Legion

“ The Seventh Legion, locking their great shields close together over their heads, came like a great tortoise with shell of steel close to the foot of the wall. Vainly the Britons stormed at them with missiles and yells and fantastic dance. Working beneath that roof of steel the legion picked the weak wall down and made a causeway clean through. ”

“ Great and incredible are the services done by this legion to the republic. This was the first legion to tear itself from the piratical band of Antonius; this was the legion which encamped at Alba; this was the legion that went over to Caesar; and it was in imitation of the conduct of this legion that the fourth legion has earned almost equal glory for its virtue. The fourth is victorious without having lost a man; some of the martial legion fell in the very moment of victory. Oh happy death, which, due to nature, has been paid in the cause of one's country! ”

“ As by studying a hive one feels the mysterious governing spirit, so he felt the spirit of the Legion in its music, its restlessness, its longings, its passions, and its ambitions, uttered and cried to heaven in prayers and curses. As individuals the men were dumb, guarding their secrets, striving to forget ”

“ We stuck it out; and, after eight weeks, went to the front with the Second Regiment of the Foreign Legion.
No other nation in the world has a fighting force like the Foreign Legion. Here, in this finest unit in France, the real red blood of all peoples unites. Men from fifty-three countries, every land and clime, all ranks and walks of life, colors, ages, professions, or different religious and political beliefs, speaking all languages, they have come from the four corners of the globe and are fused in the crucible of discipline. ”

“ It is always so with the Legion, and that is what makes the Legion so terrible in battle—They are not so much fighting with the enemy, monsieur, they are bayoneting the Past, and what the Past has done to them. ”

“ "Is that the Three-and-Twentieth, Strabo mine,
Marching below, and we still gulping wine?"
From the sad magic of his fragrant cup
The red-faced old centurion started up,
Cursed, battered on the table. "No," he said,
"Not that! The Three-and-Twentieth Legion's
dead,
Dead in the first year of this damned campaign—
The Legion's dead, dead, and won't rise again.
Pity? Rome pities her brave lads that die,
But we need pity also, you and I,
Whom Gallic spear and Belgian arrow miss,
Who live to see the Legion come to this,
Unsoldierlike, slovenly, bent on loot,
Grumblers, diseased, unskilled to thrust or shoot. ”

“ The Legion must sustain its reputation, such as it is! Desperate men, bad men, let them be called by civilians in times of peace, but give them fighting and they are the glorious soldiers who never turn back, who, even when they fall in death, fall forward as they rush upon the enemy. All the world knew that of them, and they knew it of themselves. They knew, also, that when the moment of starting came men of Sidi-bel-Abbés who drew away from them in the streets and the Place Carnot would take off their hats as the Legion went by. It would be "Vive la Legion!" ”

“ And as the valour of the legions has shown itself worthy of their most illustrious generals, the senate will with great eagerness, now that the republic is recovered, bestow on our legions and armies all the rewards which it formerly promised them. And as the martial legion was the first to engage with the enemy, and fought in such a manner against superior numbers as to slay many and take some prisoners; and as they shed their blood for their country without any shrinking ”

“ They come by the legion, in countless scores of thousands; and when once they have tasted the waters of their birth they never touch food again, never cease their onward rush until they become bruised and battered wrecks, drifting down from the spawning-beds. ”

“ These Watchers, I felt certain, had been compelled by this dead man, who lay before me, to continue as defenders of the fort after their deaths. ... He was evidently a man. A bold, resourceful, undaunted hero, sardonic, of a macabre humour, as the Legion always is.
As each man fell, throughout that long and awful day, he had propped him up, wounded or dead, set the rifle in its place, fired it, and bluffed the Arabs that every wall and every embrasure and loophole of every wall was fully manned. He must, at the last, have run from point to point, firing a rifle from behind its dead defender. ”

“ There are plenty of fine speeches made about the glorious Foreign Legion in the French Republic, but there is a prejudice against having anything to do with a légionnaire in the flesh there. Everywhere he is shown the door, and the poor devil begins a terrible course of starvation.
How often have I seen these men come back again with a batch of recruits to Sidi-bel-Abbès, and their old comrades mockingly asking them why they were in Africa once more. ”

“ The Legion, though recruited considerably from the ranks of the broken-down, the criminal and the starving, is a regiment of dudes; after the main ambition to escape comes the ambition to outvie one's neighbour in cleanliness and neatness. This desire to be neat, to be bright and speckless, is stimulated by the laws of the Legion that bear with terrible severity upon slackers ”

“ They are miserably cold in the chilly African night, and the pangs of hunger soon assail them. But they keep going on: they are accustomed to accomplish miracles of marching even when loaded with the Legion's heavy baggage; without it they cover enormous distances. Five minutes at the double with that long cat-like stride of the Legion which never tires those who have once got the knack of it—and then five minutes' marching. They go on like this without stopping all through the night, and in the morning the truants are a good sixty kilometres from the garrison. ”

“ The mighty deeds of the Legion are still more of a riddle. All these men have been clever enough to discover sooner or later what a very poor sort of bargain they made when they enlisted, and the Legion has always been a hotbed of seething discontent. ”

“ In many a venturous assault, in many a hand-to-hand encounter, fought out with enemies as fierce and almost as skilful as themselves, they had earned their ominous title; and the very legionaries, though they sneered at their discipline, and denied their efficiency in long-protracted warfare, could not but admit that to head a column of attack, to run a battering-ram under the very ramparts of a citadel, to dash in with a mad cheer over the shattered ruins of a breach, or to carry out any other hot and desperate service, there were no soldiers in the army like the Legion of the Lost. ”

“ Contrary to most of the légionnaires, I have always seen the necessity for the hard marching discipline. Troops that have to march in such droughty country must be able to economise their water rations. This is simply a law of necessity. There is another brutal feature of the Legion's marches: cruel at first sight but it is really kindness to the men. A légionnaire who faints on the march is tied to the baggage-cart. A pole is pushed through the sides of the cart at about the height of a man's arms and the légionnaire roped to it by the shoulders. ”

“ Their pay was always ridiculously small, their punishments barbarous, and the discipline that they were subject to more than hard. And yet there were always thousands of recruits willing to shed their life's blood, who did not serve under the Legion's flag merely to earn their living, but formed one of the best bodies of troops in the world. What misery and misfortune must there be in Europe to bring thousands and thousands of poor and desperate men flocking to the Legion's standard, whose total in the eighty years of the regiment's existence must add up to an overwhelming figure. ”

“ To his original legion were added some of the finest and bravest of the Lombard volunteers, who had learned his worth "after the armistice"; while boys from ten to fourteen, who were his pride and delight, formed his "band of hope."
To-day for an act of courage a man would be raised from the ranks, and, sword in hand, command his company; but woe to him if he failed in shouldering a musket or brandishing a bayonet at need. To onlookers this legion, composed at first of but one thousand men, seemed a wild, unruly set ”

“ V. THE ARMY.—The Roman army was originally called Legio; and this name, which is coeval with the foundation of Rome, continued down to the latest times. The Legion was therefore not equivalent to what we call a regiment, inasmuch as it contained troops of all arms, infantry, cavalry, and, when military engines were extensively employed, artillery also. The number of soldiers who, at different periods, were contained in a legion, does not appear to have been absolutely fixed, but to have varied within moderate limits. Under Romulus the legion contained 3000 foot-soldiers. ”

“ Is a sentinel attacked, then he must defend himself with his bayonet until he can alarm the guard and bring the officer on duty to the rescue with cartridges. Such things are significant. But they do not prevent the légionnaire from being a splendid soldier.
Individual training—Boer tactics—practical instruction ... that is the Legion. And it marches. Now and then its marching powers are increased artificially. The "compagnies montées" one with each regiment, companies mounted on mules, have even done seventy kilometres a day. Every two men have a mule. ”

“ It is always the exceptions that one notices. An editor of the Temps, who visited Sidi-bel-Abbès and struck up a chance conversation with me, said in astonishment:
"I was speaking just now to a professor of Greek, and now you're a journalist. Is the Legion then a collection of ruined talents?"
In between the paintings in the Salle d'honneur there stand the Legion's memorial tablets, with the names of the battles in which the Legion took part written on them: forty-eight great battles, fought in all corners of the earth, from Indo-China in the East to Mexico in the Far West. ”

“ The Légionnaire marches....
The Foreign Legion, as an old troop of mercenaries, works like a machine. The newly recruited human material is quickly adapted to the old, faultlessly working parts. In barrack life and on the drill-ground the officers stand in the background. For these stages they are superfluous, and their work is confined to paper reports or to an occasional visit to the drill-ground. ”

“ The Legionary's time is, in theory, his own after 5 p.m., and the most sacred plank in the most sacred platform of all his sacred tradition is his right to promenade himself at eventide and listen to the Legion's glorious band in the Place Sadi Carnot. ”

“ The Roman armies consisted of vast bodies of men which, when not in actual service, were established in permanent encampments in various parts of the empire, wherever it was deemed necessary that troops should be stationed. These great bodies of troops were the celebrated Roman legions, and they were renowned throughout the world for their discipline, their admirable organization, the celerity of their movements, and for the indomitable courage and energy of the men. Each legion constituted, in fact, a separate and independent community. ”

“ It appeared to every legion as though the other legions were engaged in a fierce, bloody conflict, the clashing of swords and lances echoed around us, but there was no fighting anywhere. In the darkness we thought that our whole army was transformed into a single vast, confused mass, in which man fought against man, the mounted cohorts trampled down the [Pg 22] foot-soldiers, the tribunes rode at the head of the legions, and the troops met in desperate, destructive shocks. Only while the lightning glared did we see the legions standing in motionless squares in their places. ”

“ Besides their regular equipment every man has a bow and quiver. Out of a legion we get four thousand men fit for volley archery, two thousand of them make good archers and one half of those get to be experts while on horseback. Then a legion can fight afoot with their regular shields and formation or we can use any advisable proportion of the men as archers and shift from one arrangement to the other as we please. Changing their heavy shields for bucklers, we can use as many as a third of a legion as mounted archers. ”

“ Advancing steadily, fighting side by side with the magnificent French Regiments who regard the Legion with respect, almost with jealousy,—the Legionnaire feels himself a personage. His comrades have suffered and died by thousands to gain the position the Regiment holds. Each living member must now maintain that enviable record.
35July 14, 1917, anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, Independence Day of France, the Foreign Legion was decorated with the braided cord, the Fouragere, the color of the Medaille Militaire, by President Poincare. ”

“ The Roman legion--whether it was composed of four thousand men, as in the early ages of the republic, or six thousand, as in the time of Augustus--was divided into ten cohorts, and each cohort was composed of Hastati (raw troops) , Principes (trained troops) , Triarii (veterans) , and Velites (light troops, or skirmishers) . The soldiers of the first line, called Hastati, consisted of youths in the bloom of manhood, who were distributed into fifteen companies, or maniples. Each company contained sixty privates, two centurions, and a standard-bearer. ”

“ Their name is legion and their presence ubiquitous, but they rarely annoy as much as when disguised under the mask of the “Introducer.” In his clutches one is helpless. It is impossible to escape from such philanthropic tyranny. ”

“ Legion, or it might, for example, wear a crested lark upon its helmet and be called the Legion of the "Lark." The commander of the whole legion is a man of senatorial rank; its standard is a silver eagle on the top of a staff, commonly holding a thunderbolt in its claw. ”

“ The Legion recruits its units mostly from the failures and broken-down men of the world; consequently, and leaving aside young criminals who are driven into it by the law, it numbers few very young men in its ranks. ”