Joined The Foreign Legion

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 219, 16 September 1939, Page 6

Joined The Foreign Legion

A LONDON policeman, Patrick McPartland, went out on his beat—and disappeared. He did not report back to his station at the end of his duty. He did not return home that night to his wife and child. As days passed the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard—expert at finding missing persons—set going all their machinery to find the man who wore their own uniform. They failed. For four months Police Constable McPartland was posted as "missing," his wife and child had to move their home. Then, suddenly, the mystery of the missing policeman became drama. Police Constable Patrick McPartland had been found. He was a private in the French Foreign Legion and was known to be in a military hospital in the Sahara suffering from malaria. A letter reached his sister—Mrs. Kathleen Hamilton, of Camberwell—in which he said: "I shall never go back to England. My heart is broken." The man who vanished was attached to the Leyton Division of the Metropolitan Police. He was popular, a good officer, a well-known jndice athlete. I - our months before he was a familiar figure directing traffic and patrolling streets round l.evton. His first letters home, scrawled hastily in pencil and on odd scraps of paper while waiting to go on guard, told of

Lis new life in the Foreign Legion. Here is one extract:— "At last I am a nobody. It is hell here. The worst tramp in England is ten times better off than me. I hare come to the Legion of Honour, maybe never to return. "However, what little honour I did have I shall try to recover. Mv last word is: 'For God's sake, look after Michael and Eunice. 5 Do what you can for them. I cannot write any more, my heart is broken." McPartland was Irish, 33 years old, married, with one child, Michael. His wife, Eunice, was astonished by the news that her husband had joined the Foreign Legion. '•'Pat has to serve five years with the Legion, but I do not think he will ever return to this country," she said to a Pressman. "The boy and I are going to start life afresh." McPartland also wrote to his mother at Plymouth: > '"I must not think too much of what I have given up, and I shall come through with flying colours. I am now going on guard) not with an armlet and truncheon, but with a French rifle." Another letter speaks of life in the Legion at Marseilles. "Life here is worse than prison. Spanish refugees make it terrible. We live with bugs and lice. I get one and a half francs a week, not enough for a packet of cigarettes.*'