French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The new recruits were issued their kit and sent for another medical examination, which, in Martyn's case, “... consisted merely of the doctor asking me if I was all right and cautioning me to be careful in my dealings with the opposite sex.”30 Then they were distributed among the barracks rooms, where the old soldiers could initiate them in the basic skills of their trade. The German Jean Pfirmann was handed over to his “double” by the section corporal: “Here is the recruit,” the corporal said. “See to it that he becomes a good legionnaire.”31

  There was one more formality to accomplish—as legionnaires were not permitted civilian clothes, these must be got rid of. “Would you like me to sell your clothes for you?” Martyn was asked. “I shall get a better price than you would, perhaps.”32 Rosen accepted the offer of his sergeant to act as a go-between, and was just as happy that he did not have to deal with a raucous “riff-raff” of Arabs, Spaniards and Jews who stripped the legionnaires of their civilian clothes for a fraction of their value.33 Aristide Merolli, who decided to conduct his own negotiations, was taken into a courtyard to confront “... a howling mob of Arabs in dustcoats and Jews dressed like Europeans or with a turban à la polonaise, who ran at us, deafened us and annoyed us with noise and gesticulations, tore our clothes from us, felt them, smelled them, hurled them back, disdainfully, and threw out an offer which we found insulting. Nevertheless, for a modest sum, a few francs, all our belongings were snapped up by the rapacious men and the crowd recovered its calm. The satisfied faces of these buyers confirmed that we had made a bad deal.”34 Ehrhart's new comrades threw his clothes over the barrack wall to a legionnaire who soon returned laden with cigarettes and bottles of wine.35

  It was at this moment, the fatigues and upheaval of the journey to Algeria behind them, that many could begin to take stock of the service for which they had volunteered five years of their lives. Junger, to take but one example, immediately realized that he had been cast into a “mixed and questionable” society: a small Italian who constantly chewed garlic and with whom he could communicate only in sign language; an Austrian with a low-class Viennese accent forced to flee his country after trying to murder a rival for his girlfriend's affections; a massive German, ex-circus actor, whose party piece was to chew and swallow his wine glass (“But once you had seen this two or three times,” recorded Junger, “it got boring.”); two Frenchmen, one of whom was the section corporal; a rather shifty Spaniard whose family lived in Sidi-bel-Abbès; two Germans who were inseparable; two Dutchmen, one of whom had lived in Borneo and the other of whom frequently wrote letters “in the laborious manner of children” to his fiancée, who apparently already had waited ten years for his return; and, lastly, a rather elegant but aloof Pole who, it was rumored, had fled into the Legion after being caught with his hands in the company till.36

  Legionnaires obviously comprised a fairly heterogeneous collection of humanity. But who were these men? The question is not an easy one to answer, as legionnaires not only enlisted under false names—the “anonymat”—but also conjured up false pasts to match. When Ehrhart's recruiting sergeant asked him if he preferred to enlist under his real name, or borrow a name and nationality, he asked the advice of an old legionnaire, who told him to retain his real identity if he had nothing to hide: “In the Legion, no one concerns himself with what you may have on your conscience,” he was told.37 However, others like Flutsch, who did have something to hide, or who simply wanted a fresh start in life, preferred more imaginative options. This practice was both respected and even encouraged by the Legion as part of its romanticism and tradition of asylum. Indeed, it may be more important to know who they were not, or who they pretended to be. For, as has been noted, the anonymat has caused people to build great legends around the Legion.38 What has been less apparent, perhaps, is that it caused legionnaires to build great legends around themselves: “With complete bad faith, I constructed for myself a past as I would have dreamed it to be,” Antoine Sylvere confessed, “that of the son of a rich farmer, happy owner of at least twelve cows, destined for a life of abundance and of study. As I had to justify my flight, I did not hesitate to kill off my father and remarry my mother to an absolutely insupportable man. The only truth which ended the story was the affirmation that I was happy in the Legion and had not the slightest desire to leave.”39 One of Rosen's companions, a German named Muller, gave his name as von Rader and “declared that his father was the Chancellor of the German Supreme Court and that he himself was by profession a juggler and lance-corporal of marine reserves. And the colour-sergeant put it all down in the big book without the ghost of a smile.”40

  But outside the Legion, the anonymat gave birth to at least two legends, both of which proved useful recruitment tools. The first, which was current almost from the first days of the corps’ creation, portrayed the Legion as a band of outlaws, an asylum for men on the run from the law. This was certainly true, as the Legion itself admitted. During morning muster, pictures of fugitives might on occasion be circulated by the sergeant as part of a police inquiry. But Luc Dangy insisted that no one would have identified the culprit even had he been standing in the front rank.41 Flutsch, who fled into the Legion to avoid prosecution for embezzlement, and Junger discovered that men who had had minor scrapes with the law were a fairly common commodity in the Legion.

  To be sure, any army might offer a convenient asylum to men in legal difficulty, not the least the British army, according to Frederic Martyn: “Personally, if I wished to hide from the police of this or any other country, when they wanted badly to find me, I should be very careful indeed to keep away from the Legion,” he maintained. “I rather fancy that it would be safer to try to get into the Metropolitan Police.”42 But opinion was unanimous that professional criminals would not find a home in the Legion. Even the Swiss Leon Randin, who condemned the Legion as human exploitation on a grand scale, admitted that hardened criminals would find the life uncongenial,43 a view supported by the Legion commanding general in the 1930s, Paul Rollet.44 Nor might the Legion offer them an inviolate sanctuary—on his way back to France to face trial after he confessed to his own crimes, Flutsch was accompanied by a legionnaire of one week being extradited to Germany to stand trial for murder.45

  Yet the “outlaw” myth was important, for it drew to the Legion men for whom the attractions of serving in such company were irresistible, men perfectly qualified to serve in more “respectable” military organizations. However, as will be seen, the anonymat also offered the disadvantage from the Legion's viewpoint of permitting bad soldiers, even deserters from the Legion, to re-enlist without having to produce the service record that might have caused them to be rejected.

  The second great myth depicted the Legion as a band of romantic outcasts, a refuge for Europe's Beau Gestes, men of good family and education who after being jilted or enduring some other downturn in their affairs sought to bury their misfortunes, and themselves, in the Legion. This image of the Legion was well established at least by the 1850s.46 However, by the turn of the century some authors claimed that the Legion had assumed a definite middle-class character. The most extreme statement of this view came from the French writer Georges d'Esparbès, who, after listing the rather modest professions of legionnaires enlisting in 1885 and 1898, dismissed them as fabrications,

  ... attributable to imagination, to untruth. Many of these vultures transformed themselves into sparrows to get into the barracks unnoticed: the engineer enlisted as a mechanic, the financier as bookkeeper, the architect as a worker, the solicitor as office worker, the factory owner as an operative, the count passes for a horse trainer, the intellectual for a gardener, the polytechnicien for a blacksmith, the philosopher for a farmer or the salesman for a valet de chambre. The column reserved for those “without profession’” numbers 112, and obviously overflows with ex-officers, doctors, teachers, priests, lawyers: it is the statistics of Misfortune which hide there.47

  This view was supported by others who wrote on the Legio
n before World War I, including the journalist Hubert-Jacques and Colonel Gaston Moch.48

  However, Aristide Merolli, a legitimate member of the middle classes who threw up a promising but tedious prefectural career in Italy to join the Legion in 1910, in which he rose to the rank of captain, identified four basic recruitment categories:

  1. The miserable, without work who prefer to enlist rather than beg and sleep under bridges. 2. Those who seek adventure, generally the very young. 3. Deserters. 4. Adventurers who come to forget their mistakes or who would like to be forgotten by society. Romantic hews spring up sometimes, and it is these cases, purely exceptional, which give rise to the legend that kings having lost their thrones, bishops who misplaced their miters or generals who lost their stars make up the majority of legionnaires.49

  Of course, the anonymat, reinforced by the reluctance of some legionnaires to discuss their true pasts and their tendency to invent imaginary ones, encouraged this image. Yet the belief that the Legion offered asylum to rich or famous men bestowed both glamor and mystery upon the corps and allowed its members to lay claim to special status in the army. Rosen was told that a member of the Prussian royal family had died fighting for the Legion in the 1880s: “The ‘royal prince of Prussia’ is part and parcel of the unwritten history of the Legion, told from légionnaire to légionnaire, and I have often wondered how much truth there may be in the legend,” he wrote. “Very likely the man of Saïda had been a German aristocrat, the black sheep of some good family, and in the course of time and telling the Legion had made him a royal prince of Prussia.”50 Le Poer, Rosen, Martyn, Junger, even Flutsch, all encountered legionnaires whose bearing, manner or unexplained sources of revenue indicated that they had been men of condition before coming into the Legion. However, discretion often prevented them from asking questions. On the other hand, there were plenty of legionnaires willing enough to tell their life story over a liter of cheap Algerian wine. And d'Esparbès to the contrary, legionnaires appear to have demonstrated a marked preference for social promotion rather than modesty. This was especially true of those who claimed to have been officers or NCOs before coming into the Legion. For instance, Protestant pastor J. Pannier, who served in Tonkin in 1900, was startled when a legionnaire appeared before him in the uniform of a German cavalry lieutenant, threw off his cloak and said: “I want you to see that I am not mad, and for you to know who I am. Here is my card.”51

  So much for the place of the anonymat in the creation of the Legion's public image. What has been almost totally ignored by historians is the role of the anonymat in the socialization process of the legionnaire. What the Legion offered its recruits was the possibility of a completely fresh start in life, with a slate wiped clean of past sins. “I don't want to know what you have done,” Ehrhart's colonel explained to the new arrivals. “That is why a legionnaire, even an ex-convict, can become an NCO, be decorated, even be awarded the Légion d'honneur, if he shows himself worthy.” And when his conscript military record listing numerous stays in the guardhouse was forwarded to the Legion, his captain told him, “All that is in the past. It doesn't interest me. What counts is what you do here.”52 The adoption of a new name and past not only meant that history could not catch up with one, but it also, eased the psychological transition between the past and the new existence. “The idea that a new life is possible is very attractive to him,” Junger wrote, especially to those men who did not know what they wanted: “When all is said and done, no one is so easily led as he who does not know what he wants.”53 Legionnaires became actors, men who lived behind a mask that increasingly became indistinguishable from their true identity. But actors require a stage. That was provided by the corps, and a heroic one it was, too. Their new existence, their new identity, became tightly bound to that of the regiment. In this way, the heroic deeds of the Legion were especially important because they strengthened and validated the personal identities of the legionnaires in a world where fiction and reality were not always easy to distinguish.54

  All military organizations seek to impress their novitiates with the heroic deeds of past generations as part of their adaptation to a new military life. However, this formed an especially important part of induction into the Legion. Much, perhaps most, of this indoctrination was unofficial. For instance, Flutsch delighted in hearing stories of bar fights that pitted legionnaires defending the honor of their corps against a motley of soldiers from other regiments. “Flory's eyes sparkled as if he could imagine the barroom where 20 drinkers were making fun of the Legion.” But for Flutsch these were more than mere accounts of low brawls. These stories and the man who told them, the uneducated Flory, exemplified for him the best of the Legion—rough and uncultured but with a “sort of innate grandeur,” indomitable spirit and integrity that prepared legionnaires “to accomplish some sublime and immense sacrifice.”55

  The theme of the supreme sacrifice was also strongly emphasized in the official indoctrination process. Martyn's contingent was taken into the “salle d'honneur,” which at Sidi-bel-Abbès was a separate building with a suitably impressive entrance. The walls of the large room were covered with portraits of past Legion heroes and canvases of battle scenes. An NCO recounted the battle of Camerone and concluded by saying, “Soldiers of the Legion, remember the third company of this regiment and Camaron when it comes to your turn to fight.” Martyn confessed to being “profoundly impressed.” But his comrade Petrovski was enthusiastic: “What a regiment!” he exclaimed on leaving the building, “What men!”56 Ehrhart, too, was awed by the commemoration of Camerone at Sidi-bel-Abbès, which he witnessed in 1906: “When they blew the retreat,” he wrote, “more than one legionnaire had tears in his eyes. I had been a legionnaire for only a short time, [but] I was moved and my thoughts were for all of those unknown men who died so that this flag would always fly proudly.”57 By the time Aristide Merolli arrived at Saïda in 1910, the list of battle honors had lengthened considerably since Martyn's day. He and his fellow recruits listened to them with “profound emotion,” as well as to the war stories of the veterans, “a thousand dizzying episodes of audacity and cold courage” that made them eager to complete training and get on with their own “belles aventures.”58

  Furthermore, as will be seen, the anonymat became an important ingredient in the Legion's battle performance. Men who could claim, or imply, that they had previous military experience might be promoted more rapidly to corporal or section leader. But more, even if they did not seek promotion (and many did not), it could give men a moral ascendancy and influence over their fellow soldiers in a unit that before 1914 was desperately short of cadres. One of the results might be the creation of parallel hierarchies in some instances. As will be seen, these parallel hierarchies encouraged by the anonymat could cut both ways, to increase performance in combat or to encourage indiscipline and even desertion, depending upon the disposition of the “natural” leader.

  So while there were certainly Beau Geste types in the Legion, they made up only a minuscule minority. Leon Randin was probably generous to them when he wrote in 1906: “Whatever is said, the unfortunate victims of life, those defeated in ‘the struggle for life,’ are more numerous in the Legion, despite the popular legends which claim that most of legionnaires are fallen princes or sons of ruined families. Take one hundred of these unhappy soldiers, and you have a maximum of twenty or thirty scatter-brains or ‘declasses’ and seventy or eighty victims that misery or hopelessness have thrown into the chasm of the Legion.”59 For Ehrhart, an orphan dismissed at age twenty-two from the French army with a very undistinguished service record, the Legion was a last resort. “What am I to do?” he asked. “My uncles and my aunts want nothing to do with me. I am on my own. I have no trade, no civilian clothes, no money. I am completely destitute.” After sleeping rough and trying to pick up some money carrying bags in the train station, he tried to enlist in the French marines. “A lieutenant questioned me about my military record and told me that he saw the Foreign Legion as my on
ly option. I accepted. I had no choice.”60 Flutsch's comrades, with two exceptions, were very modest fellows indeed. A striking illustration of the social recruitment of the Legion occurred with the arrival at the Sidi-bel-Abbès and Saïda train stations of the weekly draft of filthy, ragged recruits, who were greeted by an immaculately turned out Legion contingent led by the band.

  Commanders of the famous Spanish tercios under Philip II actually sought to enlist gentleman rankers, called particulares, because it was believed that they set an example of courage for the lower-class recruits.61 Those members of the middle class who enlisted in the Legion, however, were usually more trouble than they were worth. One of the results of the myth of the Legion as an exile for jilted middle-class males was that it encouraged some men of a more dramatic disposition, like Erwin Rosen, to make for the Legion as soon as life's prospects began to look a little bleak. “These women! these women!” Martyn was told by the medical officer in the process of his induction physical. “What fine recruiting-sergeants they are! How many engagements in the Legion would there be, I wonder, if it wasn't for women?”62 Of course, the number of enlistments provoked by broken love affairs was probably infinitesimal, although Martyn believed that they made up “a fairly numerous class.”63 However, from the Legion's point of view, the image of their service as a sort of romantic holiday from the pressures of life was not healthy. For while the numbers of middle-class recruits were limited, some of them served to give the Legion a bad name, because the realities of Legion life almost never lived up to their romantic expectations. As a consequence, their books about the Legion often take on the tone of exposés, litanies of the horrors of Legion life, or a sort of leçon morale directed at the rudderless or the suicidally romantic. When one examines the nature of Legion life, it is easy enough to understand why this was so. For the middle-class recruit had to come to terms not only with the transition from civilian to military life, and a rather special military life it was, too. But there was also the added shock of being thrust into an overwhelmingly working-class milieu, a rough and ready world stripped bare of the courtesies and deference that they had grown to consider a normal part of everyday existence.