AN ENGLISHMAN EXAMINES THE LEGION

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 96, 20 October 1934, Page 25

AN ENGLISHMAN EXAMINES THE LEGION

:,-There' is. very -little in the Legion of ■ that glamour "with which it became surrounded in British eyes when Oui[da published ■ "Under Two Flags," 75 years ago, writes Mr, Gf. Ward Price in his book, '.' In Morocco With the Legion." This colouring of romance .and adventure has been, heightened by the imagination of subsequent novelists, ■and especially by- tho efforts of filmproducers.

General Bollet, the vetcian inspec-tor-general of the' corps, put the truth moderately when' discussing Marleno Dietrich's well-known film, "Morocco," which shows legionaries dancing with s-betiutiful women in a gay cabaret and marching out from there into the desert "to fight, followed "By' their faithful sweethearts.1 He said: "The truth about the Legion is perhaps too simple for the cinoma."

Suck refugee's as reach the Legion are generally of a political kind, adds Mr. Ward Price. ■; Many Italian Communists found employment in its ranks after Mussolini established the rule of Fascism; there, has been a similar large influx of Germans since Hitler came to power, and . tho..Spanish Monarchists have contributed a considerable quota under the Republican regime. The defeat of Wrangel's army in Russia brought so many enlistments that a whole cavalry regiment was added to the Legion from their number.

The scallywag members of the Legion are, in the great majority, ."French by nationality, since no Frenchman is likely to enlist in the corps unless there

is something wrong with his easier judieiarie, or police records. . . : :

It is these outlaw-Frenchmen who mako up the majority of the disciplinary companies of the Legion, and give the most trouble, for, being French citizens, they have little difliculty in inducing a Communist momber of the Chamber of Deputies to indulge his anti-militaristic instincts by representing them to the Government-.as martyrs of Legion tyranny. • :

Public opinion, even in France,, has been more consistently misled-about the Foreign Legion than.on any other- topic of popular interest. . On the one hand, the novelist and .film-producer have presented it in a setting-of gay "and-, gal-, lant adventure; on the other,- antiLegion propaganda stories and the tales told by deserters depict it as a madhouse of cold-blooded erttelty.

The truth is equally remote, from both conceptions, but tHe scale has been tipped more heavily to the side of falsehood than to that of flattery.

Like most highly-dramatised institutions, tho Foreign Legion-is more commonplace than the picture of it existing in the public mind."

Mr. Ward. Price, widely known as a brilliant journalist and intrepid war correspondent, deals with some of tho campaigns of the" French Legion in Morocco. Ho records the beneficent colonisation work amongst the Morocco Arabs, which goes to the credit of the Legion, and which "is overlooked. by those "who only hear or read the romantic tales of the Legion which are too often fantasies rather than facts.