Overview

They had no country. They served one anyway. On March 9, 1831, King Louis-Philippe of France signed a document that he expected to solve a problem. Foreign veterans were flooding Paris, the colony of Algeria was consuming soldiers faster than France could supply them, and a regiment of foreigners - bound by contract rather than flag, serving outside France's borders, asking no questions about where a man had come from - seemed an elegant solution to both. He did not expect it to last. Nearly two hundred years later, the French Foreign Legion is still marching. It has fought on five continents, in conflicts from the deserts of Algeria to the jungles of Indochina to the mountains of Mali. It has served empires that no longer exist under governments that no longer govern. It has been praised, condemned, romanticized, and vilified - and through all of it, it has survived, recruiting men from over 140 nations who are willing to give up their names, their histories, and five years of their lives in exchange for belonging to something larger and more durable than themselves. This book follows the Legion from its founding as a political convenience through the colonial campaigns that made it legendary, the catastrophes that nearly destroyed it, and the operations that define it today. It reconstructs, hour by hour, the battle of Camerone in 1863 - sixty-five men holding off two thousand for an entire day, refusing surrender three times, dying almost to the last - and asks why this particular defeat became the sacred myth that the Legion performs in ceremony every year without exception. It also examines the extraordinary literary volunteers of the Great War, among them the American poet Alan Seeger, who wrote about his rendezvous with death from a trench in Champagne and kept the appointment at the Somme. It confronts the Legion's participation in colonial atrocities - the burned villages of Tonkin, the torture cellars of Algiers - with the same seriousness it brings to the extraordinary courage of Bir Hakeim and Dien Bien Phu. And it asks, of the contemporary Legion deploying in Mali and the Central African Republic, what it means that France has found it consistently useful, for two centuries, to maintain an army of men who have nowhere else to go. This is not a hagiography. The Legion has done terrible things, and this book does not look away from them. It is not a condemnation either. It is something more demanding: an attempt to understand the Legion on its own terms, and then to ask what those terms reveal about France, about war, and about the strange human compulsion to belong to something larger and more durable than oneself. The answer the Legion has been giving for nearly two centuries, in blood and sand, is: apparently the compulsion is stronger than almost anything.

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