Foreign Legion Quotes

“Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

“Ex-Foreign Legionnaires in London, for instance, often use the same pubs, but more than that they all know where to contact each other if ever they’re threatened. If they’re ever in trouble - and by nature of the life they’ve led that’s highly probable - members of their tribe will immediately come from all over London to lend robust assistance. There are similar tribes in the underbelly of every city. I just happen to know about ex-Legionnaires because I’ve come across a couple, drank with them and listened to their stories. It’s like sitting with pirates, fortune-hunters, bank robbers and Gypsies”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“c'est tout le monde qui veut aller à la guerre, mais personne qui veut y rester”
― Foreign Legion Soldier

“I do not attach too much attention to words. I enlisted, and as several times already in my life, I was prepared to follow the consequences of my actions. But I did not realize that the Legion would make me drink this chalice to the dregs and that these dregs would make me drunk, and that by taking a cynical pleasure in discrediting and debasing myself, I would end up by breaking free of everything to conquer my liberty as a man. To be. To be a man. And discover solitude.
That is what I owe to the Legion, and to the old lascars of Africa, soldiers NCOs, officers, who came to lead us and mix with us as comrades, these desperadoes, these survivors of God knows what colonial epics, but who were all men, all.
And that made it well worth the risk of death to meet these damned souls, who smelled of the galleys and were covered with tattoos. None of them ever let us down, and each one was willing to sacrifice himself, for nothing, for kudos, because he was drunk, for a challenge, for a laugh, to stick it to someone by God.
They were tough and their discipline was of iron. These were professionals. And the profession of a man of war is an abominable thing and leaves scars, like poetry. You have it or you don’t. One cannot cheat because nothing wears out the soul more and stigmatizes the face (and secretly the heart) of man and is more vain than to kill, and to begin again.”
― Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force