Books with title Beau Geste.

A shot rang out. The Arabs surged forward under a savage fusillade of heavy fire. Nearer and nearer they came, shouting with hate and blood-lust. Geste rushed up and down his side of the roof, pausing only long enough to load his rifle and fire into the shrieking mob below, hoping to trick the Arabs into believing the fort was heavily manned. Load, aim, and fire, ignoring the cries and curses of the wounded, the dead sprawled out in their own blood. Of all those hard-bitten veterans who had yelled their defiance at the first Arab onslaught, who had shouted with joy at the order of "Aux Armes!", only 10 remained, 10 legionnaires against a thousand Arabs. Beau Geste is the world-famous novel of suspense and adventure, love and glory, courage, and treachery. It is the thrilling story of three men who braved the hellish brutality and ruthless savagery of the French Foreign Legion to protect the honor of a woman they loved more than their lives.

A cavalry unit, having crossed the Sahara to relieve a besieged French Foreign Legion fort, arrives to an eerie silence — the enemy has vanished, and the post's walls and ramparts are defended by dead men. The fort's commander, slain by a bayonet through the heart, clutches a letter that links the riddle of the desert massacre to another mystery, the long-ago and far-away theft of a sapphire known as the Blue Water. It was the scandalous disappearance of the Blue Water that led to the self-exile of Beau, the oldest of the Geste brothers. John and Digby couldn't believe that Beau was a thief and refused to allow him to shoulder the blame alone. Thus all three Gestes turned up in North Africa, among the ranks of the Foreign Legion. Their story of suspense, betrayal, and bravery has inspired several movie versions and remains a favorite with readers who relish a classic adventure.

In the first place, there was the old standing trouble about the Shuwa Patrol; in the second, the truculent Chiboks were waxing insolent again, and their young men were regarding not the words of their elders concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley, and what happened, long, long ago, after the battle of Chibok Hill. Thirdly, the price of grain had risen to six shillings a saa, and famine threatened; fourthly, the Shehu and Shuwa sheiks were quarrelling again; and, fifthly, there was a very bad smallpox ju-ju abroad in the land (a secret society whose "secret" was to offer His Majesty’s liege subjects the choice between being infected with smallpox, or paying heavy blackmail to the society). Lastly, there was acrimonious correspondence with the All-Wise Ones (of the Secretariat in "Aiki Square" at Zungeru), who, as usual, knew better than the man on the spot, and bade him do either the impossible or the disastrous. And across all the Harmattan was blowing hard, that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea, not so much as a sand-storm, but as a mist or fog of dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches and cameras, defiling water, food and everything else; rendering life a burden and a curse. The fact, moreover, that thirty days' weary travel over burning desert, across oceans of loose wind-blown sand and prairies of burnt grass, through breast-high swamps, and across unbridged boatless rivers, lay between him and Kano, added nothing to his satisfaction. For, in spite of all, satisfaction there was, inasmuch as Kano was rail-head, and the beginning of the first stage of the journey Home. That but another month lay between him and "leave out of Africa," kept George Lawrence on his feet. From that wonderful and romantic Red City, Kano, sister of Timbuktu, the train would take him, after a three days' dusty journey, to the rubbish-heap called Lagos, on the Bight of Benin of the wicked West African Coast. There he would embark on the good ship Appam, greet her commander, Captain Harrison, and sink into a deck chair with that glorious sigh of relief, known in its perfection only to those weary ones who turn their backs upon the Outposts and set their faces towards Home. Meantime, for George Lawrence—disappointment, worry, frustration, anxiety, heat, sand-flies, mosquitoes, dust, fatigue, fever, dysentery, malarial ulcers, and that great depression which comes of monotony indescribable, weariness unutterable, and loneliness unspeakable.

Percival Christopher Wren (1 November 1875[1] – 22 November 1941) was an English writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. This was one of 33 novels and short story collections that he wrote, mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa.Wren was a highly secretive man, and his service in the Legion has never been confirmed. When his novels became famous, there was a mysterious absence of authenticating photographs of him as a legionnaire or of the usual press-articles by old comrades wanting to cash in on their memories of a celebrated figure. It is now thought more likely that he encountered legionnaires during travels in French North Africa, and skillfully blended their stories with his own memories of a short spell as a cavalry trooper in England. While his fictional accounts of life in the pre-1914 Foreign Legion are highly romanticised, his details of Legion uniforms, training, equipment and barrack room layout are generally accurate. This may, however, simply reflect careful research on his part. The descriptions of Legion garrison life given in his work The Wages of Virtue, written in 1914, closely match those contained in the autobiographical In the Foreign Legion by ex-legionnaire Edwin Rosen, published by Duckworth London 1910.