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Show LIFE IN THE FOREIGN LEGION All Races Go to Make Up World's Fightingest Army-Warped Army-Warped and Crooked Bodies and Spirits Strengthened Strength-ened Strict Discipline Tempered with Kindness K-w.- -i ; try The Legionnaires must march or die. But some - -.. " ?; j : absolutely, physically, cannot keep up. Inset: Foreign : v J ."---f-- jjTV, Legionnaires In camp, photographed by Richard Ilalli- 5 " - &r "s4' burton. j . r ) The Legionnaires must march or die. But some absolutely, physically, cannot keep up. Inset: Foreign Legionnaires In camp, photographed by Richard Halliburton. By RICHARD HALLIBURTON Author of "The Royal Road to Romance," Etc. I IF I were twenty-one again, , and if the term of enlistment enlist-ment were limited to a year (instead of five) I'd join the French Foreign Legion. , I am perfectly aware that Le-, Le-, gionnaires frequently get shot by : Arab bullets or tortured to death by I Arab women. But the gambling j chance of escaping is worth taking. ; If there were no danger mere would j be no adventure. It's the danger ' that attracts fully half the 10,000 new recruits that come to Bel-Abbes each year. I Only recently I went to the railroad rail-road station to watch one trainload of these recruits come in. These unequipped bleus were of every race under the sun: Poles, Turks, Negroes, Spaniards, Italians, Russians, Rus-sians, Rumanians, Belgians, and above alL Germans. Derelicts Born Again. Yet however much their languages lan-guages differed, they all looked alike. They had been traveling a week In their civilian clothes, and were now a grimy army of tatterdemalions, tatter-demalions, unwashed, unshaved, ragged, and exhausted. As this hopeless and disreputable column Elouched down the road leading to the barracks, I Joined them. Was this the famous Legion la brave Legion that had conquered Africa for France, that had brought glory upon glory to their flag, that could outmarch and outfight any army in the world? Yes, the very same. This grime will be washed off. These rags will be burned and a smart new uniform Issued to replace them. These miserable mis-erable bodies will be straightened by exercise, these unhealthy faces tanned and toughened. In six months this pack of starving vagabonds vaga-bonds will go marching back up the boulevard behind the stirring trumpets, clean, erect, shining, dangerous. dan-gerous. More than 70 per cent of the recruits re-cruits are German usually peasant boys who have run away from home because they were ill-treated or hungry. One also finds many German Ger-man ex-soldiers out of jobs. A good 10 per cent will always be French who get in by saying they are Belgian Bel-gian or Swiss. The remaining 20 per cent are truly international. But whether German or non-German they usually usual-ly come from the lower orders. Exceptions Ex-ceptions however meet one at every turn. In Bel-Abbes (as the Legion calls its home) there is a military band of 150 pieces. Every member mem-ber of that band is a good musician. musi-cian. And every member is a Legionnaire. Le-gionnaire. At the other extreme one finds the infamous Compagnie de Discipline, the penal prison for the Legion, where 300 murderers, bandits, criminals incorrigible, have been collected. They too are Legionnaires. Le-gionnaires. But the average Legionnaire is neither musician nor murderer just an unhappy and unfortunate outcast, a pauvre malheureux, seeking seek-ing forgetfulness from the past and shelter for the present. He loses his name when he joins up and finds a new one. He denies and dismisses all he was. He is born again of a mother who understands and forgives. But in payment for his rebirth, he must sacrifice all else for her and fight for her and suffer and hunger and thirst for her and die for her, unhonored and alone. Booze God of the Legion. Before I'd been in Bel-Abbes an hour, on my first visit, I learned what, next to loyalty, is the most important tiling in the life of a Legionnaire liquor! Their favorite drink (because it is cheap) Is a raw, red, Algerian wine called Pinard. Pinard is the raison d'etre for the average Legionnaire. Le-gionnaire. Pinard has always been his god. It is now. It will be till the Legion perishes. Pinard has welded the Legion together, preserved pre-served its morale, won battles, conquered con-quered Africa. Bottle brothers Legionnaires. On the first Legion pay-day I was in town, I wandered into the barracks bar-racks canteen, the Legion's high altar al-tar to this great god booze. The place was an inferno, with scores of soldiers brawling, laughing, singing sing-ing and shouting in ten languages. Tobacco smoke thickened the air, oaths turned it blue. Bottles and bodies were strewn across wine-splashed wine-splashed tables, or under them. Benches were overturned. Drink, drink, drink a madness, a frenzy, a demoniac worship of the idol alcohoL al-cohoL As the night advanced, those who were too paralyzed to lift another an-other glass were stacked in corners while stouter drinkers held on and poured it down till dawn. One for AU AU for One. Next day found a good percentage percent-age of the most savage drunks in prison, and scarcely anyone in the whole barracks really sober. As a rule, however, the officers are wonderfully won-derfully patient, and overlook most of these little binges. I saw one Legionnaire who lay prostrate in the gutter rise totteringly to his feet at the approach of an officer, draw himself to rigid attention, salute with a smartness that was inspired, and then plop! back into the gutter gut-ter he collapsed. The officer just laughed and passed on. But drink is by no means the Legion's only diversion. In Bel-Abbes Bel-Abbes (as in most of the smaller towns where Legionnaires are quartered) quar-tered) there is the Village Negre too the Street of the Women. On a holiday the women put on their most bizarre gowns and heaviest heavi-est jewelry. Gross negresses will cry shrilly at passers-by. Painted white women reach out to seize one from the crowd. Arab girls with raucous voices shriek insults at each other across the alley. A few French filles, too old for Paris, compete com-pete savagely with their native sisters, sis-ters, striving in this last outpost of degradation to postpone the end another an-other year, another month. With so many desperately gay soldiers sol-diers wandering about the streets at night, fights are frequent. At this the Legian excels, and woe to their opponents, for every Legionnaire in sight will come to the aid of a fellow fel-low Legionnaire, and, regardless of where justice lies, fight like a demon de-mon for the uniform. Sing in Scorching Sun. In order to have close contact with the Legion in the field, I chose to accompany, on foot, 200 Legionnaires Legion-naires who had to march 150 miles across desert country in five days. We had 30 miles to do that day, and I'd not walked that many miles in a month. I soon began to regret it The moment the pas de route order was given, the Legionnaires broke step, took a reef in their ceintures and moved. My God, how they could march! The kilometers rolled behind like knots behind a battleship, smoothly, steadily, mercilessly. mer-cilessly. The pace was never less than four miles an hour. As soon as the sun rose the heat began to torment me, for I was wearing a light sweater. But what of the Legionnaires, in overcoats? They dripped far worse than I did, but while I struggled to keep up, they sang lusty German marching songs, always, always, German. Next day we had to cross 30 miles of sand without a tree or a stream. The officers drove their men more and more ruthlessly. They must march march ou creve, march or die. But some absolutely, physically physical-ly could not keep up. They preferred pre-ferred to creve and so did I. Falling Fall-ing back in ignoble defeat I persuaded per-suaded a kitchen-wagon driver to let me board his steaming stove. He had been ordered to follow the column to pick up stragglers, so our strange ambulance was soon loaded to capacity, but still the limping stragglers multiplied. As a last resort, re-sort, ropes from the wagon were tied to the exhausted soldiers' belts not so much to compel them as to assist them, but it worked both ways. Before we reached the end of our 150-mile desert march I heard enough Legion stories from my comrades both riding and walking to fill a book. One stands out vividly vi-vidly in my memory: Some time before, considerable excitement had developed in Col-omb Col-omb Bechar, one of the desert outposts, out-posts, over the remarkable case of a certain Austrian whose name, shall we say, was Schantz. Young Schantz had fallen heir to a huge fortune in Vienna left him by his father's will, and the executors were trying to find the beneficiary, whom they knew to be for some unknown reason hiding in the Legion. Le-gion. They had succeeded in tracing trac-ing down his regiment, even his company. His assumed name, however, how-ever, baffled any further identification. identifica-tion. Not for a Million. As a last attempt to find the missing miss-ing man the sergeant-major, to whose company the authorities were sure Schantz belonged, announced an-nounced the bequest publicly at assembly. as-sembly. All the details were described de-scribed so that there could be no mistake. The sergeant-major ordered or-dered "Schantz" to step forth and receive his legacy. There would be no penalties, no questions just a paper to sign and a million dollars dol-lars to spend. Nobody moved. "What! A million dollars, fool!" The examiner's eye swept the ranks, blazing with impatience at the stupidity of the secretive Austrian Aus-trian who preferred to remain unknown un-known at the price of a million dollars. dol-lars. But all his pleadings and threat-enings threat-enings were of no avail. His search was a failure. A failure until two years later when Schantz himself, discharged honorably from the Legion, appeared ap-peared in Vienna to claim his fortune for-tune Schantz was the sergeant-majorl e Bell Syndicate. WNU Seivlce. |