The Wages of Virtue

A legionnaire's barrack in North Africa: an English gentleman, an American, a Russian and a murderer, and a woman in the canteen whom two of them will kill over. Wren claimed to have served in the Legion himself, a claim nobody has ever verified — but he wrote the code of the barrack-room so convincingly that a generation believed him. Fifty-nine plates, from Munch to Alma-Tadema, gather the barrack-room's drinkers, hatred and sudden ambush into a single gallery of Legion life.