Camerone 2026

By Louis Perez y Cid

One might think that a ceremony is repeated. That it obeys a fixed, immutable, almost mechanical rite. But this is only true for those who observe it from afar. From the inside, Camerone is anything but a repetition. It is a rupture in time. A day that escapes its own chronology.

I have placed on this site two texts by foreign officers. Two ways of saying the same thing without ever quite converging. One, by Antoine Marquet, lingers on the signs, on the figures highlighted, on the way an institution tells its own story.

The other, by Jean Marie Dieuze, speaks of silence, of this strange suspension where the Legion recognizes itself in its dead as much as in its living. Two writings, two distances, and yet the same attempt: to understand what, each year, returns without ever allowing itself to be confined.

But there are times when analysis simply isn't enough.
For me, Camerone 2026 had a particular intensity. First, there was this convergence of lives. I had crossed paths, in other periods of service, with General Thierry Burkhard, as well as Warrant Officers Jörgen Madsen and Luigi Da Pont.

Men I had met over the years, in different contexts, but who, on that day, seemed united by something older than our careers. As if military memory knew how to recognize its own fragments and piece them together effortlessly.

Then there was the music. “Haydn’s Sarabande” began before Captain Danjou’s hand rose. I don’t know why this music always affects me in the same way. There is something raw, profound, almost implacable about it. That day, it surprised me as much as it moved me. It was no longer just music; it became the very substance of time itself.

And when I saw the hand appear, carried with its procession of pioneers, slowly ascending the sacred path, something happened that words struggle to contain. Time didn't stop. It withdrew. As if effacing itself to make way for something else, something older, something more silent. I put on my sunglasses without thinking, not to protect myself from the sun, but to contain what I didn't want to show.

There are emotions that don't ask to be shared. They only ask not to be betrayed. It was then that I thought, without putting it into words, of a certain idea of ​​being present in the world, this way of looking at beauty and pain without trying to justify them, without resolving them. Simply welcoming them, in their raw obviousness.

After the ceremony, another time began.
I met Colonel Cormenier. We had served together in French Guiana in '83 and '84, with the 3rd Foreign Infantry Regiment (3e REI). He was a lieutenant, head of the forestry unit, the Selva. A force of nature, an almost animalistic energy in his demanding nature. I, a warrant officer, was his deputy. We had shared those training grounds where everything was difficult: the heat, the mud, the fatigue, and where the stakes were always higher than they seemed.

The CEFE (Forestry Training Center), the CCF (Forestry Training Center), the makeshift facilities, the endless days. And that invisible competition between the Legion's forestry unit and the Marine Troops' unit, to determine who would host the future national equatorial forestry training course. A rivalry that spoke less of opposition than of a shared obsession with excellence. Ultimately, it was our successors who obtained this title, later established in Régina.

I hadn't seen him since 1993, at Fort Nogent. He was already a lieutenant colonel in the 1st Infantry Regiment (1er RI). Always that same drive in his eyes, that forward-looking momentum, as if nothing could truly stop him.

And then life took its course. A stroke. The rupture. The body betrayed. The story unfolding differently. Meeting him again in Aubagne, brought by the Gravereau CBA, felt surreal. His body had changed, but not him. His gaze remained unchanged, sharp, incisive, almost defiant. He gave me a framed watercolor, a legionnaire in the Selva. And behind it, the nicknames of our legionnaires: Yé Yé, the Macedonian, Rambo, Zorba the Greek, Rasmus.

It's not an object. It's a fixed memory, offered like a silent testament that nothing has been lost.
We spoke for only a few minutes. Then Camerone, as always, took hold of us again. The phone calls, the encounters, the flow of people. We had planned to meet later, in a corner of the fair. It didn't happen.
What remains is a simple regret, not dramatic, but persistent. The regret of things interrupted by life itself, not by will.

That's what Camerone is: a grand mass with no guaranteed tomorrow, where the living cross paths with the living as if they recognize each other without truly saying so.
A day that gathers and disperses in the same movement.

And when everything ends, there is neither assessment nor conclusion.
Only this silence remains a unique, somewhat dense, somewhat cold atmosphere, in which one understands that the most important things cannot be described.
They pass away, and they stay with you.