In this connection, stories of persecution of individuals who have done nothing to merit the punishment inflicted on them, especially in military service, should always be accepted with the proverbial grain of salt. For there is never smoke without fire, and the man who is unpopular with all his officers and non-commissioned officers to such an extent as to incur a succession of punishments is usually deserving of all that he gets. Humanity is so constituted that sympathy almost invariably goes to the individual who is at variance with the mass, and in the exercise of sympathy one is apt to overlook the qualities and characteristics of the object on which it is bestowed. We hear, usually, the story of the man who considers himself aggrieved or unjustly punished, and, without listening to the other side of the case, we immediately conclude that his statements are correct in all their details. As a rule, the man who thus attempts to secure a reversal of the decision against him has some inherent quality which makes for unpopularity. He is inclined to curry favour, which renders him a marked man among his comrades, or he commits acts against discipline in such a way that, although it is practically certain that he is the offender, the evidence against him is insufficient to warrant punishment. These and other characteristics of the man concerned bring heavy punishment on him when is finally caught, and, although the punishment is perfectly just, the offender immediately whines over it in such a clever way that sympathising outsiders accord him far more consideration than he deserves, and consider that his just judges have been inhuman brutes, though they merely fulfilled their duty. The offender makes sufficient fuss to be heard, but the individual or body of individuals who ordered his punishment are not able to advertise themselves in similar fashion, and thus a one-sided view is taken.
To return to the Foreign Legion, it may be said that any attempt to quote incidents typical of its members and their ways would be quite useless, for there is in the Legion sufficient material to furnish all the novelists of this and the next century with plots to keep them busy. To outward seeming the soldiers of the Foreign Legion are average men, engaged in average military duties, and it is not until definite contact with them has been established that any realisation of their exceptional qualities and curious defects can be obtained. As is well known, the Legion includes every class of adventurers from men of royal blood and noblemen of the highest rank downward, and many an assumed name conceals a story which would be worth untold gold in Fleet Street, or in the journalistic equivalent of Fleet Street in some other European capital.