Which legionnaire are you

Large volumes of alcohol are consumed — night and day, in the barracks, and on operations — and there is the mandatory singing of decade-old anthems. But the camaraderie I witnessed during a week-long exercise in the mountains of Corsica seemed confined to small groups who share a mother tongue.

The men are divided first by rank, then by wealth and finally by psychology: educated French officers seek advancement, the poor seek financial security, fighters seek violence.

It's for this reason that Scott's success might be best measured simply by the fact he's still in the Legion at all. Desertion, long a feature of Legion life, occurs to him too at times, but he's determined to resist it. Many of the 40, legionnaires who have lost their lives in the service have done so far from France. Over the past years, the Legion has sent its men to Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, Indochina and elsewhere in pursuit of French foreign policy.

More recently, legionnaires have served in Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire and Chad. Amid numerous training deaths, operations have still taken their share: one legionnaire died in Iraq last year during a reconnaissance mission; three have died so far in Mali. Its formative moment was in aid of an insurgency in Mexico, at the Battle of Camaron on April 30, Surrounded by 3, Mexicans, just 65 legionnaires fought to the death, led by Captain Jean Danjou, who wore a wooden prosthetic hand.

The Mexicans gave Danjou's remains an honour guard and his dummy hand now takes pride of place at the Legion's shrine to its dead in Aubagne, near Marseilles. But the Legion's soul was truly forged in the deserts of northern Africa.

Legionnaires became famed for their hardiness and the speed at which they could move through the desert. Their campaign against independence fighters was as bloody as any the Legion fought. Murray described a "systematic destruction" designed to rob Algerians of any potential refuge. After one firefight his unit was ordered to hack heads from the bodies of rebels for future identification.

One evening, his comrades prepared a pot of soup. Just as he was about to put the cupful of soup to his lips, one of the Spaniards, with a mighty guffaw, reached his hand into the cauldron and pulled out by the hair one of the Arab heads.

For years, Algeria was the Legion's home, and the French claim on the north African country became deeply enmeshed with the identity of the force itself. Still today, the bar which belongs to Scott's 5th Company is decorated with symbols of the desert: crude Bedouin motifs are carved into the ceiling, fanous lamps glow along the walls, and along one wall is a glass tank housing two pythons and an albino viper. In the end, though, the Legion's grip on the continent became a matter of national humiliation.

After long and bitter fighting to retain control of Algeria, there was dismay within the Legion when French President Charles de Gaulle granted the nation an independence vote in When it failed, and the legionnaires were ordered from the country, they performed their final march on African soil singing Edith Piaf's Non, je ne regrette rien.

There's been no outbreak of mutiny since, but the Legion's maverick streak remains. The 2nd Regiment, isolated on its island home of Corsica, revels in the same grit and flair of its desert forebears. If the Legion is France's spear, its Corsican paratroopers are the very tip — trained to drop into contested territory and secure it ahead of the arrival of regular troops.

It's what drew in Scott and other ambitious fighters, this "operational capability". The Legion fights a lot, and for those who manage to survive, creates new opportunities. A life in France for one. Many legionnaires take their training and reputation and become security contractors, particularly in Africa. Others stay, climbing the limited ranks available to them, and blooding new recruits in the very miseries they themselves endured.

He traveled to France, where he reported to a Legion recruitment center in Paris. Making the grade Recruiters can afford to be discriminating. Every day, several dozen men hoping to enlist arrive in Aubagne and in other recruitment centers throughout France, officers say.

Applicants must be between 17 and 40 years old. They must be foreign, though this rule is often glossed over. About 16 percent are French nationals who join posing as citizens of other French-speaking countries, such as Belgium or Canada. Legionnaires can apply for French citizenship after their first three years of service and about 80 percent do so eventually.

While boot camp was extremely tough, both physically and psychologically, the longer one remained, the easier life became. Promotions come relatively quickly for those committed to a military career, he said. Cyr military academy, but about 10 percent of them are promoted from the ranks. They have now been replaced by a surge of applicants from Latin American and Asian nations such as Nepal. Edward said that Americans still regularly apply but that many — even former servicemembers — fail the recruitment tests and the four-month-long basic training.

Others drop out during the first year. Even pay rates are broadly similar, he added. And during the first five years of service, a legionnaire is banned from marrying. Boulanger was a non-commissioned adjudant, the equivalent of a warrant officer. He had been barred from the regular French Army because of troubles with the law when he was a teenager, and so had joined the Foreign Legion under the identity, initially, of a Francophone Swiss.

After two years there, on the hunt for gold miners who are infiltrating from Brazil, Boulanger was reassigned to France. It should have been a glorious homecoming, but just before leaving Guiana, Boulanger had roughed up a superior officer. For this he was being disciplined. Boulanger now found himself on the farm, adjusting to garrison life and trying to steer this batch of recruits through their introduction to the Legion.

On the one hand, he needed to make legionnaires of them. On the other, he had already lost five to desertion. Not too soft, not too hard—that was the pressure he felt, and with a sense that his own future was on the line. A young Scotsman named Smith, who had been cashiered from the British Army for failing a drug test, was his current concern. Smith was at risk because he missed a new girlfriend back home. For his part, Boulanger missed the jungle.

Mostly what he did here was to supervise the other instructors. The only direct contact with the recruits reserved systematically for him was a French-language lesson that he taught daily in the multi-purpose room. For obvious reasons, the teaching of rudimentary French is a preoccupation in the Foreign Legion. One morning I attended a class. Each of the native French speakers was formally responsible for the progress of two or three nonspeakers and would be held accountable for their performance.

On a whiteboard at the front of the room, Boulanger had written a list of words in French to be copied down: more, less, high, low, on, under, inside, outside, interior, exterior, ahead, behind, small, large, thin, fat.

Beside that he had written: Morning Shave Breakfast. Noon Evening Eat. To wash yourself. To shave. Write Read Speak. Buy Pay. Boulanger walked into the room holding a pointer. Standing ramrod-straight, he led the class through conjugations of the verbs to be and to have. Motioning with his pointer, he whistled a recruit to the front of the class.

Boulanger pointed at his head. Nose, eye, one eye, two eyes, ear, chin, mouth, teeth, lips, tongue, cheek, neck, shoulder, repeat! He began whistling individual recruits to their feet for answers.

The New Zealander stood and mumbled something indistinct. Why does he not know it? Boulanger gave both men 30 push-ups. No one thought he was being capricious. He had a gift for empathetic command. Skull, foot, balls, repeat!

He directed a recruit to jump onto a table. He directed another to crawl underneath. These were not men who had excelled in school.

Boulanger told them to take a break to practice what they had learned. He left for a smoke. A dirt track led to an upper field. What is he doing? Morning, afternoon, evening, night. There were tactical exercises during which the recruits advanced in confusion through forest and field, shooting off blanks and suffering scores of imaginary casualties for their errors. There were runs, short and long. There were weapon-disassembly-and-cleaning classes.

During one of these intervals the unhappy Scotsman named Smith approached me with a mop in his hand and asked for news from the outside. I mentioned something about French elections and war, but what he meant was the latest soccer scores.

I told him I could not help him there. We talked while he mopped. He missed his girl, yeah, and he missed his pub. He called the British Army the best in the world and said he would return happily if only it would have him back. By comparison, he said, the Foreign Legion had no sense of humor. I laughed for the obvious reason that the Legion, by comparison, had taken him in. The stay on the farm was nearly over. The march to Castelnaudary is a rite of passage.

Once it is completed, recruits become true legionnaires and during an initiation ceremony are given permission by the regimental commander to put on their kepis for the first time.

Kepis are the stiff, round, flat-topped garrison caps worn in the French Army as part of the traditional dress uniform. Charles de Gaulle wears one in famous pictures. Legionnaires are expected to be proud of the caps. But two nights before the departure from the farm, the recruits would have preferred to crush them underfoot.

The men had been training since before dawn, and now they were standing in formation holding practice kepis wrapped in protective plastic, and being drilled on the upcoming ceremony by the vicious corporals.

To serve! With honor! And loyalty! Smith in particular kept getting the sequences wrong. Before dawn the recruits set off in file through heavy rain. They wore bulky packs, with assault rifles slung across their chests. Boulanger navigated at the head of the column. I walked beside him and ranged backward down the line. The Russian sergeant brought up the rear, watching for strays. It was a slog, mostly on narrow roads through rolling farmland.

Dogs kept a wary distance. When the column passed a herd of cows, some men made mooing sounds. That was the entertainment.

Late in the morning the column entered a large village, and Boulanger called a halt for lunch in a churchyard. I had thought that people might come out to encourage them, and even warm them with offers of coffee, but rather the opposite occurred when some of the residents closed their shutters as if to wish the legionnaires gone.

This fit a pattern I had seen all day, of drivers barely bothering to slow as they passed the line of exhausted troops. When I mentioned my surprise to Boulanger he said that the French love their army once a year, on Bastille Day, but only if the sky is blue.

As for the foreigners of the Foreign Legion, by definition they have always been expendable. The expendability can be measured. Since , when the Legion was formed by King Louis-Philippe, more than 35, legionnaires have died in battle, often anonymously, and more often in vain. The Legion was created primarily to gather up some of the foreign deserters and criminals who had drifted to France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

It was discovered that these men, who were said to threaten civil society, could be induced to become professional soldiers at minimal cost, then exiled to North Africa to help with the conquest of Algeria.

During the pacification of Algeria, legionnaires died. During a foolish intervention in Spain in the s, nearly 9, died or deserted. During the Crimean War, in the s, died.

It did not work out. Mexico won, France lost, and Maximilian was shot. Of the 4, legionnaires sent off to help with the war, roughly half did not return. Their last stand provided the Legion with an Alamo story that, in the s, during a spate of tradition-making, was transformed into an officially cherished legend— Camerone!

Between and , more than legionnaires died while reinforcing the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War. This was their first fight on French soil. After the war ended, the Legion stayed on and helped with the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune—a civilian revolt during which legionnaires dutifully killed French citizens on French streets, often by summary execution. After order was restored, the legionnaires were quickly returned to their bases in Algeria, but they had earned the special loathing reserved for foreign mercenaries, and a visceral distrust of the Legion still felt by French leftists today.

An idea grew up inside the Legion that meaningless sacrifice is itself a virtue—if tinged perhaps by tragedy. A sort of nihilism took hold. You are soldiers meant to die, and I am sending you to the place where you can do it! In any case, he was right. They died there, and also in various African colonies for reasons that must have seemed unimportant even at the time. Then came the First World War and a return to France, where 5, legionnaires lost their lives. During the interwar period, with the Legion having returned to North Africa, Hollywood caught on and produced two Beau Geste movies, which captured the exoticism of Saharan forts and promoted a romantic image that has boosted recruiting ever since.

Immediately after World War II, which claimed 9, of its men, the Legion went to war in Indochina, where it lost more than 10, Recently, near Marseille, an old legionnaire told me about a lesson he learned as a young recruit, when a veteran sergeant took a moment to explain dying to him. There is no point in trying to understand.

Time is unimportant. We are dust from the stars. We are nothing at all. Whether you die at age 15 or 79, in a thousand years there is no significance to it. So fuck off with your worries about war.

With the French withdrawal from Indochina, the Legion returned to Algeria under the command of embittered army officers, many of whom believed that they had been betrayed by the civilian elites and that only they, the officers, had the moral fiber to defend the integrity of France. These were dangerous delusions for officers to have, particularly because the Legion now found itself embroiled in something like a French civil war—the savage eight-year struggle over Algerian independence.

It was an emotional fight, characterized by the systematic use of torture, retributive killings, and atrocities on all sides. The Foreign Legion committed its share of the crimes. It also lost 1, men. Altogether perhaps a million people died. For cultural reference, Brigitte Bardot was in her prime. Near the end, just when the army believed it had prevailed on the battlefield, wiser heads in France—Charles de Gaulle and the French people themselves—realized that Algeria could no longer be held.

After negotiations began for a complete French withdrawal, a group of French officers hatched a plan to reverse the tide by seizing cities in Algeria, killing Charles de Gaulle, and installing a military junta in Paris. Two additional Legion regiments joined the rebellion, as did a number of elite units of the regular French Army.

The situation seemed serious enough to the government in Paris that it ordered the detonation of an atomic bomb at a Saharan test site to keep it from falling into the hands of rogue forces.

But the conspiracy was hopelessly ill-conceived. On the second day, after de Gaulle appealed for support, the conscripted citizen-soldiers who made up the overwhelming majority of men in the armed forces took matters into their own hands and mutinied against the conspirators. The coup failed. The chief conspirators were arrested, officers were relieved of their command, another resigned, and the rebellious Foreign Legion parachute regiment was disbanded.

The paratroopers were unrepentant. Some of them deserted to join the OAS, an ultra-right terrorist group that launched a bombing campaign. The Legion emerged from the experience reduced to 8, men and reassigned to bases in southern France, where it spent the next decade doing little more than marching around and building roads.

The trauma was deep. This is a sensitive subject, and officially denied, but the history of defeat encouraged a reactionary culture in the Legion, where, beneath an appearance of neutral professionalism, the officer corps today harbors virulent right-wing views.