Review of: Rendezvous
with Death: The Americans Who Joined the Foreign Legion in 1914 to Fight for
France and for Civilization
Author: David Hanna
Publisher: Regnery Books
Source: Library
Grade: A
The world has been marking centennial milestones of the
First World War for the past few years. So it’s fitting that this final post
for February 2017 falls in the centennial month in which the United States
received the infamous Zimmermann telegram, the piece of paper that finally
propelled it into the Great War. It was,
however, a war some Americans had already been fighting for years.
In his 2016 volume, Rendezvous with Death: The Americans Who Joined the Foreign Legion in 1914 to Fight for France and for Civilization, author David Hanna uses many first-hand accounts,
including the soldiers’ letters and memoirs, to put human faces on the
mechanized horror of 20th century warfare.
Although there would be more American volunteers later, and
at least three Americans were already serving in the Foreign Legion as
mercenaries, Hanna’s narrative concentrates on the few dozen original enlistees
who on August 25, 1914, marched to the train that would take them to the
Legion’s training center. Two of them, poet Alan Seeger and Franco-American big
game hunter René Phelizot, took turns carrying the procession’s huge American
flag. Crowds gathered to see them off, throwing chocolates and flowers. Pretty
girls offered kisses. Few would survive the fighting that would stagger on for
more than four more years.
They were a motley crew -- artists, students, dreamers, and
the occasional prize fighter – united only by their nationality and love of
France.
The Foreign Legion didn’t know what to make of them. Its soldiers,
foreign volunteers serving under French officers, were typically “men running
from something – perverts, deserters, thugs, and worse. The discipline was
severe; the conditions often harsh,” Hanna writes. “No one with better options
sign up for the Legion.” Until the Americans arrived.
Unlike the regular French forces, the Legion’s soldiers
pledged allegiance only to their unit, not to France, which allowed the Americans
to join without forfeiting their citizenship. It was in the Legion that the
recruits got their first taste of war in the fall of 1914, encountering the
Great War’s legendary mud – “so thick it would pull the boots off one’s feet”
with “a stench putrid and obscene.” And that the first of them died.
More battles would follow – at Artois, Verdun, the Somme. As
the volunteers’ numbers dwindled, another fighting venue opened – in the sky –
where they ultimately formed the famous Lafayette Escadrille. One of them,
Eugene Bullard, would become the first black American fighter pilot. But while
the French saw American airmen as publicity tools to encourage American
intervention in the war, Germany considered them blatant violators of America’s
vaunted neutrality.
The U.S., however, did not enter the war until spring 1917, and
then not through the efforts of the American volunteers but through the fatal
telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to Mexico, offering an alliance with Germany to help reconquer its former territory in the
U.S.
U.S. entry came too late for poet Alan Seeger, who helped
Phelizot carry the American flag across Paris in August 1914, and who had been
frustrated ever since by his country’s failure to aid the Allies. On the
afternoon of July 4, 1916, Seeger advanced with his fellow legionnaires on
German trenches. In his most famous poem, he had written, “I have a rendezvous
with Death, at some disputed barricade. . . ” That day he kept his rendezvous.
He and the other volunteers would leave behind an America
that first fought for, then turned its back on European wars, leaving their idealism
passe, as Hanna writes. But France was saved – until the next time.
