Other editions of book Beau Ideal

The narrator of this story is an American called Otis Vanbrugh, who forms a friendship in childhood with the Geste boys, and with Isabel, who grows up to be John's beloved. Otis is also madly in love with her, and it is on her account that he throws himself heroically into the penal divisions of the French Foreign Legion in the middle east in order to save John for Isabel. (John himself has gone on an addle-pated but honourable rescue mission. In fact, the men in this story are all so busy rescuing each other, they seriously endanger each other at every turn!) So we're operating in the realms of High Honour here, with all the repressed misogyny masquerading as devotion, and all the similarly repressed homoeroticism that that world entails. The patronizing tone with which the Arabs are treated is enough to make you gag. Add that to the singularly patronizing attitude to women that I have already mentioned, and it was enough to make this a far less enjoyable experience...

My brother caught the priest and Dolores… . In the priest’s own church… . My brother married them before the altar… and their married life was brief!… But of course, God knew he was mad… . As he left that desecrated church, he cried, 'Never will I enter the House of God, again!… ' And that very night the big earthquake came and shattered our village with a dozen others. As we dashed through the door—the old mother in my brother’s arms, my crippled sister on my back—the roof caved in and the very road fell from before our little posada, down the hillside. My brother was in front and fell, my mother still in his arms… . And where did he recover consciousness? Tell me that!… Before the altar, upon the dead body of his victim, the murdered priest—who thus saved my brother’s life, for he had fallen thirty feet from the half-destroyed church-roof, through which he had crashed… . Yes, he had entered the House of God once more!… "It was to South America that he fled from the police—to that El Dorado where so many of us go in search of what we never find. And there he went from worse to worse than worst, defying God and slaying man… and woman! For he shot his own woman merely because she knelt—just went on her knees to God… . And one terrible night of awful storm, when fleeing alone by mountain paths from the soldiers or guardias civiles, a flash of lightning showed him a ruined building, and into it he dashed and hid. "It may have been the rolling thunder, the streaming rain, or an avalanche of stones dislodged by the horses of the police who passed along the path above—I do not know—but there was a terrible crash, a heavy blow, a blinding, suffocating dust—and he was pinned, trapped, held as in a giant fist, unable to move hand or foot, or head.

1925. Wren immortalized the French Foreign Legion in Beau Geste and many other novels of high adventure and romance. Beau Ideal is the sequel to Beau Geste. featuring Otis Van Brugh, brother of Hank and Mark Van Brugh, who were in Beau Sabreur. He visits Africa and gets caught up in a fight.He is then asked by Isobel Geste to find her husband John, who has disappeared in Africa trying to find his old friends Hank and Buddy. Otis, who was a childhood playmate of John and who is in love with Isobel, enlists in the foreign legion. He gets himself sent to a penal battalion and finds John. Arabs raid the battalion and capture Otis and John. The Arab girl the Death Angel falls in love with Otis