Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 November 1901 — THE FRENCH FOREIGN [ARTICLE]

THE FRENCH FOREIGN

HUMAN DERELIOTS WHO FIGHT UNDER FLEUR-DE-LIS. ✓ A Famous Corps la Which are Many Distinguished Men who Wish to Bury The Past In War’s Oblivion. Much has been written from time to time about the French Foreign Legion, that strange mysterious medley of men, recruited from nearly every quarter of the earth, who belong to the French regiments on service in Algeria. The armies of all the great powers contain men of many different nationalities and interesting past, but the French Foreign Legion is made up almost entirely of these nondescripts. In this cosmopolitan corps are to be found rubbing shoulders together noblemen and gentlemen who have lost caste, disgraced officers broken down bankers and notaries, artists and students who have failed in life, deserters from various armies, escaped convictß, thieves, pickpockets and men who have managed to cheat the guillotine or the halter. Many Men of Talent. It is certain that there are numerous Teutons and especially Alsatians in the legion, but, then, many of the Austrians also put themselves down as Germans, while Frenchmen who desire, for reasons best known to themselves, to remain utterly unknown Inscribe themselves as Belgians, Swiss and sometimes as Italians, Among the adventurers and castaways there are men who are to be heard discussing Kant, Leibnitz, and, in another connection, Wagner in their barrack rooms or along the free shaded principal street of Sidi-bel-Abbes. There are common legionaries who know five or six languages, and who can quote ancient and modern writers. Others are marvelous musicians, actors, accountants. When they die in the colonies or in battle they are thrown Into a hole and covered up, but there la generally a prayer said over the dead comrade by somebody who "plays the priest” for the occasion. In such a collection of men vice is naturally rampant. The greatest vice in the corps is love of drink. A legionary would laugh at the apostles of temperance or teetotallsm. In Algeria ten bottles of wine can be had for a franc and ten glasses of absinthe for fifty centimes. In these circumstances it is not surprising that a course of Algeria is detrimental not only to the legionary, but also to the ordinary French messman.

Offlcen and Men Alike. The officers of the French Legion are In many respects like their men. Many of them are, of course, "rankers,” and all are as brave as their men. Their isolated life makes them studious, and they are not above taking lessons from legionaries possessing more erudition or technical knowledge than themselves. They have appointed as one of their lecturers a corporal who had been a colonel of engineers in the Austrian army. Although the legionaries do not read many newspapers, echoes of far off events reach them from time to time and they occasionally call each other by the names of men famous in the world beyond Sidi-el-Abbes. Thus a German-Alsatian named Kirchner was usually called the sirdar, in allusion to the post formerly held in Egypt by the present English commander in chief in South Africa. Distinguished Persons In the I>glon. Those mysterious men of the legion enter it one fine day and as soon as they are clothed in uniform sedulously endeavor to forget their pasts. They never speak of themselves, and they die as they lived in the legion—human enigmas. Nothing can ever be known about them or their antecedents. A few have been identified or found out by the officers. One, for Instance, had been a leading tenor in the opera house of a great European capital. A Prussian who was killed in Tonquin was found to be a genuine count and the son of a high military official. In 1897 one Albrecht Friedrich joined the Second Battalion of the legion. He was about 25, of distinguished manners, reserved and Bllent about his past.- He died at Fort Geryville, Algeria, and three days afterward a party of German official persons came for his body, which they took away with them on board their special steamer, bound for Hamburg. According to the authorities, the dead legionary was a cousin of Emperor William of Germany.