By Christopher Miskimon
On August 24, 1914, 44 Americans joined the French Foreign Legion to fight the new war against Germany. They paraded through the streets of Paris to the cheers of crowds. David W. King, a 21-year-old Harvard dropout, spent four years in the trenches before becoming an officer in the U.S. Army near the end of the war. Alan Seeger was a 26-year-old intellectual from New York. He wrote the famous poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” and died during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Eugene J. Bullard, the son of a slave, worked as a boxer in Columbus, Georgia, before the war. Wounded at Verdun, Bullard was discharged from the Legion but became the world’s first black aviator. He ran a bar in Paris after the war and fought for France again in World War II.
This book presents the experiences of Americans in the Foreign Legion through the eyes of these three men. It is an interesting look at how a few adventurous Americans influenced Franco-American relations through two world wars and beyond.
Fighting for the French Foreign Legion: Americans who Joined the First World War in 1914 (Nils Elmark, Pen and Sword Books, South Yorkshire UK, 2024, 257 pp., photographs, $42.95, HC)
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