Books › Blue Book v057 n06 [1933-10], 1933 › scan 1
Scan 1
Blue Book v057 n06 [1933-10], 1933
12 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Sin Writes History
3Happy is the nation—or man—who has no history. For, as Goethe remarked, sin writes history; goodness is silent. . . . So it comes about that the world's most stirring histories are those of unhappy nations, and some of our most fascinating stories are based on the lives of unhappy or unregenerate men.
5Over a century ago France established a remarkable fighting force which has come to be a favorite refuge for such men—the Foreign Legion. One of it distinguished officers (gallant Major Pechkoff, who wrote "The Bugle Sounds") has perhaps best defined the character of the Legionnaires. They do not comprise a "legion of the lost ones and cohort of the damned." Rather, they are men who have been "wounded in their souls," and who seek in the iron discipline and rigorous campaigning of the Legion to forget their sorrows, and regain courage to face life again—or to lose it.
7These tragic men, naturally, have long been a favorite theme both for reader and writer alike. Ouida's "Under Two Flags" was a famous best-seller of its day; there have since been many others, including the stories of our own Warren H. Miller. But perhaps no stories of the Legion have had such a world-wide success as Percival Christopher Wren's "Beau Geste," "Beau Sabreur" and "Valiant Dust." And for this reason we are especially proud to present to you in this issue the first of a group of six new stories of the Legion by this celebrated writer.
9Major Wren of course knows his subject well. He has served in the British and the Indian armies as well as in the Legion, and in both North and East Africa. More important, he well knows the men and events he writes about—beginning on page 6 of this issue.
11—The Editor
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.