Legionnaires

The pain. The fear.The weakness leaving your body.

Another ill-chosen battleground; another ill-starred day,

The odds too great,and the cause insufficient,

The wrong tools to hand,

And no-one to care either way,

Whether you live or die, win or lose.

Despair is your comrade, your rifle.

There is only the Legion, marching apart,

Doing penance for all men.

The outcast, the despised, the wretched of all nations,

Turn to salute one flag blowing in the desert wind.


When you are broken you are ready.

When you have been killed and buried,

You can finally live.


The village nègre after nightfall:

Fifteen-year-old girls beckon with henna hands,

Blue-black negresses with silver against their skin,

Worn-out Spanish women painted like Amazonians,

Blue-eyed Kabyle girls sitting like statues in rows,

In the moonlit alley...


Blood-red sun through the sandstorm,

Solid wind shrieks over you,shoves you to your knees,

Sand lashes that face to shreds,

All you can do is lie flat on the ground,

Cover your head with the shech...

Fire and ice in waterless mountains,

A few stunted cacti and scraggy oaks,

And stones,boulders,stones...

March,stumble,march,fall,march!


Purgatory of an isolated fort:

Men,maddened by tedium,

Lie hour after hour on their bunks,

Staring into oblivion,

Or suddenly rush out into the desert,

Howling with delirium.

Seized by inexplicable evil,


They turn on each other like rats in a trap,

Beating and stabbing for no reason.

A thief’s hand is pinned to the barracks table

With a bayonet.

Another suicide is found on the toilet floor.

At parade the sergeant-major

Bawls the company out:

“If you want to finish it, go ahead!

But don’t make a mess of it, do it properly!

Dont cut the wrists, cut deep down the insides

Of the elbows-the veins are bigger there-

You will have more success.”


The last Legion outposts are wiped out in Indochina:

Men die alone,the manner of their death untold;

A last few radio messages then silence.

In the  jungle defiles' green night,

Tiny columns ambushed by entire armies

Keep firing to the last,then bid one another farewell.

Utterly surrounded, a few doomed groups

Start singing a battle chant as they charge

One last time,killed but undefeated.