When Corporal Allan Ford was a boy in Cavan, he tried to swap a toy soldier for a friend's legionnaire. "I offered him 10 of my soldiers. He said no. I offered him 50, then 100. Not for any number would he give up his legionnaire, so I told my Dad I had to have some. He bought me a section from the (18801906) Moroccan campaign, and after that I won all the battles. Now I'm a legionnaire myself."
Cpl Ford sits in a hot tent at this isolated camp in the desert mountains of Corsica, where the French Foreign Legion's 2nd paratroop regiment (2e REP) is training a new batch of corporals and, across the hillside, a sniper squad. "I was in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Rangers before, like my grandfather," the 26-year-old paratrooper says. "I got tired of working for the Brits and decided to work for the French." Nearly six years have passed since he made the change. "This is a lot tougher. Legionnaires do anything they're told. You might get a complaint in the British army - here they don't complain about anything."
The only thing Cpl Ford misses about the Rangers is fried breakfast. "I went from bacon, egg, tomato, sausage, mushrooms, toast and a pint of tea to a pain au chocolat and coffee," he laughs. He is specially trained for urban warfare. Has he ever seen combat? "We went through some villages in central Africa. I never killed anybody, if that's what you mean." How long will he stay in the Foreign Legion? "Fifteen years if they'll have me, maybe 20." (The Legion gives a full pension after 15 years' service.) "It's a bloody hard life, but it's a bloody good life. They've given me more than anyone else ever did. My Dad is a bus driver and he's very, very proud of me. I'm somebody who got off his ass and did something for the family."
Some day, Cpl Ford dreams of buying a house in Waterford, near a golf course. In the meantime, the paratrooper's life has the glamour of an old Hollywood movie with Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich. "It's a long way from Cavan . . . I've got a French girlfriend I'm madly in love with", he confides while his French officer listens. "Her brother is a legionnaire and he took me home on leave. It was like Penny and Vince in Just Good Friends. It was love at first sight but we didn't admit it. Her name is Sibylle de SaintPhalle - be sure to spell it right - her mother is a countess. She's been my girlfriend for four years and she follows me everywhere, to Africa, to Guiana. She's got a little place in Corsica now."
When he is promoted and marries Sibylle, Cpl Ford says he'll alter the tattoo that shows through his tank-top. "Legio 2e REP. Born to Kill," it says. "I was looking for war as all young sods do," he laughs. "I'll have `kill' crossed out and change it to `love'."
Many recruits are attracted to the Legion by the offer of French nationality after five years. "When you've got an Irish passport, who needs a French one?" Cpl Ford asks. And unlike his fellow paratroopers, he doesn't mind being called a mercenary.
"It's not a dirty word at all. The French have been employing Irish soldiers for hundreds of years, since the Wild Geese. As long as there's a French army, there'll be Irish guys in it."
Cpl Ford knows "about 10 Irish lads" in the 1,300-strong 2e REP. As the Legion's only paratroop regiment, it is the most prestigious unit of the world's most storied army. One of the Irishmen, from Newry, sits a few feet away, polishing his boots, his arms bulging with snake tattoos. Did he serve in the British army like Cpl Ford? The Irishman scowls. He doesn't want to talk, and the French officer steers me back to sniper practice. He wouldn't be the first IRA man to have found refuge in the Legion.
Nearly 100 films and Edith Piaf's Mon Legionnaire ("He was tall, he was handsome, he smelled good like hot sand. . .") have perpetuated the legend of romance and adventure that Cpl Ford is living. In three days' time, 166 legionnaires from the 2e REP will march down the ChampsElysees in the Bastille Day parade. Legionnaires march at the slow cadence of 88 steps to the minute (compared to 120 for the rest of the French army) as a vestige of their early days as the king's private guards. So they always take up the rear of the Bastille Day parade, and they always receive the loudest applause.
A pamphlet from the Legion's headquarters at Aubagne, near Marseille, says of the legionnaire: "In almost every case, he has come to the Legion to break with the past." That may mean family, political or police problems. "We don't care what they did before they came to us," says Captain Christophe Billan, who is in charge of training for the 2e REP. Yet the Legion rejects 70 per cent of all applicants, including known murderers, drug addicts, mental cases and homosexuals. "There was an Irishman in my section who kept getting into trouble because he liked fighting," Capt Billan says. "That's the kind we look for - scrappers. We've had a few football hooligans that we turned into good legionnaires."
The French Foreign Legion offers an almost evangelical chance for salvation and rebirth. There is probably no other organisation in the world that you can join without showing identity papers. Commissioned officers are regular French army officers and keep their real identity, but everyone else is given a new I.D. on entry. There is an office in Aubagne where they do nothing but invent names, birthdays and places of birth for legionnaires. And should a legionnaire encounter someone from his past, the Legion transfers him immediately to a far-flung corner of France's former colonies, for his protection. Those who want to resume their original identity may do so after several years - the process is called "rectification".
Journalists are not allowed to speak to legionnaires unless they are "rectified" - a precaution that cuts out contact with criminals. While most soldiers wear their names sewn on a chestpocket flap, the legionnaire has only a blank Velcro strip, on which he can attach his name, real or fake, if he wants to. When he dies, he can be buried at the Legion's cemetery at Mont Sainte-Victoire, of the Cezanne paintings - with the name of his choice on the tombstone.
If their individual past is forgotten, shared hardship and the Legion's history are the glue that binds together men from 138 different countries. Founded by King Louis Philippe in 1831 to get revolutionary riff-raff off the streets of Paris and to "pacify" North Africa - a euphemism for killing Arabs who resisted French rule - the Legion's exploits included conquering the Algerian citadel of Constantine - perched atop a 1,000-foot cliff - in 1837, and, 50 years later, defeating 10,000 devil-worshipping tribesmen in Dahomey (now the republic of Benin), including units of bare-breasted women who stabbed legionnaires and bit off their noses.
But the Legion's defining battle, the one whose name appears on its flag along with the emblem of an exploding grenade, was Camerone. On April 30th, 1863, three officers and 62 legionnaires held off 2,000 Mexicans at a hacienda near Puebla in Mexico for an entire day. At nightfall, the last five survivors staged a bayonet charge. Ever since, "faire Camerone" has meant to fight to the last man - something the Legion did again at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954. "The mission is sacred," says the Legion's code of honour.
"You will execute it to the end, whatever the cost. You never abandon your dead or wounded nor give up your weapons."
The wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou, one of the officers who died at Camerone, is the Legion's most sacred relic. (Danjou's real hand was blown off by a grenade in Algeria, and the wooden hand was found in the hacienda at Camerone.) April 30th is one of the Legion's four official holidays. The officers and their men spend Christmas, New Year, Epiphany and Camerone together. Even those who are married are required to spend Christmas morning with their unit. The motto Legio Patria Nostro - the Legion is our country - is taken very seriously. Not only is it their country, it is their family.
As we complete the spine-crunching two-hour drive by Peugeot jeep up to Casta Camp, 30 trainee corporals are assembled in a clearing amid the Corsican brush known as maquis. At 9 a.m., the sun is high and it is more than 30 degrees Celsius. The men have just run 13 kilometres. With their sun-leathered skin, scars, tattoos and skin-head haircuts, most of them do not look like the sort of men you would want to meet - anywhere.
By noon it is 38 degrees. The legionnaires have been drilling all morning, but for what their sergeant calls an "aperitif" they do an intensive 20 minutes of push-ups and running with their assault rifles before lunch. In the heat and dust, this is cruel and inhuman punishment - almost as mad as throwing yourself from a moving aircraft at 350 metres, which they also do, at least two dozen times a year. During this month in the maquis, their flesh is devoured by mosquitoes and they sleep only four hours a night. They have a trench for a toilet, and a bucket of water for a shower. Two legionnaires have collapsed in the heat.
"Softies. They're not going to make it," the sergeant says scathingly. "Those corporal's stripes have to mean something." At the sniper firing range, the legionnaires laugh when they hear that Irish soldiers are suing the Department of Defence for hearing loss.
Every upheaval in this century has brought a new wave of recruits to the Legion. White Russians joined in 1917, Spanish Republicans in the late 1930s. After the second World War, German troops and officers took up the Legion's offer of anonymity. An old issue of France Soir newspaper tells the story of Eliahu Itzkovitch, an Israeli who joined the Legion in the 1950s to track down an SS officer - also a legionnaire - whom he found and killed in Indochina. After the Falklands war, there was a rush of Britons who had tasted combat and were bored.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the largest number have come from eastern Europe, seeking better wages and French passports. They make good interpreters in former Yugoslavia and know how to start vehicles in freezing weather, but the Legion finds them difficult to train. "You see how Communism contaminates people," Capt Billan says. "They are less receptive. They have less initiative than the others."
During the 1954-1962 Algerian war, legionnaires tortured rebels from the National Liberation Front (FLN) and joined in the putsch against Gen de Gaulle when he decided to give the country independence. The 1st paratroop regiment was disbanded in shame, and the 2e REP barely escaped the same fate. As they were trucked back to their base at Zeralda, the legionnaires sang Edith Piaf's Je Ne Regrette Rien.
To this day, many are unrepentant. "It was wrong to turn Algeria over to a handful of terrorists from the FLN," Capt Billan says. "If you need proof, look at the state Algeria's in now."
In 1978, the 2e REP dropped into Kolwezi, Zaire, on six hours notice to rescue 2,200 Europeans from Katangan rebels. More recently, legionnaires fought in the 1991 Gulf War, participated in UN and NATO operations in Bosnia, went on peace-keeping missions in Somalia and Rwanda. Last year, the Legion rescued more Europeans from a civil war in the Congo. Since bombings in Paris in 1995 and 1996, they have been deployed in train stations and metros as part of the French Interior Ministry's Vigipirate operation. One legionnaire created a scandal when he told an inquiring tourist, "I'm trained to kill people, not give directions."
These days, most of the Legion's foreign operations are in French possessions in Tahiti, Guiana, Djibouti and the Comoros.
Capt Billan, a 30-year-old Frenchman who graduated 7th in his class of 120 at Saint-Cyr military academy and constantly whistles military marches, spent three years with the Legion in Guiana, eating snakes ("chewy"), hacking his way through the Amazon jungle on a "mission of sovereignty" to protect local Indians - French citizens - whose monthly welfare payments incited the greed of their Brazilian cousins. What an integrated Europe will make of such folly is anybody's guess. But Kourou is the French satellite launching base, so there is an ulterior motive.
The Foreign Legion is unabashedly sexist. Women cannot join, and no one has ever suggested they would be welcome. "I'm interested in work. Women I leave for the holidays," Sgt Jack Harrison, from Canberra says. "Most of us have girls who write to us. Girls are never a problem - all you have to do is say you're a legionnaire. It's the uniform, it's the mystique." Legionnaires are not allowed to marry for the first five years of service.
Boozing and whoring seem to be part of the job definition, but even that is changing. The last official military bordello, in Guiana, shut down in 1994. "That's today's morality," Capt Billan sighs. "It was much easier to control diseases before."
So despite its traditions, the Legion changes with the times. The couvrenuque - the white flap that hung down from the legionnaire's kepi on Cpl Ford's toy soldiers - has been abandoned. The French government has performed radical surgery on the defence budget and even the Legion is being forced to cut back, from 8,300 to 7,700 men. Its officers claim it will be a more compact fighting force. The trendy language of Pentagon planners has caught on even here. "Combat is no longer part of our vocabulary," Capt Billan says. "We talk about crisis management. Our job is to maintain the crisis at the lowest possible level. I don't think there'll be any more wars like in the old days. There hasn't been a real war since Indochina and Algeria."