Budding novelists in search of ideas for tales of adventure, short
story writers who have come to the end of their stock of episodes,
and all who wield the pen either for amusement or instruction, may be
recommended to turn over the pages that tell the story of the Foreign
Legion. There is a whole literature at their disposal, covering
a period of more than eighty years and written in almost as many
languages as there are nationalities in this remarkable military body,
and it teems from beginning to end with incidents which respond to the
entire gamut of human emotions.
The Foreign Legion, which in time of peace is composed of between eight
and ten thousand men, but which now probably exceeds the strength of
an army corps, since no fewer than thirty-two thousand odd foreigners
enrolled themselves from August 21st, 1914, to April 1st, 1915, is,
as it were, a microcosm of the world. According to official French
returns, there were in its ranks at the beginning of the war nine
thousand five hundred Alsatians and Lorrainers, fourteen hundred and
sixty-two Belgians, three hundred and seventy-nine English, three
thousand three hundred and ninety-three Russians, four thousand nine
hundred and thirteen Italians, thirteen hundred and eighty Greeks,
five hundred and ninety-one Luxembourgers, nine hundred and sixty-nine
Spaniards, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven Swiss, thirteen
hundred and sixty-nine Austro-Hungarians, one thousand and twenty-seven
Germans, five hundred and ninety-two Turks, six hundred Americans, and
four thousand two hundred and fifty-four of various other nationalties,
including, in all probability, as at the time of the Empire, Poles,
Albanians, Croatians, Illyrians, and negroes.
In this world-in-little all classes of society are represented--the
prince and the pauper, the scholar and the illiterate, the one-time
brilliant officer, prominent financier, and ecclesiastic. All of them
are brought to a common level with the lowest of the low through
inherent human weakness, some foolish act committed in haste and
repented of at leisure, or else through some misfortune or other over
which the man who is "down on his luck" has no control whatever.
The social outcast, the deserter, the gambler, the fugitive from
justice, the man who has been crossed in love, the desperate man
who, on second thoughts, prefers the ranks of the Legion to suicide,
the man who has a pure love of soldiering or an inordinate taste for
adventure, the out-and-out failure who has been told by his family to
"make good" and clean off his debt to society--all of them are found
here, living under the shadow of mystery, undergoing the most arduous
life imaginable, and, for the most part, suffering in silence. So
heterogenous are they that the legionaries, quite unjustly, have been
called many ill names. Through the faults of a few, who necessarily
find their way into such an organization, they have all been
indiscriminately labelled with such epithets as "band of criminals,"
"degenerates," "troop of dishonoured foreigners," "heartless
mercenaries," and so on. But many sins can be forgiven the soldiers of
the Legion when we read their history aright, and come to understand
their Spartan characters in the hour of trial and danger. And it is for
that reason that, despite their antecedents and shortcomings, they are
now generally known in French military circles as "The Heroic Rascals,"
or as "The Glorious Blackguards."
The Foreign Legion can trace its origin to the days of the Scottish
archers, employed by Charles VII. of France, and to those of the Swiss,
Albanian, Flemish, Walloon, German, Italian, and other mercenaries in
the service of his successors. At the time of the Convention, in 1793,
an appeal was made to the nations of Europe for soldiers, with the
result that several foreign regiments fought with the revolutionary
armies. All these, however, were disbanded at the fall of Napoleon.
When Louis XVIII. came to the throne he created the Royal Foreign
Legion in their place, but they gradually merged into the regular army.
However, after the 1830 Revolution the Foreign Legion was revived,
and ever since they have taken part in nearly every foreign campaign
in which France has been engaged--in the conquest of Algeria, in the
Crimean War, in Mexico, Tongking, Formosa, Madagascar, and Morocco.