THE FOREIGN LEGION

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 689, 15 November 1933, Page 7

THE FOREIGN LEGION

HAPPIER NOW!, BUT LIFE IS STILL HARDEST IN WORLD. A MIXED COMPANY. Don't think the Legion is a Sunday School treat. I have faithfully recorded what the legionaries I have talked to have told me. The fullest possible opportunities have heen given me for doing so without eonstraint. They all agree that it is far from being as had as is igenerally believed. But I should be sorry if any of the hundreds of thousands of young men who 'read The Daily Mail were to dash off to the nearest recruiting offiee in France without hearing something of its less pleasant side, writes Ward Price, the Daily M'ail's speeial correspondent with the Foreign Legion in Morocco. On active service, in advaneed posts close to the enemy, where I •have heen seeing the Legion, discipline is neeessarily relaxed in many

ways. Offieers and men are all dirty, thirsty, tired and in danger together. By natural reaction such conditions promote esprit de corps, and kill that cafard, or feeling of black despair, which is the curse of this corps of desperate men. I have painted the high lights of the picture. Let me add some of its darker shades. First of all, the first six months of instruction is heart-breaking in its severity, land a man has to fight to hold his own. Their work in the Legion is harder and more unceasing than in any army in the world. The British publie generally has a wrong idea of its activities. A Labour Corps. "We are not so much a fighting corps as a militarised labour corps," was the way a German sergeant put it to me. Wihen there is fighting to be done — there will be very little more of it now — the legion always has its share, for its moral in action is absolutely reliable. It is rarely used for first contacts with the enemy — native levies are employed for that. But its task is to consolidate and hold each new position gained. French military operations in Africa are modelled, in fact, on the tacfics of the ancient Romans. Auxiliaries, commanded by French offieers, advance to the attack. The legion itself follows to build entrenched camps and defend them. For every day that the legionary is in action he spends 20 days making roads, erecting forts, and marching. What that means under the North African sun one has to see for oneself. I have met companies of the Foreign Legion on the march. The sand lay six inches deep beneath their feet, which s.ank into it at every step. 1 Passing motor-lorries and mule cons voys kept them in a permanent cloud 1 of fine dust, of a kind that inflames ] the eyes, parches the throat, shrivels j the tongue, and eracks the lips. j With haggard faces they plodded 1 on, packs on their backs containing 1 hlankets, tent section, food, and en- | trenching tools, with rifle, hayonet, 1 60 rounds of ammunition, waterbottle, and sometimes a load of bombs ■as well. In many cases their boots had given out, and they wore native sandals on their bare feet.

Punishments are frequent. They have to he in a corps many of whose members have been deliberate rehels against authority. For very little a non-commissioned officer will procure 1 a man eight days in the cells, or, on 1 active service, eight days stoppage of 1 pay and constant fatigu© duty. Pri1 son on active service takes the form ' 0f cramped confinement in a tiny tent, i within a barbed wire enclosure under | the hot sun. a Insub ordination brings transfer to S the disciplanary battalion at Colomb j Bechar, where the men are worked j remorselessly hard in continual drought and heat, and all movements are at the douhle. More serious crimes, like attempted desertion, mean deportation for penal servitude in l French Guiana. Irregular punishments are someI times practised by the sergeants with- | out the knowledge of their offieers. If a man proves to he a hard case, he gets, as a British soldier would say "all that's coming to him." Legionaries have told me they have _ seen men stripped, drenched with water, and flogged in the cells. It is only fair to add that an ill-treated legionary has the right to appeal, even to the Minister of Whr direct, _ and that such eomplaints, when made, are always inquired into. A Happier Corps. Remorse, regret for wasted opportunities, and the haunting echo of those Tbitter fords, "Too late," do most to embitter life in the legion. It is a happier corps than formerly, because fewer of its members are men who have ruined their own careers. The majority of those now servxng joined under the economic pressure of world conditions rather than to find refuge from the results of their past misdoings. There are but few of the Ouida Guardsman type in the ranks. One colonel told me that in four years' command of a regiment he only met ahout 30 men who were clearly of superior social origins. Yet one cannot help wondering, as one watches a ragged. bearded column - of the legion on the march, whai j fantastic turns of Fats may not live I in the memories of those sun-burnt, dust-caked men. It is not surprising that 3 per cent. of the legion manages, despite strict precautions, to desert each year, or that 10 per cent. try to desert and are hrought back, while some, especially those who have known better days and more comfortable conditions, blow their brains out with their rifles. Some deserters have even gone over to the Berbers, savagely mereiless as their mountaineers are toward all Christians. Recently, through an interpreter, I talked to two Berbers who had. only come down from the mountain to suhmit the day before. Th'ey told me of several legionaries

who had tried to join them. Some, they said, had heen killed at once. Others, who were lucky enough' to fall in with a less aggressive clian, had been .able to sell their arms and had passed on unmolested, probably to die miserably in the desert beyond. Two, these Berbers told me, had. remained some time with the tribe&men, fighting against the French, but they also had disappeared some months ago. A Deserter's Life. Sometimes, at a surrender of the elansmen, children with unusually white skins are seen, which the Berbers themselves attribute to the parenthood of legion deserters. One da ylasit year, when a column of the corps oceupied a Berber valley, one mud house was noticed which contrasted with the rest hy the fact of being spotlessly whitewashed. The villagers were questioned.' It proved that two deserters, a Russian and a German, had lived there for several years, each with a whole harem of wives. They had, in fact, become small Berber chieftains. The Russian had bolted as the legion troops approached. The German, with more assurance, presented himself at the captain's tent and said he wanted to make his submission with the rest of the elansmen. "You shall make it this very moment, you renegade," exclaimed the captain, and, drawing his revolver, he shot him dead.

With quite a dozen offieers of the legion I have had long conversations. They are in every case men of an outstandingly fine soldier type. ^ The elder men often look like portraits of medieval knights, with faces tanned and furrowed hy years of "sun and dust. The subalterns are the pick of the infantry cadets from &t. Cyr, who have first spent some time in another regiment, for there are so many exsoldiers in the ranks of the legion— I talked this morning to a German who had served three and a half years in the ranks of the Reichswehr, for instance — that a young officer needs to he very well trained in his profession to command them. Only those offieers who prove to be good judges of charaeter are retained in the corps, hut a company eommander who shows courage and takes trouble to look after his men is rewarded with unfailing fidelity. "They are easy troops to handle," a Russian battalion commander with a single arm— one of the few foreign offieers in the1 legion — told me, because they are men with experience of life." A strange corps, faithful to France — as its German members proved during the Great iWiar— fbecause she pays and feeds them, yet standing firmly by the fact that they are mercenaries, not renegades. For when the Foreign Legion was recently presented with a flag bearing, like all French colours, ' the words "Honneur et Patrie" (honour and patriotism), the legionaries formally requested that the inscription might he altered to "honour and fidelity"— which was duly done.