on the hillside overlooking the sea. Never before had he been out of sound of the waves. He was a man who, like Herve Riel, might have saved the fleet, but France, with the usual good sense of officialism, sent this man of the coast into the mountains, and Jean Rasteaux became a soldier in the Alpine Corps. If he stood on the highest mountain peak, Jean might look over illimitable wastes of snow, but he could catch neither sound nor sight of the sea.

Men who mix with mountains become as rough and rugged as the rocks, and the Alpine Corps was a wild body, harsh and brutal. Punishment in the ranks was swift and terrible, for the corps was situated far from any of the civilising things of modern life, and deeds were done which the world knew not of; deeds which would not have been approved if reported at headquarters.

The regiment of which Jean became a unit was stationed in a high valley that had but one outlet, a wild pass down which a mountain river roared and foamed and tossed. The narrow path by the side of this stream was the only way out of or into the valley, for all around, the little plateau was walled in by immense peaks of everlasting snow, dazzling in the sunlight, and luminous even in the still, dark nights. From the peaks to the south, Italy might have been seen, but no man had ever dared to climb any of them. The angry little river was fed from a glacier whose blue breast lay sparkling in the sunshine to the south, and the stream circumnavigated the enclosed plateau, as if trying to find an outlet for its tossing waters.

Jean was terribly lonely in these dreary and unaccustomed solitudes. The white mountains awed him, and the mad roar of the river seemed but poor compensation for the dignified measured thunder of the waves on the broad sands of the Brittany coast.

But Jean was a good-natured giant, and he strove to do whatever was required of him. He was not quick at repartee, and the men mocked his Breton dialect. He became the butt for all their small and often mean jokes, and from the first he was very miserable, for, added to his yearning for the sea, whose steady roar he heard in his dreams at night, he felt the utter lack of all human sympathy.

At first he endeavoured, by unfailing good nature and prompt obedience, to win the regard of his fellows, and he became in a measure the slave of the regiment; but the more he tried to please the more his burden increased, and the greater were the insults he was compelled to bear from both officers and men. It was so