Voices Of The Foreign Legion by Adrian D. Gilbert (.ePUB)
File Size: 800 KB
Voices Of The Foreign Legion: The French Foreign Legion in Its Own Words by Adrian D. Gilbert
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 800 KB
Overview: 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 Drawing on published memoirs, unpublished papers, the Imperial War Museum’s sound archive and his own interviews with British veterans, Voices of the Foreign Legion lets legionnaires from the 1880s to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.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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