At Sidi-bel-Abbes, in Algeria, I visited the home of the renowned French Foreign Legion.  Probably, over the years, the most famous fighting unit in the world.

The Legion comprises the only true mercenaries left in existence.  They’ll fight whomever their leaders tell them to; on either side, with the same emotions.

A Legionnaire lives with but one high goal—death on the battlefield.  On the walls of one of the barracks is inscribed this message from a former commander: “You, Legionnaires, are soldiers made to die.  I send you where you die.”  The message is looked upon with reverence, almost as holy.

Like a good many things in this world, the Legion isn’t as romantic close to as it is from a distance.  It has a fine fighting history, no question of that, but life in the Legion is much more modern than most of us have thought.  And yet it is an empty life, by most standards.  It is a bleak life.  Men with fine minds, who for reasons of their own go into the ranks of the Legion, find that after a few years their minds have dwindled to a common denominator of mere existence.

[. . .]

The Legion consists of about ten thousand men.  In this war it fought the Germans in France and in Norway.  Its record, as usual, was superb.  After the fall of France it withdrew to Algeria, its lifelong home.  in 1942 it fought against the British in Syria—it doesn’t make any difference to the Legion whom it fights.

[. . .]

The morning the Americans landed in North Africa, the Legion started north on the 50-mile run to Oran to join the fighting.  But they never arrived.  Allied airplanes bombed and machine-gunned them along the highways, and they had to turn back.  I saw their burned-out trucks still lying along the roadside.  Fortunately, there were almost no casualties.  The Legionnaires felt badly that they didn’t get to Oran in time.  Not because they disliked Americans, but simply because they missed a fight.

After our arrival the Legion was heand in glove with the Americans, and started readying itself to join in the great fight on our side.  The soldiers were impatient and itching to get along.

[. . . . . . .]

The Legion had changed greatly from the dregs-of-humanity catchall that it once was.  But it was still wholly a fighting outfit, and anything that exists solely to fight is bound to be tough.  As a result, the Legionnaire lived in a mental environment that was deadly.  There was little reason or inclination to high thinking.

The Legionnaires were lonely.  There was little outside their military life for them.  They could sit in cafés and drink, and that was about all.  Many of them carried on regular correspondence with women all over the world whom they had never seen, even with Americans.  They said it wasn’t unusual to see among the want ads in the Paris papers a plea from a Foreign Legionnaire for a pen-pal.

The loneliness and longing for other days was preved, it seemed to me, by one little vital statistic.  Every year around Christmas five or six Legionnaires committed suicide.