The Mystery of This Strange Humanity
By Christian Morisot
Famous Deaths of April… Before beginning an article on General Rollet and Captain Danjou, it seems worthwhile to discuss Colonel Villebois-Mareuil, a larger-than-life character who left a lasting impression on the legionnaires under his command. Singular and determined, for him, the army meant action, commitment, a daily struggle.
But above all, he was an ideologue who could not abide military routine in peacetime. Having been refused permission by the General Staff to participate in the conquest of Madagascar, he resigned from the army and, after becoming a civilian, founded the "Union of Regimental Societies of Former Military Personnel," which boasted 500,000 members…
In essence, this association was intended to create a network throughout France: "A network of nationalist spirit to combat individualism and the bourgeois principle in all its uncompromising and demoralizing selfishness"… The year is 1899.
It was precisely in September 1899 that war broke out between the Afrikaner peasants (Boers) and the British in South Africa, and the former colonel saw his moment arrive… Well received by the Boers, who appointed him general, this unusual French mercenary refused all pay and compensation.
On April 5, 1900, surrounded and practically abandoned by the retreating Boer troops, he was killed at Boshof.
The British, his enemies, gave him full military honors.
Georges de Villebois-Mareuil had a profound understanding of the legionnaire's psychology and captured what he called "the mystery of this strange humanity," in impressive writings where the precision of his words leaves no room for compromise.
"The Legion presents itself with a dual character: one enlists up to the age of forty, and it is composed of professional soldiers for whom a military career is a refuge, a guaranteed livelihood, often a means of naturalization, sometimes a rehabilitation—that is to say, for a time at least, a true profession… the legionnaire lives in his dream.
What is this dream? No one will specify, not even he; but he will hold it responsible for his misfortunes, he has given it a name: 'the blues.' Is it any wonder that dark clouds of the all-too-heavy memories of a past estranged from his present sometimes weigh upon his intelligence, obscuring it? Can one smile at the lamentable fiction of the gnawing insect, born in the…"
The decay and ruins of life, casting their shadowy silhouette upon this soul extinguished by happiness, attacking its last hopes? Just as normal life is not for the legionnaire, he is loath to accept events in the monotony of their ordinary form and cause. His tendency is to dramatize, to drape everything in legends; to the flat truth that bores him, he prefers his invention, which amuses him. He becomes passionate about it and clings to it until, caught up in his own story, he gradually unconsciously attributes to it a significant portion of reality in his own life.
This primarily makes investigating his past difficult, a past he is far from concealing, except for very specific reasons, and which, on the contrary, he would like to flaunt, embellishing it to enhance its prominence. Above all, he needs to assert himself as an extraordinary being, and Certainly, he is not; he is an outlaw who has leaped over the barriers of a society where he felt ill at ease, who thirsts for mortal risks, to gamble with his life, the only possession he has left, which he treats lightly and which he gives, when necessary, with the fervor of a soldier from bygone eras.”
The corps within the Army possess an intellectual and moral existence independent of the men who compose it, and the changes, however numerous one might imagine, are powerless to alter the traditions of their cradle.
E. Wasteels, in 1907 in Béchar, seven years after the death of General de Villebois-Mareuil, wrote this poem dedicated to his former colonel:
It was precisely in September 1899 that war broke out between the Afrikaner peasants (Boers) and the British in South Africa, and the former colonel saw his moment arrive… Well received by the Boers, who appointed him general, this unusual French mercenary refused all pay and compensation.
On April 5, 1900, surrounded and practically abandoned by the retreating Boer troops, he was killed at Boshof.
The British, his enemies, gave him full military honors.
Georges de Villebois-Mareuil had a profound understanding of the legionnaire's psychology and captured what he called "the mystery of this strange humanity," in impressive writings where the precision of his words leaves no room for compromise.
"The Legion presents itself with a dual character: one enlists up to the age of forty, and it is composed of professional soldiers for whom a military career is a refuge, a guaranteed livelihood, often a means of naturalization, sometimes a rehabilitation—that is to say, for a time at least, a true profession… the legionnaire lives in his dream.
What is this dream? No one will specify, not even he; but he will hold it responsible for his misfortunes, he has given it a name: 'the blues.' Is it any wonder that dark clouds of the all-too-heavy memories of a past estranged from his present sometimes weigh upon his intelligence, obscuring it? Can one smile at the lamentable fiction of the gnawing insect, born in the…"
The decay and ruins of life, casting their shadowy silhouette upon this soul extinguished by happiness, attacking its last hopes? Just as normal life is not for the legionnaire, he is loath to accept events in the monotony of their ordinary form and cause. His tendency is to dramatize, to drape everything in legends; to the flat truth that bores him, he prefers his invention, which amuses him. He becomes passionate about it and clings to it until, caught up in his own story, he gradually unconsciously attributes to it a significant portion of reality in his own life.
This primarily makes investigating his past difficult, a past he is far from concealing, except for very specific reasons, and which, on the contrary, he would like to flaunt, embellishing it to enhance its prominence. Above all, he needs to assert himself as an extraordinary being, and Certainly, he is not; he is an outlaw who has leaped over the barriers of a society where he felt ill at ease, who thirsts for mortal risks, to gamble with his life, the only possession he has left, which he treats lightly and which he gives, when necessary, with the fervor of a soldier from bygone eras.”
The corps within the Army possess an intellectual and moral existence independent of the men who compose it, and the changes, however numerous one might imagine, are powerless to alter the traditions of their cradle.
E. Wasteels, in 1907 in Béchar, seven years after the death of General de Villebois-Mareuil, wrote this poem dedicated to his former colonel: