Ex-Monk Leads Foreign Legion

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 803, 25 October 1929, Page 18

Ex-Monk Leads Foreign Legion

FAMOUS FRENCH SOLDIER NOW BRIGADIER-GENERAL “Send Frydenberg,” came the laconic wire from Paul Painleve, Minister of War in Paris, a few hours after he had been informed that troops of the Foreign Legion, Senegalese and Moroccans, had been ambushed by the Moors near Ait-Yacoub and that 81 were killed or missing and 33 wounded, recently, says an exchange. “Give Freydenberg eight battalions of the Foreign Legion and send him to the relief of Ait-Yacoub,” were the supplementary instructions reaching -Lucien Saint, Resident-General, and General Vidalon. commander-in- i Chief, shortly afterward. A week later I Ait-Yacoub was relieved.

“The monk-soldier,” as Freydenberg is known, is a veteran of desert wars, who has battled with thirst in the di ought periods, fought floods in the same regions and ever and always has been in the front line of battle against the Moors, the Touaregs or the Rifflans. An inmate of a monastery until he had reached his 40th year, Freydenberg suddenly decided that he wanted a little more action than carrying water to thirsty vegetables or scrubbing the floors of the monastery’s halls. He got it. He joined the Foreign Legion. In two months he was a corporal and had two wounds. The Touaregs of the Southern Atlas accounted for the Slash that is visible as a white streak across the scalp of his flaming red head. Taza, Fez, Colomb-Bechar, saw him in turn, as a sergeant, a second lieutenant and later a captain. He was made a colonel at the beginning of the World War and although he took part in most of the battles along the Western Front, a colonel he i emained at the Armistice. When Abd-el-Krim made his drive against French Morocco in 1925 after practically driving the Spaniards into the Mediterranean, Freydenberg was in Fez. Krim raced down through the Riff, occupied Sidi-Abdullah half-way between Taza and Fez, cutting the narrow gauge railroad between the two cities and commanding the main road. “Am sending Freydenberg,” General Count de Chambrun, who was in command of Fez at the time, wired the Ministry of War. Freydenberg was given two companies of Senegalese, each carrying four machine-guns, and in four days Krim was in flight to the North. “These chaps may not be great fighters, but they are damned good runners,” Freydenberg said later, without the slightest monk accent, when explaining why the Riffians had gotten away. They simply had to make Freydenberg a brigadier-general after that battle. “All I got out of the Great War was a few white hairs in my red head,” Freydenberg once told his officers at the mess. “I’d much rather fight in Africa.”