FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10033, 2 May 1910, Page 3

FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION.

A GRIM PICTURE OF^LIFE,

Mr Erwin Rosen, journalist and ex-legionaire,in his booic the 'Foreign Leigon,' tells unpretentiously enough, though at times he lapses into pinchceck imitations of Kipling's terse virility—the talo ot his personal experiences as a soldier in tnafc section of the French Foreign Legion which is quartered in Algeria, So interesting and so true is the story that I found if, says Evelyn Byng, difficult to put the book dosyn, still more difficult now it is read to banish some of its grim details from my mind.

Mr Rosen draws relentlessly the torment of thousands whom'either adverse circumstances or the result of their own follies have drifted into this particular branch of service, 01 rather of servitude. It ia, as he shows us, the legionnaires who guard the borders of French territory in those pestilent lands where few white men can live at all. It is they who, in these countries, build barracks, Government offices, officers' quarters, and—in Alseria at all events- have engineered 80 per cent, of the roads.

HEWERS OF WOOD. In whatever countries the legionnaires find themselves they are treated as the scavengers and beasts of burden to th 9 members of the communities among whom they live. But not only are they artisans and scavengers, these avocations form but one portion of their lives—they are also soldiers, though, Heaven knows! not soldiers in the geneially accepted term of a service which is highly esteemed and honourable. ; Rather they are the slaves and bondmen of cruel taskmasters; and the routine of the soldier's life is aggravated, lendered intolerable by ceaseless drills on a glaring barrack square, by manoeuvre marches whose length and ruthless cruelty kill and maim, and by a daily existence whose scheme of brutalising work soon drives a man to the drink which is his only solace, and to the terrible "cafard" or madness which, seizing even the most sanest mind, often ends in permanent insanity or death. Over and nbove these miseries the leigonnaires are subjected to the gadfly stings in which narrow-minded non-commissioned offiecrs are experts; to the callous indifference of commissioned officers, who regard their men as lower than the brutes, and, worst of all, when ill they ara left to the tender mercies of doctors, who join to gross brutalities the crass incompetence which, alas! stamps them very often not only in that particular portion of the French army, but in other armies nearer home.

| NO FUTURE. Labouring under these brutalising influences, what chance has a man to work out his own salvation? What baa he got to look forward to in the dreary round of his days, in the endlessness oi the years for which he has bound himself to serve? Pay after day passes in the barracks, whited sepulchres of a scrupulous surface cleanliness, which mask the unspeakable foulness of the prisons where for weeks or even months at a 'iims he is subjected to solitary confinement. In bygone days the terrible "silo" existed, "a tunnel shaped hole in the groand, broad at the top, and pointed towards the bottom. ... into this hole, used aa a cell for solitary confinement, the misdoers would be thrown, clad only in a thin suit of fatigue clothes, without a blanket or any protection against rain or sun." For days and nights there they would lie h the hole one or two feet square.

Then there was the "crapaudine" when the prisoner "was simply tied up in a bundle and thrown into a corner, his hands and feet being tied together on his back till they formed a semi-circle. . . . for a quarter of an hour a day he would ba set free to eat and drink. . . A day and a night in the 'erapaudine' was enough to deprive a man of the use of his limbs—several days gave him his

quietus." These horrors were ojly abolished by General Negrier, so until comparatively recent yearß such tortures still existeJ ia the army of a highly civiliieJ country! But it is the end of the luckless legionnaire's career which forms the grimmest reading, when, timeexpired, he returns (o civilisation and, seeking work, find-3 the doors of the self-righteous closed to him. Every man's hand is against this poor piece of human flotsam, this moral lepsr whom the 5 ears of his service have damned in their sight. Homeless, destitute, Hopeless, he wanders over the fee < f a world which no longer has room for him; and whatever may have b;en the heinousness of hia sins against God or man, mrst titterlv, most fully does he expiate them.