French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The many Jews who had fled to Paris in the 1890s to escape the pogroms of Eastern Europe and their descendants were equally enthusiastic—in the heavily Jewish quarter of Montmartre, a Jewish butcher rode a horse decorated with the French tricolor and placards urging Jews to enlist. A group of Jews paraded through the Place de la Bastille carrying banners in support of France, while the Jewish poet Sholem Schwartzbard composed a song that compared Jewish volunteers to the Maccabees. Rumanian Jews calling themselves the Groupe de volontaires Juifs Russo-Roumains du 18e opened a recruiting office in a cafe on the rue Marcadet and launched a manifesto that reminded “Fellow Jews” that “France ... the first country in the world to grant Jews the Rights of Man—this dear country where we and our families have found sanctuary” now required their services. Groups of Russian-Jewish refugees from Switzerland arrived in Paris to offer their services to the French army, while in Brussels 82 Jews presented themselves at the French consulate with an offer to enlist.5

  British residents of Paris were invited to call by the Imperial Club for a meeting whose purpose was the “formation of a British volunteer corps, and to offer its services to the French War Minister.... God save the King! Vive la France!”6 Similar frissons of patriotic fervor were detected among Spanish, Luxemburgers, Portuguese, Czechs, Ruthenians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Syrians, Greeks and others. Even eight hundred subjects of the German and Austrian monarchies allegedly offered their services to France. On August 5, an appeal was made to American residents of Paris by René Phélizot of Chicago and others to support France, while in faraway Atlanta, Georgia, Kiffin and Paul Rockwell, both college students, had already contacted the French consul in New Orleans—by August 7, they were aboard a steamer bound for France.7

  Cendrars complained that the French government was extremely dilatory in dealing with this surge of foreign support for France:

  It had taken a good month of discussions with the Minister of War before he would accept this enormous mass of men of good will, and admit into the [recruitment] bureaux this army of foreign volunteers which furnished the world's best propaganda for the French cause (the Boches [a pejorative term for Germans] would have understood immediately. They were wild not to have us.)8

  In fact, the French government appears to have been less slow off the mark than Cendrars believed. On August 8, the Journal officiel published a decree of August 3 that allowed these foreign volunteers to enlist from August 21 “for the duration of the war.” There was, however, one important proviso that was to cause the French no end of trouble—these enlistments must be in the Foreign Legion.

  Many of the enthusiastic recruits filled the time between the general mobilization of August 1 and their reporting dates drilling under the direction of their members with previous military experience: The Americans in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the British in the “Magic City” amusement park, the Russians in their cinema. By the last week in August, the volunteers began to report in national groups to the Hôtel des Invalides on the Left Bank, where they were given a physical and signed their enlistment papers. According to Blaise Cendrars, who reported on September 3, the scene in the stately courtyard of the Invalides was fairly chaotic, and he even met a Canadian volunteer who appeared with three hundred “semi-wild” horses that he had brought over at his own expense from Canada.9 The formalities completed, the volunteers were marched behind their national flags to the railway stations that disbursed them to the designated training areas across France. On August 25, the American contingent, about fifty strong, followed an American flag carried alternately by Phélizot and ex-Harvard undergraduate Alan Seeger through cheering crowds up the avenue de I'Opéra and the rue Auber to the cavernous Gare Saint-Lazare to entrain for Toulouse via Rouen.10

  In recent years, historians have challenged the notion that France went gladly, almost gaily, into war in 1914.11 It is also possible that a desire to portray a world eager to rally to the defense of France has also caused a similar confusion about the numbers and motives of the foreign volunteers who offered their services to France in World War I. The spectacle of foreign support certainly offered a welcome boost to French morale, especially after the catastrophic early “Battles of the Frontiers,” and gave her the moral high ground in the propaganda war against the Central Powers— the conservative Catholic deputy Albert de Mun boasted before the French chamber that “France has foreign volunteers, while Germany has only deserters!”12 But exactly how many foreign volunteers she had is not clear.13 Some of the individual national statistics appear impressive— almost 5,000 Italians volunteered, enough to form their own régiment de marche with an Italian commander, which fought bravely in the Argonne in December 1914 and January 1915. V. Lebedev claimed that 4,000 Russians were in French uniform by December 1, 1914,14 although many of these “Russians” were Poles or Jews who formed their separate contingents—Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski estimated the number of Jewish volunteers at 4,000.15 A battalion of 928 Greeks was constituted in the spring of 1915 as the bataillon de marche etranger d'Orient, as was another of 948 Montenegrins, while a detachment of 53 Japanese offered themselves as a group to France.16

  Legion statistics show that 42,883 foreigners enlisted during the course of the First World War,17 although, as will be argued, not all of these men served in Legion units. According to figures gleaned from the various journaux de marche, the Legion went from 10,521 men in 1913 to 17,147 in 1914 and peaked at 21,887 in 1915, after which it declined substantially.18 In other words, Legion strength increased by 11,366 men in the first year, probably in the first nine months, of the war.19 Therefore, the number of foreign volunteers for the French cause, while substantial, appears to have been less than the propaganda of the time would seem to suggest.

  What motivated these foreigners to offer themselves to the French army? Again, propaganda and popular memory suggest that love for France and a desire to defend the Allied cause were behind the surge of enlistments, and this was certainly true in many cases. Cendrars's manifesto was addressed to “all foreign friends of France,”20 as were those of other national groups. The Polish Jew Pierre Goldfarb enlisted because “France was for me a friend. This is why I defend her with the greatest courage and if I remain here, I will tell my parents: victim of his duty!”21 The Americans Alan Seeger and Henry Farnsworth attributed their enlistments to love for France and devotion to the Allied cause,22 as did many of the Eastern Europeans. And, as has already been noted, many Jews identified the cause of French democracy with the interests of their people—V. Lebedev was told by one enlistee that he fought “For the Jewish people!”23 Cendrars was more prosaic—he enlisted, he said, because “je déteste les Boches.”24

  Therefore, patriotism, love for France and ideology were strong among those in the first wave of enlistments. However, together with these sentiments, often mixed in with them, were others. Obviously, many men of military age did not want to be left out of the first major European war in forty years, especially as it was meant to be a short one. Many of the Americans who enlisted in August 1914 were of French extraction. However, others like “Percy and Scanlon ... both good Southern Negroes who had followed Jack Johnson to France” were drifters and adventurers who happened to be traveling in Europe,25 and could have possessed only the vaguest notions of the larger political and strategic issues of the war. In September 1916, Seeger confessed in his diary that “it is for the glory alone that I engaged.”26 It is also clear that Seeger harbored ambitions of being a war correspondent, which he hoped his enlistment would further. Rockwell also accused fellow American Edward Morlae, who “claimed to have been everywhere and to have done everything,” of only seeking “cheap notoriety,” a claim that seems to have been substantiated in part when Morlae deserted in 1915 and presented himself as something of a war hero in New York.27 Others had joined after the general closedown of factories on mobilization threw them out of work.

  Nevertheless, the men who came forth to offer their services to France,
though heterogeneous, were not your typical Legion recruits. Paul Rockwell noted that the 3e régiment de marche, which was recruited among foreigners resident in Paris (although it appears that the government also profited from the mobilization to exile a number of petty criminals into the Legion), was composed in the main of men who “belonged to the most sedentary professions.”28 “As for the Legion, as far as I have seen it, it is not much like its reputation,” wrote Farnsworth, himself a graduate of Groton School and Harvard, in January 1915, after five days in the barracks of Reuilly in Paris. “Many of the men are educated, and the very lowest is of the high-class workman type.” His corporal was a “militant socialist” who often engaged those from a business background in heated political discussions of the sort that were seldom heard in Sidi-bel-Abbès.29

  “We were all foreigners, or certainly sons of foreigners, but, with few exceptions, those who held the limelight were Parisian born,” wrote Cendrars of his new comrades.

  There was not a single peasant among us, nothing but small tradesmen from the suburbs: tailors, furriers, upholsterers, leather-gilders, sign-writers, coach-painters, goldsmiths, and concierges, night-club musicians, racing cyclists, pimps and pick-pockets, the grandsons of the revolutionaries of 1848 who came from all corners of Europe to man the July barricades, or those of the last of the journeymen doing their Tour de France, and who settled in Paris because they were skilled workers, earned a good living and had found wives there; also a few sons of noblemen, such as the Pole, the knight of Przybyszewski [nephew of the celebrated decadent writer], or the Peruvian, de Bengoechea [killed north of Arras], son of the most eminent banker in Lima, plus a few intellectuals from Montparnasse who, like me, were enchanted by the obscene language of these exhilarating companions and their enchanting exuberance.30

  Quite naturally, a group of volunteers motivated in great part by a love for France, or a desire to see the triumph of democracy, which they identified with the Allied cause, and which contained many intellectuals and middle-class or “high class workman types,” were rather disturbed by the prospect of being deposited into a unit with the reputation of the Foreign Legion. Some protested openly at being pitched into a regiment of “outcasts from society and fugitives from justice.”31 A Jewish volunteer wrote that, “As I am a soldier and am fighting for France, it will make me happy to be called soldier and not legionnaire; and when I will go through the campaign one could not tell me that I served in a regiment which has no flag.”32 Cendrars complained that he and the other leaders of his movement had been repeatedly assured that, although the law required them to enlist as volontaires étrangers,

  there was never any question of our being automatically enlisted in the Foreign Legion, or so we had been given to understand, and formally promised, by the highly placed persons in political, literary and artistic circles whom Canudo and I had urged to appeal to the War Ministry and the President on behalf of our recruiting movement.33

  The American Maurice Magnus was reluctant to volunteer for the Legion, but the American consul in Algiers assured him in 1916 that the composition of the corps had been completely altered by the influx of patriotic recruits:

  He told me what I had heard before, that since the war had broken out, the Legion was entirely different from what it used to be, that the traditional Legion had been cleared out and that it was made up of enthusiasts for the Allied Cause. By traditional Legionary he meant the professional soldier, adventurer, deserter. “The Legion is now a clean, healthy place,” he said, “with men who have ideals, and there is an American contingent, in fact several hundred Americans. At the present moment several thousand Americans are fighting in France.” This sounded very encouraging, and I felt that I had chosen the right course.34

  Therefore, the new volunteers were rather apprehensive when they learned that they were, in fact, legionnaires. When the war broke out, the Legion counted four battalions in Algeria, three in Tonkin and five in Morocco. The Algerian battalions were ordered to send half of their strength, or about one-sixth of prewar Legion strength to France to incorporate the new recruits. Together, this would constitute four new Legion regiments: the 2e, 3e and 4e régiments de marche of the 1er étranger and the 2e régiment de marche of the 2e étranger. Legionnaires from the 1er étranger, minus its Germans, Austrians and others who declined to fight the Central Powers, left Sidi-bel-Abbès on August 28 and stopped in Avignon to collect the large number of Italian volunteers before proceeding north.35 Those from the 2e étranger called at Toulouse to incorporate the volunteers, including most of the Americans, who had assembled there.

  The first impressions were not invariably unfavorable: The volunteers at Toulouse gawked with admiration as the 2e etranger marched smartly behind their band into the Pérignon barracks.36 Henry Farnsworth found the legionnaires from Africa far more professional than the Paris firemen who had provided most of the cadres for the 3e regiment de marche—one old legionnaire called le Père Uhlin was especially useful in showing the new recruits the ropes, quite literally. “There is an official string provided to tie the tent pegs to the outside of the sack,” Farnsworth wrote. “He has at least 27 uses to which it might be put. All in his slow Alsatian legionary argot.” He was also happy when they received a veteran Legion NCO: “It will be a comfort to have a man who knows his business over us. The firemen from Paris may be good drill-masters, but as campaign leaders they are nothing but a nuisance.”37

  But the outlook, mentality and social backgrounds of the “Africans” were so radically different from that of the new men that the amalgamation promised to be a stormy one. Lebedev explained that the training of the Eastern Europeans was going fairly well until the old Legion arrived, “people from another world, with the ideas and habits of mercenaries of the Middle Ages. It is difficult for a socialist to get used to serving with them.” Sections were “constantly divided into two hostile clans. For one found, in almost equal numbers, real legionnaires, real roisterers from Africa, and Russian volunteers who did not speak French.”38 Cendrars recorded that the arrival of the legionnaires caused a morale crisis. The Americans, he believed, took it especially hard, “for the Legion's reputation on the other side of the Atlantic was extremely sinister, and I knew more than one American who had comported himself bravely until this time, and now, secretly dreamed of deserting.”39 American legionnaire David King agreed that “The old Légionnaires were made of quite different stuff and were in it for reasons ranging from man-slaughter to unrequited love. It struck me as strange, at first, that there were even Germans and Turks among the anciens”40 Rockwell recorded that the friction between the two groups created an atmosphere of “each man for himself and his particular group of friends.”41

  Dissension between the Americans and the old legionnaires deepened in March 1915, when two veterans made scathing comments about Americans in general and Phélizot in particular while the unit was resting behind the lines. Phélizot challenged them to a fight, and, a fair man with his fists, had the better of his opponents when, according to Rockwell, a third legionnaire arrived and, in a thumping demonstration of the Legion philosophy that the only fair fight is the one you win, smashed Phélizot from behind with a two-liter bottle of wine, knocking him unconscious. Phélizot twice reported to the infirmary complaining of severe headaches. However, the Legion doctor, working on the principle that treatment was “civilian medicine” and that his task was to “conserve the effectives,”42 sent him back to his unit. On his return from the second visit, he collapsed by the roadside and died from a fractured skull.43

  Seeger believed that the Legion should have been thrown into action immediately rather than allow friction between the two groups to grow, for

  . . . it must be admitted that here discontent has more than the usual to feed upon, where a majority of men who engaged voluntarily were thrown in a regiment made up almost entirely of the dregs of society, refugees from justice and roughs, commanded by sous-officiers who treated us all without distinctio
n in the same manner that they were habituated to treat their unruly brood in Africa.44

  Zosa Szajkowski argues that Jewish volunteers were the special objects of scorn of these old legionnaires, who taunted them that they had only come for the gamelle, or the mess tin.45 The Swiss Jean Reybaz complained that the veteran legionnaires who arrived at the Avignon depot where he had been sent stole the new recruits blind.46

  The presence of so many relatively well-off recruits also presented veterans with a golden opportunity to separate them from their cash— Magnus, who dined conspicuously every night in the best hotel in Sidi-bel-Abbès, in this way singled himself out as a target for NCOs and even legionnaires short of cash, which, “if you did not lend, they got nasty.”47 However, David King found that, even though there was little chance of recovering principal, much less interest, loans could prove a good investment: “Non-commissioned officers were forbidden to borrow money from their subordinates, but most of them did, especially the corporals,” he wrote. “It was not bad policy to lend, even if you never expected to see the money back. They rarely borrowed twice from the same man, and it certainly greased the wheels.’48

  Nor was the unfriendly reception of the “volunteers for the duration” confined to the Legion in France—“A fact that I could never properly understand was the undying hatred and jealousy that existed between the old Legionnaires and the volunteers for the war,” wrote John Barret, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who volunteered in August 1914, but who subsequently was sent to the Legion in Morocco. “The feeling was even more bitter on the part of the officers and non-coms.”49