Evening Post SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1937. SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1937. SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE

So much has been said in the news of late about foreigners fighting on both sides in the Spanish civil war that one might naturally conclude that this is a novel phenomenon in warfare. It is not. The soldier of fortune follows one of the oldest professions in the world. Four hundred years before the birth of Christ a citizen of Athens, one Xenophon, finding in the decline of his native city little outlet for his youthful energies, accepted the offer of 'a friend, Proxenus, of Boeotia, of a commission in an expedition to assist the Persian prince, Cyrus, the Franco of his time, in a revolt against his brother, Aitaxerxes 11, the King of Persia. With the party were ten thousand Greek soldiers trained in the Peloponnesian War. Cyrus was defeated and killed in the Battle of Cunaxa (401 8.C.), hard by the ruins of Babylon, and the little army of i Greeks had to retreat nearly 1500 miles through the hostile upland tribes of Armenia until they reached j the Black Sea at Trebizond. The hero of this, one of the greatest retreats in ! history, was Xenophon himself, who j tells his story, modestly enough, in the famous "Anabasis" or "UpCountry March," through the medium of which the beginner usually learns Greek. Xenophon got his men through to comparative civilisation and enrolled with them in an army of Spartans to fight against the Persian satraps in Asia Minor. Later Xenophon himself fought with the Spartans against his own- countrymen at the Battle of Coroneia (394 8.C.), for he was a thorough-going Fascist by conviction, and could not abide Athenian democracy. So indeed one might imagine General O'Duffy and his Blue Shirt Brigade in Spain with Franco, if Franco were defeated, having to fight his way through the mountains of Cantabria to the sea to secure his return to Ireland. ,

Spain has ever been the happy hunting ground of the soldier of fortune since the days when the members of the Barca family of Carthage made the Peninsula their preserve and Hannibal completed the life Vork of Hamilcar and Hasdrubal by using Spain as a base to march round the coast and over the Alps, with an army mainly of Spaniards, to conquer Italy. The Scipios, Pompey, and Caesar himself, great Romaiis, all at different times exploited Spain as a training ground for their military careers, and the thousand troubled years that ensued after the fall of the Roman Empire to the era of Ferdinand and Isabella were shot through and through with the warfare of Spanish and Moorish adventures. In Italy in the earlier years of the Renaissance the Condottieri, mercenary bands, under leaders like Sir John Hawkwood, Francis of Carmagnola, and Francisco Sforza, afterwards Duke of Milan, fought wherever, the lure of booty led them, selling their services to either side, and, where neither offered reward, making war on their own account for plunder. Their example was followed on a larger scale by the engagement of bodies of foreign troops by different Governments. The British were by no means the least offenders. For long periods they hired German troops from the Landgrave of Hesse, who sold his men at so much a head and received as much as half a million sterling for the Hessians lost in the American War of Independence. In the British Army were the King's German Legion and the Corps of French emigres known as the Chasseurs Britanniques. They were disbanded after 1815, but in the Crimean War Britain enrolled a foreign legion of 10,000 Germans, 5000 Swiss, and 5000 Italians. For over two hundred years the Swiss provided mercenary troops all over Europe, and over a million served in that time. On the other hand, Scottish and Irish men at arms practised their profession with equal impartiality on the Continent. After the fall of Limerick Patrick Sarsfield with his "Wild Geese," to whom General O'Duffy's brigade for Spain has been compared, sailed for the Continent and took service there. In 1692 there were about 19,000 of them in the French Army and over 10,000 elsewhere in Europe. For many years also the French Army had its Scots Guard, and Scotsmen served under Gustavus Adolphus.

Such men as the rank and file of these foreign legions are, however, rather men who make a living out of warlare. The true soldiers of fortune are those individuals who have a natural taste for adventure, and who follow war round the world and through the ages. Such, for instance, was Marshal Keith, born at Peterhead, on the Aberdeenshire Coast, who fought in the early Jacobite Rebellion and had to leave his native land. He became a Colonel in the Spanish Army, and took part in the Siege of Gibraltar in 1726-27. After service in Russia he joined Frederick the Great, and became one ,of hia right-hand men who followed

him through the Seven Years' War and fell at the head of his troops in the Battle of Hochkirch (1759). Frederick raised a bronze statue to him in the'Wilhelmplatz at Berlin, and in 1868 King William of Prussia, the first Emperor of Germany, had a replica made, which he gave to the town of Peterhead as a memorial to a good soldier. It is curious, however, how Spain and the Spanish Dominions in America had their attraction for the soldier of fortune. Admiral Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald, smarting under injustice in Britain, threw in his lot with the Chileans in their struggle for independence from Spain, and by his brilliant naval exploits on the Pacific Coast made his name immortal in the annals of South America. Similarly, Sir Lacy de Evans, a fighting Irishman, who joined the army at 20, and fought in India, in the Peninsular War, in America in 1812-14, and at Waterloo, left his Parliamentary duties as Member for Westminster (1833-65) to lead a British Legion, 10,000 strong, to help the young Queen of Spain against the Carlist rebels in the years 1835-37, taking part in the storming of the Carlist lines at San Sebastian, in the capture of Irun, Oyarzun, and Fontarabia, names familiar in the present fighting. In the same war Colonel William Wakefield, whose gravestone may be seen in the Bolton Street Cemetery, played a prominent part and won his commission.

Would it be fair to class such men as Wakefield, or By ron, who died at Missolonghi in the Greek War of Independence, as soldiers of fortune? It was certainly not for money that they fought nor for the love of fighting, but rather for an idea, a faith, an ideal, or a cause. Such men are rather to be classed as crusaders in their own belief. When Mr. Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, mentioned in the House of Commons on Wednesday last that agents were seeking to recruit young men for Spain by the offer of substantial rewards, Mr. Gallacher retorted: "I want to challenge Mr. Eden to say that any man has gone to support the Spanish Government for money and not in support of principles." There is a difference, but it does not mean that a soldier of fortune is not an honourable man. There is nothing to be said against the gallant von Tempsky, a true soldier of fortune, who met a soldier's end in the Maori wars. It may be finer to fight for an ideal as did the British volunteers with Garibaldi, one of the survivors of whom died a little while ago in Auckland, or to die like the young New Zealand student Griffith Maclaurin, for a cause in the defence of Madrid, butj the soldier's faith is a simple one— to do his duty—and neither now nor in the past should one dig too deeply into motives. The spirit of adventure is still dormant in all of us, and so the soldier of fortune will con-1 tinue to flit, a romantic figure, across the pages of history.