Now that everybody was going to the war, he was wishing to do the same thing.

He was not afraid of death; the only thing that was disturbing him was the military service, the uniform, the mechanical obedience to bugle-call, the blind subservience to the chiefs.

Fighting was not offering any difficulties for him but his nature capriciously resented everything in the form of discipline.

The foreign groups in Paris were trying to organize each its own legion of volunteers and he, too, was planning his--a battalion of Spaniards and South Americans, reserving naturally the presidency of the organizing committee for himself, and later the command of the body.
He had inserted notices in the papers, making the studio in the rue de la Pompe the recruiting office.

In ten days, two volunteers had presented themselves; a clerk, shivering in midsummer, who stipulated that he should be an officer because he was wearing a suitable jacket, and a Spanish tavern-keeper who at the very outset had wished to rob Argensola of his command on the futile pretext that he was a soldier in his youth while the Bohemian was only an artist.