VOICES OF THE FOREIGN LEGION: The French Foreign Legion in Its Own Words

THE TRUE STORY OF THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION, TOLD BY THE MEN WHO SERVED IN IT

‘These compelling stories of the Foreign Legion, sometimes brutal, are imprinted on the page. It is impossible to remain unmoved.’ The Times

‘Gilbert’s book is characterized by the original testimonies of the legionaries. Interesting reading, and not just for enthusiasts.’ Military History

‘ Voices of the Foreign Legion is a profound, life-changing experience.’ Publishers Weekly

For nearly two hundred years the Legion has taken men from anywhere in the world, asked nothing about their pasts and issued them a new name at the gate . Some were running from debt, prison or a broken marriage. Others wanted to find out what they were made of.

Adrian D. Gilbert has spent years gathering what those men had to say about it. Drawing on published memoirs, unpublished papers, the Imperial War Museum’s sound archive and his own interviews with British veterans, Voices of the Foreign Legion lets legionnaires from the 1880s to the present day tell the story in their own words.

They describe how recruits are selected, and what they endure in training at Castelnaudary. Then the barrack-room world that follows: shirt creases ironed exactly thirty-five millimetres apart, bristles burned off an unshaved chin with a corporal’s cigarette lighter, the punishment cells, the desertions, and the despair of an isolated posting that they called cafard , after the beetle they believed was eating their minds.

And then the fighting — the colonial campaigns in Morocco and Indochina, the trenches of the Western Front, a Legion divided against itself in 1940, the collapsing perimeter at Dien Bien Phu, the bitter last years in Algeria, the parachute drop on Kolwezi.

Above all, Camerone. On 30 April 1863, sixty legionnaires held a walled inn in Mexico for eleven hours against two thousand. Ordered to surrender, Captain Danjou replied, ‘We have ammunition and we shall not surrender’ — then raised his hand and swore to fight to the death, and made every man there swear it with him. Three were still standing at the end. The account of that day has been read aloud to every unit in the Legion on the same date, every year since.

One of the British veterans Gilbert interviewed, a former paratrooper who served five and a half years, looks back on it like this: ‘I would never, never, never, ever do the first two years again.’

This unflinching account is perfect for readers of Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices , Richard van Emden and Joshua Levine.