Voices of the Foreign Legion by Adrian D. Gilbert

Author:Adrian D. Gilbert
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2011-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

As well as altruism, a love of adventure was a powerful motivating force. Another American, Edward Morlae, summed up the prevailing mood when he wrote, ‘Some of us who volunteered for the war loved fighting and some of us loved France. I was fond of both.’

For the first time in its history, young Americans flocked to the Legion’s colours; many were well educated and would provide valuable testimony of their time in the trenches.

At least 40,000 foreigners volunteered for military service. The French were quite unprepared for this, and as only French nationals were eligible to serve in the French Army in 1914, the foreigners were shunted off into the Legion. Although the Legion was used to a mix of nationalities, the wide social range of the new volunteers came as a bewildering surprise. For their part, the volunteers were intrigued by the heterodoxy of their fellow recruits. Englishman J. Woodhall Marshall, who subsequently transferred to the British Army, described his comrades in a note to his mother:

The Legion is the strangest thing ever thought up in the mind of man. In my room, which is comfortable, there is myself, an Irishman; my next neighbour is an American, and the other inhabitants include an ex-officer of [a] So. American Republic, who came specially over from South America for the war, and is my greatest friend, a Dutch solicitor, a Russian Jew, three Cossacks, two Italians, a student from a Russian university, an Englishman who has always been resident in Paris and can hardly speak English, a Spaniard, and other mysterious individuals whose identity is absolutely hid.

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