A Bit of Red Ribbon

 

cover art by Hubert Rogers

I've written about J.D. Newsom's Foreign Legion stories a number of times now. I read another one last night and, as usual, enjoyed it enormously. I have yet to run across a Newsom story I didn't like.

"A Bit of Red Ribbon" was first published in Adventure's June 15, 1931 issue. In it, we meet meek, henpecked John Jefferson Forbes-Smith, who has been waiting in the rain for an hour and a half for his wife to come out of a store.  She had said "I shan't be a minute," but Forbes-Smith is used to her minutes stretching into hours.

In a rare fit of mild rebellion, he goes into a bar. He intends to order a coffee, but he's soon downing whiskey sours with a new friend. 

When he wakes up the next morning, he's been arrested for public drunkenness. He is wearing different cloths and carrying the ID of a man named Smith who joined the Foreign Legion the day before. The cops won't believe his story and ship him off to the Legion.

So poor henpecked Forbes-Smith soon finds himself in North Africa, being drilled until he's exhausted and punished whenever he tries to point out that he doesn't belong in the Legion. He soon decides that he can't ever go home anyways--his wife would reject him because of the shame he would be bringing to her. 

At the same time, he does toughen up a little. So, when he spots his wife in a nearby town--certainly there in search of him--he immediately volunteers to accompany a column marching into battle. His sergeant agrees to let him go: "I don't blame you. I'd rather take my chance [in battle] any day rather than face some women!"

Newsom strikes a fine balance in this story. There's a dark humor underlaying Forbes-Smith's plight, but Newsom's description of life in the Legion, the desert heat and--eventually--the chaos of battle are all vivid and without irony. Forbes-Smith's character growth is realistic. Some men, after all, are manned-up by military life. But, though Forbes-Smith does man up, he does so in fits and starts, with the deliberate intension of getting killed when he volunteers for combat. It's a realistic depiction of gradual character growth that meshes well with Newsom's realistic description of desert combat and serving in the Foreign Legion. 

So when Forbes-Smith has a chance to perform a dangerous mission, he may prove to himself that he's more of a man than he thought.

You can read the story for yourself HERE.