In the Foreign Legion

by Erwin Rosen

And thereby hangs a tale.

A very sad story, too…. No sensible man will attempt to dispute the fact that iron discipline is essential for the lurid mixture of human material in the Legion. If the justice of the Foreign Legion was in practice what it is in theory—stern but just—one could not say a word against it. It is, however, only just in theory, in the intention of the military law-makers. In reality it is the justice of unlimited tyranny; made so by the individual tyranny of officers and non-commissioned officers in individual cases, and in general by an obstinate tenacity to the letter of the law.

Every French officer and every French court-martial acts under the time-honoured assumption that the légionnaire makes a brave soldier, but is in all other respects a thoroughbred rogue and knave, and that one cannot go far wrong in assuming the worst about him. The word of a superior is always accepted as proof of guilt. There is no better illustration of this than the everlasting heavy penalties which are meted out for "theft of equipment." This sort of theft exists, of course. Theft is not a thing to be very much wondered at when the men's wages are five centimes a day.

But many hundreds of innocents are punished for this offence in the course of a year.

The favourite trick of non-commissioned officers, when they have a spite against a man, is to inspect his kit suddenly. Some trifle or other, a tie or a couple of straps, are quite sure to be missing and then there is the casus belli! "Lost is stolen—sold!" Thus the axiom of the Legion's authorities, against which the most positive assertions are of no avail. Now and then an offender of this sort is leniently treated, and let off by the regiment with sixty days' imprisonment; in the majority of cases, however, he is tried by the court-martial.

A typical case: "Jean the Unlucky" was the nickname of a young Frenchman in my company who had been sentenced in his second year of service to six months in the penal section for stealing a sash. He swore he was innocent, and as far as I can tell he spoke the truth, as his mother sent him twenty francs every month. Thus he was quite well off according to Foreign Legion ideas, and certainly need not have risked a heavy penalty by selling his ceinture for a few sous. The probabilities were in favour of his innocence, but that did not help him. He was sentenced. He survived his six months in the hell of the penal battalion and was then sent back to his company.

And now his troubles really began. At the time of his trial he had, in his rage at the false accusation, made more than one biting remark about our adjutant and his little ways. This the colour-sergeant never forgot. In spite of the fact that Little Jean was a quiet fellow, who did his duty to the best of his ability, a good soldier and a capital shot, he kept wandering backwards and forwards between the prison and the company, the company and the prison. Nothing he could do was right. Sometimes his boots were not properly cleaned, sometimes his bed was a centimetre out of the dead straight line in which beds must stand, and at another time he had not stood properly at attention at roll-call. Such were Little Jean's grave offences against the holy spirit of the Legion's discipline—ridiculous accusations, which bore the stamp of spite so plainly that even our careless captain should have noticed it.

These human machines punished automatically, without feeling, without thinking for an instant. The sergeant's reports demanding punishment for Little Jean's awful sins were signed automatically. When the sergeant put him down for eight days' confinement to barracks, the captain mechanically increased the penalty to eight days' imprisonment, because Jean le malheureux, coming from the penal section, had naturally a very bad reputation. Then came the commander of the battalion, who, not caring to be outdone in matters of discipline, doubled the dose. The sergeant's modest eight days' confinement to barracks had now grown to sixteen days' imprisonment.

But now came the embodiment of authority in the regiment in the person of the colonel. This colonel had his own ideas as to how one should treat the pernicious elements in the regiment:

"Second-class soldier Jean Dubois, No. 14892, 11th company, is sentenced by the colonel to 40 days' imprisonment for continued slackness and insubordination."