VOICES OF THE FOREIGN LEGION

Never has a tube ride been so nerve-wracking; counting the stations still to come, I was aching to get there and get it over with. At the same time, I didn’t want the journey to end. When it did, I rapidly climbed the stairs two at a time to ground level. I asked an official-looking chap in a 50-pence-shaped, peaked cap directions for the Foreign Legion. ‘Où Légion Étrangère?’ Without batting an eyelid, he pointed along a tree-lined road, ‘Par là, par là’ [There].

It was a very daunting walk up the hill from the station to the old fort with its huge wooden gate about 20 feet high. I did what I’m sure many guys did, and that is turn around and walk back to the station to have a beer and think things over. I then went back up, knocked on the door, and went through it right into the Legion.

There was a sergeant sitting behind the table who looked me up and down and said nothing. I broke the ice and said in English that I had come to join the Foreign Legion and he gave me a look that was a mixture of wonder and sympathy. He spoke reasonable English with a German accent and asked me, ‘Why?’

The pen trembled in my hand. God alone knew what I was agreeing to and what rights I was signing away. But once I had signed, I felt an indescribable release. I’d finally done it!

In some ways I joined the Foreign Legion to forget; as it gave me time not to think about the many problems I had left behind me. After 12 years’ service in the British Army I was back in my home town of Aberystwyth, back to the reality of electric, gas and water bills – something we never had to deal with in our protected Army environment. However, it was a very disappointing homecoming as I didn’t feel the ex-military were being well treated; I couldn’t find work and nobody wanted to know.

The atmosphere of the close little room was unspeakable. It was foul with the smell of unwashed humanity, sweat, dirt and unwashed clothes. Long benches stood against the wall and men sat there, candidates for the Foreign Legion, waiting for the medical examination, waiting to know whether their bodies were still worth five centimes daily pay.

There are a number of men who join for strictly professional reasons. They are men who want to be professional soldiers and cannot soldier in their own countries or have decided that it is anyhow better to soldier in the Legion. For them the Legion has certain concrete advantages. There are plenty of opportunities for active service – and for action. Promotion in the non-commissioned ranks can be rapid, with corresponding benefits, and for some, at least, it is easier to become an officer in the Legion than it might be in their national forces.

I can’t understand what you wanted to join up for. You had a good life in America. It was totally different for me; the Legion’s my lifeline. Things back in Poland are desperate – there’s crime and corruption everywhere. The only people making money are the mafia. I liked my studies but how could I live on three hundred US dollars a month? If I make the cut, I’ll join the parachute regiment where I hear you can earn fifteen thousand francs a month and more on mission to Africa!

I found that half my Legion comrades were Germans, the very people I had been trying to kill for four years in the bloodiest war of all time. I had to admit that the Germans were the better elements. The majority had belonged to the Spartacist group of Marxists, and others were monarchists who had enlisted to avoid serving the new [German] republic. The monarchists were mainly former Prussian officers. Most of the Spartacists, on the other hand, were schoolteachers, intellectuals and engineers.

Driving up to the gates of the camp, I saw my first legionnaire in parade uniform; he was wearing a white kepi, a green tie and blue cummerbund. He saluted the coach and we drove through the gates and up a hill past the enormous parade ground at the far end of which I could see the Monument aux Morts, the memorial to every dead legionnaire. It took the form of a huge bronze globe supported by an enormous stone plinth. It had originally occupied a position at Sidi-bel-Abbès, but when the Legion left Algeria it had been dismantled stone by stone and brought to its present resting place at Aubagne. Behind it was a stone wall on which was written in bronze letters the motto of the Legion, ‘Legio Patria Nostra’ [the Legion is Our Country].

I spent three weeks in Aubagne, and it was very much an acclimatisation for Legion life. You learned to march, you learned to keep your gear in order, you learned to salute properly and you began your introduction to what it meant to be a legionnaire. And I had my first introduction to the dreaded corvée – the cleaning routine. Being on corvée duties meant spending your whole day cleaning – first your barracks, then the floor, then the toilets and finally, perhaps, the entire parade ground. If one thing in Legion life was to be avoided at all costs, it was corvée duty, and, needless to say, that was impossible.

There is a certain turnover in the Legion and the gaps have to be filled but at present we have more candidates than we can use. We are now accepting about one in eight, so you can see the selection is fairly rigorous. The person’s background is taken into consideration. Previous military experience is helpful but not necessary. Civilian experiences can be just as important. We may even accept someone fresh out of school if we feel he has the right attitude and potential to make it as a legionnaire.

This was a series of interviews, which bordered on interrogation, about your previous life. The first session lasted about three hours and was like an A–Z of your life to date. It was a grilling that went on for several further sessions over an entire week, and if any aspect of your story didn’t gel, you were out. The Legion interrogators were incredibly adept at indentifying recruits who were trying to hide something in their past – in most cases a criminal conviction or an ongoing problem with the police. If they were suspicious, they could devote two entire sessions to asking the same question in about two hundred different ways. One of the worst crimes in the Legion is to be caught lying, and it’s not something that would be sorted out the easy way – at the receiving end of a fist or boot.

In the dawn, through overcast days, in the chill, damp dusk as we gazed across the harbour at the pin-points of lights, through the bleak barrack-rooms hazy with the smoke of acrid French tobacco, would reverberate an interminable roll-call over the loudspeaker. Here and there figures would detach themselves from the windswept huddles and slip away to the orderly office. We might not see them again. An empty bunk that night, its rugs returned to the store and waiting for the next occupant, would remind us of final rejection.

We leave for Algeria tomorrow. Excitement is running high. Imaginations are working overtime. We have been given Legion haircuts – clean sweep, bald as eggs, known as a boule à zero. We look more like convicts than ever. I am looking forward to getting out of this rat hole.

We now began our period of indoctrination. It was to fill our heads with the traditions of the Legion. One of the first things they did was to take you around the museum of the Legion, the Salle d’Honneur, where the great battles of the past were described to us, along with exploits of the heroes. We saw the captured battle colours, ancient swords, rifles and other relics. They gave us each a little book with our names inscribed inside, which highlighted the Legion of the past. It really did work. Every day on the parade ground there was some kind of traditional activity going on with the Legion band playing all the trumpet calls which we had to memorise and which always ended with a performance of ‘Le Boudin’ [the regimental march]. It was all very moving. And the traditions of the Legion began to sink in.

We visited the Legion’s museum and wandered round looking at the different flags of the units which had fought all over the world for 150 years. There were displays of medals, weapons, uniforms and pictures. We went down into the crypt where the wooden hand of Capitaine Danjou [hero of the fight at Camerone] lay in a glass case. It was the focal point of the room, and whenever visiting dignitaries and military authorities came to visit Aubagne they would be taken down to the crypt where they would stand and salute the hand. There was a poem on the wall written by an American legionnaire called Alan Seeger during World War I:

There were tattered flags from Dien Bien Phu and Algeria, and collections of medals belonging to famous Legion soldiers. I walked over and stood respectfully in front of Capitaine Danjou’s false limb. It was made of dark wood and looked like a graceful gorilla’s paw. I read another poem on the wall written by a God-fearing captain who had been killed in Algeria, in which he implored God to look sparingly on humble soldiers performing their divine task as warriors of Christianity. It effectively conjured up the mixture of religion, fighting prowess and romanticism which the Legion held so dear.

The French army was besieging Puebla. The Legion had been ordered to protect traffic and ensure the security of convoys over seventy-five kilometres of road.

The appeal of Camerone to a legionnaire is as natural as instinct. He reaches out to it in his own heart, because it is part of his own pain. It is the great reminder to the legionnaire that the sand is always blowing in his eyes, the battleground is always ill-chosen, the odds are too great, the cause insufficient to justify his death, and the tools at hand always the wrong ones. And, above all, nobody cares whether he wins or loses, lives or dies. Camerone gives the legionnaire strength to live with his despair. It reminds him that he cannot win, but it makes him feel that there is dignity in being a loser.

It is at this time that the almost fully trained recruit realises that, although on enlistment he swore an oath of allegiance to the French flag, that flag is wholly represented by the Legion, and only the Legion. He may be termed a soldier but he is not part of the French Army, and for him there will only exist the Legion and its officers. The French regular army is as remote as the man on the moon, and will not even exist in his mental make-up.

On Bastille Day the Legion marches last down the Champs Elysées in Paris. There they exaggerate the slow march, instead of the Legion’s actual regulation 88 paces a minute they bring it down to 60-odd paces a minute for effect. You’re practically falling over, you’re going so slow. But it is pretty impressive, and it is good to be in that platoon or squad when you’re marching.

From the highest to the lowest, there is a strong bond among legionnaires which is stronger than any solidarity of rank. A private in the Legion knows that his colonel prefers him to any officer who is not in the Legion. The Legion is like a large family that needs only itself to exist.

In 1945, an agreement between the French and Russian governments provided for the repatriation of all French prisoners in Russian hands, and all Russians on French soil. A Russian commission visited the barracks of the Legion. It was received with perfect courtesy. It showed the colonel a list of Russians in the Legion. The colonel recognised all the names, but the commission must excuse him for at that hour of the day all the men were out for drill. He asked the commission to return the following morning and promised that all the men would be there. That evening he called all the men together, explained the situation and asked each one what he wanted to do. They all preferred the Legion to Russia. The colonel immediately changed all their names to others that had a French ring. When the Russian commission presented itself the next day, it was received with the greatest courtesy. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said the colonel, ‘but yesterday evening I imprudently told those men to be ready to appear before you in the morning. Last night, every one of the scamps deserted.’

Some time or another he visited a tattooist, and printed indelibly in letters an inch high across his right hand was the one word ‘Merde!’ [Shit!] This had somehow escaped notice at his medical examination, and later caused quite a bit of embarrassment. He was ordered to wear a glove on his right hand so as to avoid giving offence to officers when saluting. As he liked nothing better than giving offence, he was constantly losing the glove, and each time he was sent to prison for fifteen days.

The story is told that one day, during an inspection at Sidi-bel-Abbès, a colonel was struck by the appearance of a recruit with the moustache of a Tartar and the beard of a prophet. The colonel asked: ‘What were you before you came here?’

Once, when we were on a long march, I saw him weary and tired, dragging along behind his section. I said to him: ‘I should like better to see you at the head or your section and not behind – especially you, an ex-officer, with all your decorations.’ But on the day that he was wounded I saw him at the head of his section, rushing forward, fearless of danger. Afterwards he wrote me a letter from hospital saying:

Then I received another letter from his father [a retired general], telling me that he himself had sent his boy into the Legion.

All civilisations have their sufferers. In every country in Europe, and without doubt in America also, live men for whom life is a penance. Some have been stricken down by misfortunes or by unforeseen happenings and the sight of the places where they have been unhappy has become unbearable for them. Others have suffered by their own mistakes or they have committed some act for which their consciences reprove them; they feel that, rightly, they are despised and they know that they can reconstruct themselves only by escaping from their pasts. Others, citizens of countries which have been overthrown, cannot adapt themselves to new conditions: their only resource is to expatriate themselves.

The Legion is a refuge . . . As such it exists in a world where it becomes increasingly difficult for the individual to find a refuge. And it may even be surer to escape into the anonymity of suburbia than the anonymity of Sidi-bel-Abbès. But many people do not want to escape into nothing – they want to escape into a community, into a tradition, into a myth. Man needs to make a gesture.

Many legionnaires took a masochistic pleasure in an unhappy life. Attempted explanations are complicated by the fact that the Legion is composed of men of many races, whose origins, sentiments and ideas are totally different. This in itself gives the legionnaire an indefinable personality of his own.

Over the decades the Legion had developed its own kind of soldiering. It was not soldiering where all hung on victory or defeat, as in other armies, but rather a stylish profession of arms, aimed at bringing greater glory to France and to the Legion. As at Camerone and Dien Bien Phu, the cost was high; but the Legion in its purest tradition saw only merit in dying for France. Painted on the walls of a barracks in the last century had been the words, ‘Legionnaires, you are soldiers in order to die, and I am sending you where you can die.’