Third. That France takes advantage of the wretchedness of the applicants and secures their enlistment while they are in ignorance of the severity of the service.
Fourth. That recruiting is carried on by crimps who abuse their victims by getting them drunk and by false promises, and it results in forming a scandalous mixture of starving men, adventurers and bandits, devoted to drunkenness and the most infamous morals.
Fifth. That it is applicable to minors, recruits being taken at the age of eighteen years.
Sixth. That Germany has, more than any other country, the right to occupy itself with that which is going on in the Legion, by reason of the great number of its subjects who serve there.
Mr. Gaston Moch issued a book in Paris in 1914, before the war, entitled “The Question of the Foreign Legion,” in which he fully discusses these arguments from the French side.
The Foreign Legion is, therefore, acknowledged to be the last of the mercenaries, a connecting link between the present day and the days before the beginning of the Christian era.
Transcriber's Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.