ALL VOLUNTEERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 August 1942, Page 4

ALL VOLUNTEERS

FIGHTING FRENCH TROOPS. IN SYRIA. VETERANS OF OTHER WARS. Who are the men of the Fighting French forces, fighting beside our own troops in Libya, who knocked out, not 35, but 45 enemy tanks in the battle of Bit Hacheim, and who at one phase of the battle were completely surrounded for three days by the Italians? The men are for the most part Parisians and Bretons, but every province of France is represented, and they have with them native soldiers who served under them in. the old days before the war and whose love for their leaders has led them to follow them, Arabs of the camel corps and soldiers of the African brush who have heard the ping of the bullet flying over the cactus and stubble since early youth. There are also Frenchmen who have never seen the homeland for which they are fighting, men who have come from the French Pacific islands and from those groups of Frenchmen dotted throughout North and South America. Men of the Foreign Legion, the great road builders of Africa, who laid straight roads, as straight as those of Caesar’s legions, across the African wastes and hewed a pass through the Atlas mountains, are again in the forefront of action. There are veterans who fought under Lyautey and Mangin in the days of the Morocco campaign, soldiers who suddenly emerged from the alleyways of Fez and boldly attacked the Arabs in the open in spite of overwhelming odds. And there are veterans of the war of 1914-18.

And all these men are volunteers, not conscripted men, but men who refused to accept-defeat and rallied to the flag of the general who would not accept defeat. Among them is a general from Alsace who has sworn that only two things will make him put up his sword —the freedom of Alsace or death. Another officer insisted on taking his place again in the thick of the fighting in spite of a wound not yet healed. Here is an officer from Syria, who when the first German aeroplane landed there, bid goodbye to wife and children and crossed into Palestine to join General cle Gaulle. Another officer changed the cloister for the field, a Dominican friar who was among the first to enter Massawa and haul down an Italian flag.