Fighting for the French Foreign Legion: Americans who joined the First World War in 1914

By Nils Elmark

On 24 August 1914, forty-four Americans joined the Foreign Legion and “with a cowboy swing” marched through Paris, wildly cheered by the crowd. They were Ivy League graduates, artists and dreamers and soldiers of fortune starting on equal terms as recruits in the French Army. They were the first Americans in the Great War, driven by a love for France and a thirst for adventure with no idea of the horrors awaiting them. This book is the amazing story of these American legionnaires told by three of the young volunteers:

• David Wooster King – a 21-year-old dropout from Harvard, son of a rich businessman. King survived four years in the trenches ending as an officer in the US Army chasing German spies in Switzerland. He became a modern global adventurer and when the world went to war again David King was the first to volunteer for an even greater adventure in North Africa.

• Alan Seeger – a 26-year-old poet and dreamer from a New York family of intellectuals. Seeger was killed during the Battle of the Somme on 4 July 1916. Six weeks earlier, he wrote the famous poem, ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’ which was to become his legacy and the favorite poem of President Kennedy. It has inspired a line of American presidents during the 20th century and is an indestructible poetic lifeline linking France and the United States of America.

• Eugene James Bullard – the last of the three legionnaires and a 19-year-old entertainer and boxer from Columbus, Georgia. His father was born a slave, his mother was Creek Indian. Although wounded at Verdun and invalided out of the French Army, Bullard became the world’s first black aviator. After the war he settled in Paris and ran a bar in Montmartre before going to war for France again in 1940.

The three men represent different pillars of the American soul, and their lives and dreams symbolize the story of how America became modern and remind us of the strong historic ties between France and America. Most of all, this book is a fantastic saga of brave men, great adventures and terrific sacrifices that bring hope and a new direction in a time of human division.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Aug 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399069175

Nils Elmark

NILS ELMARK is a European journalist and non-fiction writer. He specializes in digging up near-forgotten stories, and delights in revealing their exciting, hidden connections in modern history. With four books under his belt, Fighting for the French Foreign Legion is his fifth book and second in English. Before becoming a reporter, he served in the Danish Royal Guards.Nils shares his time equally between London and the small town of Elsinore on the strait between Denmark and Sweden and in his free time enjoys charging around the countryside on his beloved motorcycle.

Book preview

Paris - August 1914

First, London, for its myriads; for its height,

Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite;

But Paris for the smoothness of the paths

That lead the heart unto the heart’s delight….

Alan Seeger - 1912

It was a little clerk in uniform with a cigarette stuck between his lips who signed David Wooster King on to four years of war. It didn’t take very long. A few questions: Name. Age. Nationality. Stethoscope. Open your mouth. Socks off. Weight. Height. The clerk scribbled down the answers and King discovered with awe and admiration how he was able to move his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other while both hands were busy with the papers. King offered him a fresh cigarette, which the scribe filed behind his left ear for future reference: "Bon pour la service" the clerk announced and handed King a piece of paper with an official stamp on one corner.

Here you are. 9:10 A.M. tomorrow. Rouen. Gare S. Lazare. And report at the barracks of the 135th when you get there

That was it. The clerk turned away, the next foreign volunteer stepped forward for medical examination and the 21-year-old student from Harvard went back to his hotel and sent a cable to his brother Edward: The joke is on you. I enlisted and am in the Foreign Legion to which his older brother allegedly swore: Look what that damn-fool kid has done now.

King’s enlistment in the French Army happened three weeks after France went into war mode.

This war comes like the traditional Bolt from the Blue!" wrote the American journalist Charles Inman Barnard in his diary on August 1st. He had planned to retire as Paris correspondent of the New York Tribune after 16 years but they had persuaded him to remain at his post in Paris until the early autumn as a quiet summer was expected.

The headlines that summer had been the assassination of Le Figaro’s editor, Gaston Calmette, by Mme. Caillaux, who was the wife of the cabinet minister. Then there was the caving-in of the streets of Paris because of the underground tunneling for the electric tramways and the new metropolitan tubes. And then of course, not to forget, the big prize-fight between Jack Johnson and Frank Moran for the heavyweight championship of the world.

"At four o’clock on afternoon of August 1st I was standing on the Place de la Bourse when the mobilization notices were posted, wrote Barnard. Paris seemed electrified. All cabs were immediately taken. I walked to the Place de l’Opéra and Rue de la Paix to note the effect of the mobilization call upon the people. Crowds of young men, with French flags, promenaded the streets, shouting Vive La France! Bevies of young sewing-girls, les midinettes, collected at the open windows and on the balconies of the Rue de la Paix, cheering, waving their handkerchiefs at the youthful patriots, and throwing down upon them handfuls of flowers and garlands that had decked the fronts of the shops. The crowd was not particularly noisy or boisterous. No cries of On to Berlin! or Down with the Germans! were heard. The shouts that predominated were simply: Vive La France! Vive l’Armée! and Vive l’Angleterre!"

Next day, Charles Barnard received a cable message from the editor of the Tribune asking him to remain on his post during the present crisis, to which the elderly newspaperman agreed. Most plans were altered in Paris during the mobilization.

On Sunday 2 August hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen between 21 and 30 were to report for enlistment at quickly established Bureaux Militaires at designated train stations across France. Hardly anyone failed to show up. And on 3 August 1914 Germany declared war on France and sent its army across the border into Belgium using that country as a backdoor to Paris.

The streets of Paris were bustling with activity. It must have been like that during the revolution wrote one of King’s future comrades. People were cheering, singing, crying and marching. You saw soldiers and their families during the day and heard the hobnailed boots on cobbled streets until late in the evening from soldiers on their way to the stations where military trains were waiting to take them to the front. From 2 to 21 August three and a half million young Frenchmen were mobilised.

To the French surprise, tens of thousands of foreigners from all nations volunteered to join the defence of France. On the first day of mobilisation, the Swiss poet Blaise Cendras and the Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo wrote an open letter under the headline L’heure est grave in which they urged all friends of France to join the army. The modernist artists stressed that in this serious time there was no need for words, only action. The letter was published in leading newspapers signed by them and 15 other foreign intellectuals.

A 37-year-old American businessman, George Casmeze, wrote a similar letter to the editor of the New York Herald’s Paris edition, which began:

‘In the war between Despotism versus Equality, Justice, Liberty and Fraternity which noble France and her allies have undertaken to defend I am ready like any true spirited American to offer myself as a volunteer’

In the letter Casmeze urged all able-bodied American men residing in France to do likewise and wrote that he had set up a recruiting headquarter on 11 rue de Valois - open from 10am till noon and from 2pm till 5pm.

The appeal led to the formation of the American Volunteer Corps that for the following couple of weeks exercised in the Garden of the Palais Royale under the leadership of George Casmeze, René Phelizot, an adventurer who had killed elephants enough to feed an army, Charles Sweeney, a former West Point cadet and finally Bert Hall, a pilot and soldier of fortune who claimed he had flown in the recent Balkan war. Some 200 Americans, and people with only remote connections to America, had signed up and promised to join the French Army but according to one of the organisers, Bert Hall, as the reports from the front got worse and the day of the departure got closer a large number of volunteers suddenly fell ill or had business elsewhere.

The enlistment began on 21 August, when the general mobilisation was finished and took place in the big courtyard of Hotel des Invalids where thousands of volunteers of all nations marched in under their respective national flags. The recruitment officers and doctors worked swiftly, but they could not handle the overwhelming number of volunteers and many had to come back over the following day.

On the morning of 25 August, about two scores of dedicated American volunteers assembled for breakfast at the famous Café de la Regence at the invitation of the organizer George Casmeze.

Café de la Regence was not just any café. It was established in 1641 - it could have been frequented by The Three Musketeers and it had, for centuries, been a meeting place for the greatest chess players in the world. It was also here that Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels met and became friends before they introduced communism to the world. Now it was the starting point of an American adventure.

After breakfast, the volunteers went outside the cafe on Rue Saint-Honoré where they had their photograph taken by the New York Herald. It was a historic moment. Three weeks after President Wilson had declared that America would stay out of the European conflict - and 954 days before he broke this declaration - these volunteers from all over America were about to go to war for their beloved France, the country that had been the first ally of the newly born United States of America back in 1778. The volunteers were between 18 and 49 years old. Many were sons of millionaires, others came from the poorest imaginable families. Most were white, but there were a few blacks as well. Some of the volunteers had gone to school for five years but half of them had attended America’s finest universities. Each man was driven by his own personal blend of idealism and lust for adventure, but regardless of background and their reasons for going to war, each American on the pavement outside the Café de la Regence had freely chosen to risk his life for France. They had even put their continued American citizenship at risk fighting for a foreign nation.

René Phelizot, a big game hunter who had returned from Africa, and a poet from Harvard, Alan Seeger, both proudly carried American flags in front of the group as they marched through Paris across the Place de L’Opéra towards Gare Saint-Lazare. Cheering crowds lined the streets through which the volunteers passed. The men were dressed in their oldest civilian clothes, and wore almost every shape of straw, felt, and derby hats; most of them carried bundles or small valises. They had been instructed to bring along as little as possible, and to take with them only their least valued possessions. They tried to march like soldiers but they were in fact just enthusiastic and free men trying to look like soldiers. But the Parisians loved them for it. Women were everywhere in great numbers with flowers and kisses showing their gratitude towards the foreign volunteers who stood up for France.

Charles Inman Barnard of New York Tribune was also at Gare Saint-Lazare on 25 August:

These youths were a tall, stalwart lot, marching with a sort of cowboy swing. They were not in uniform, but wore flannel shirts, broad-brimmed felt hats, and khaki trousers. They carried a big American flag surmounted with a huge bouquet of roses, and alongside this a large French flag. They were loudly cheered as they were entrained for Rouen, where they will be drilled into effective shape!

While the excited American volunteers marched towards Saint-Lazare, the French, Belgian and British armies were desperately on retreat, losing one big battle after the other with horrific losses. The Germans had just taken Namur in Belgium and were racing towards Paris whilst the government had decided to flee to Bordeaux. Many old Parisians recalled the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 - and the French defeat.

At Gare Saint-Lazare the Americans entrained with the British to their training camp in Rouen. David Wooster King was one of them although it’s unlikely that he marched with the other Americans through Paris that morning. On the day of departure, he had a hurried breakfast with two Hollanders he had picked up the day before and by fighting, kicking, struggling and the aid of a sergeant major they gained the privilege of standing in a compartment with sixteen others.

It is not clear how King ended up Paris in August 1914. According to the journalist Lowell Thomas King was on holiday in Switzerland and had rushed off to Paris when war was declared but it’s also said that he was simply spending his summer holiday in Paris when the war broke out. Regardless, at the end of August 1914, David King had ended up in Rouen amongst a thousand other volunteers, in the town where the British burnt Jeanne d’Arc on the stake in 1431 - some of them even went to see the dungeon where she was held prisoner.

David Wooster King was from Providence in Rhode Island and had just spent two years at Harvard but unlike his big brother Ted, who had sailed through university with blazing colours, studying had been an uphill struggle for David who may have seen the Foreign Legion as an honourable exit from college. Maybe his decision was enhanced by the fact that his father, after two years of mental health issues, had committed suicide the year before.

David King was of an extremely rich and prominent family. His father, José Barre King had been a successful merchant and capitalist with vast interests in cement, gypsum, and mining - a ‘cement magnate’ who had one of America’s fastest schooner yachts built. Jose King had businesses in many parts of the USA, his ancestor having emigrated from England in 1628 to settle in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Young King belonged to the American elite. Before he went to Harvard, he had spent two years at an English boarding school plus one at the Institution de Bellerive at Vevey in Switzerland - a school for boys from affluent backgrounds to which rich American families sent their sons. It was at Bellerive that J.P. Morgen learned to speak French half a century earlier.

David King’s grandmother, Mary Hart, was a lineal descendent of Stephen Hopkins, another Massachusetts settler who came over to America on Mayflower in 1620 and his mother, Louise Wooster, had an equal amount of red-white-and-blue blood in her veins. She was a descendant of the famous General David Wooster, who fought bravely in the Revolutionary War on the American side.

David King’s money, heritage and education were of little use as recruit - un bleu - in the French Army, although King had never relied upon it.

Over the next couple of days, a few more American latecomers arrived at Rouen where they joined the group, which eventually comprised 44 Americans plus the lonely Swede, Elow Nilson, who later became King’s comrade de combat. Elow had met the Americans at Café de la Regence where he came to read Swedish newspapers and claimed he joined the Americans to perfect his English, and they had adopted him from the very first day. To get into the American group he had told the recruitment officer that he came from Milwaukee in Wisconsin. He had family there but he came from Gustavsberg in Sweden - not far from Stockholm - and as the war went on and he proved his courage he was in most records and letters considered one of the Americans.

King’s new comrades were an amazing lot that only a war can bring together. One was the 26 years old Alan Seeger who was a contemporary of T.S. Elliot at Harvard. He had graduated in 1910 and like King he too could trace his lineage back to Mayflower. He had come to Paris in 1912 to write and had spent the best years of his life in the Quartier Latin. There, he had already finished his first collection of poems and had handed over the manuscript to a Belgian printer in Bruges before the war broke out. Due to the advancing German troops, his precious work eventually became stranded behind enemy lines.

Alan Seeger was not the only artist or writer. John Joseph Jack Casey from California was a newspaper illustrator and portrait artist who later drew some wonderful sketches from life in the trenches. Then there was James Stewart Carstairs, a painter and art collector from New York, Paul and Kiffin Yates Rockwell, journalists from Atlanta, Professor Achilles Olinger was teaching French at Columbia University, Siegfried Narrutz was a philosopher who two years later would be riddled with machine gun bullets on the 4th of July, Fred Landreaux a mild-mannered actor and Charles Trinkard a jewellery engraver from Brooklyn.

Not all volunteers were white or wealthy. Robert Percy and Bob Scanlon were good Southern Negroes who had followed Jack Johnson to France. Their love for France and lust for adventure were equally strong. France was and is the land of equality, which they missed at home. Percy was a barber from New Orleans and Scanlon a talented professional boxer from Mobile, Alabama. Another volunteer Tony Paullet was also known in sporting circles in New York as a fine lightweight fighter. Scanlon and Paullet later fought each other in a boxing match in Alsace ‘that was talked about in the Legion for years.’

Then there were all the adventurers and soldiers-of-fortune: René Phelizot, the big game hunter from Lake Chad in Africa, who already enjoyed fame and attention in Paris. He was from Chicago and had run away from home at the age of thirteen and served as a cabin boy on a riverboat on the Mississippi. He had sailed the oceans until he eventually ended up at Lake Chad in Africa where he had hunted elephants for years. Like Seeger, Phelizot had valuables stuck behind enemy lines: He had a large consignment of ivory stored in Antwerp in Belgium, which the Germans had now confiscated.

William Thaw was the son of one of America’s richest families. He could fly an aeroplane but the French would not accept him as a pilot. Instead, the young millionaire gave his aeroplane to the French and signed up in the Foreign Legion to the ridiculously low pay of one sous a day. He commented: I don’t see why people complain about the high cost of living when they can go to the front and die on a cent a day.

Another pilot was Bert Hall. He claimed he had flown in the Balkan War for the Turks for 50 dollars a day until he switched side and flew for the Bulgarians who paid him twice as much. Having crashed his plane, he was driving a taxicab in Paris when France mobilised. Another adventurer was Charles Sweeney from Spokane, once a cadet kicked out of West Point who had lived in France for several years and was to become Ernest Hemingway’s friend and role model.

Dennis Dowd - a lawyer from Georgetown University - was an exception. He was not in the Legion because of his love for France or lust for adventure, but because his girlfriend had refused to marry him. If you don’t marry me I’ll join the Foreign Legion and go to war and probably get killed, he said. When she still refused to marry him, he took the steamer to Europe in time to walk with the rest of the Americans through Paris on 25 August.

This group of American Ivy League graduates, artists and dreamers, athletes, businessmen and soldiers, all started on equal terms at the bottom of the French Army as recruits on a cent a day. They were the very first forty-four Americans in the Great War.

In the Foreign Legion

He’s five-foot-two and he’s six-feet-four

He fights with missiles and with spears

He’s all of thirty-one and he’s only seventeen

He’s been a soldier for a thousand years

Buffy Sainte-Marie 1964

The French had two regiments of the Foreign Legion:

1er Régiment Étranger from Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria that formed the new 2nd and 3rd and a 4th Marching Regiments that would fight in France together with 2e Régiment Étranger from Saïda also in Algeria. This regiment formed the new 2nd Marching Regiment where the first group of Americans were attached.

Americans who joined the Legion after August at the recruitment office in Paris were attached to the 3rd Marching Regiment that for a large part was commanded by officers from Paris’ fire brigade. American volunteers who signed up elsewhere in France went into the 2nd Marching Regiment of the 1st Régiment Étranger. We will meet most of them in this book as the war progresses. The last of the newly formed regiments of the Foreign Legion, the 4th Marching Regiment, was entirely manned by Italian volunteers and was also known as the Garibaldi Regiment.

It may sound a bit complicated to distinguish between the four marching regiments, but it is highly relevant for the four scores and ten American volunteers who fought honourable at the front in France in the ranks of the Foreign Legion during the Great War. For them their regiments were not just a matter of life and death - it was more than that. It was their honour, for which they were willing to sacrifice their lives. Normally, soldiers in the Foreign Legion enlisted for five years, but from 1914 to ‘18 the tens of thousands of volunteers signed up for the duration of the war - which many never lived to experience.

When King arrived at the barracks in Rouen he was just in time to see the 135th Regiment march out of the barracks. The young rich student was fascinated and wrote: ‘First we saw a lot of confusion amongst twenty-five hundred men tuned up to war pitch. Then a sudden sharp order and the confusion ceased. The lines stiffened into solid blocks of red and blue. Another order, drums began to roll. The blocks broke up into columns and swayed out of the barrack gates. The brazen blare of bugles swelled the rumble of the drums as they moved down the street the glorious music rising and falling till only the distant rhythm of the drums could be heard’.

David King and the Hollanders found the volunteers’ quarters and were stopped at the gate by an Arab who would not let them in until they showed their orders they had received from the little clerk at the recruitment office. Then they passed into the courtyard and out of civilian life.

The next morning at five o’clock the sergeant called for volunteers and King’s imagination ran wild: Perhaps the Germans were advancing Rouen and they needed men to light a fuse to blow up a bridge or participate in a desperate rear-guard action to stop the enemy. King and another American stepped forward only to be given each a mop and a bucket and ordered to clean the filthy latrines. The young Harvard graduate had learned his first lesson as a soldier: When sergeants are wandering around collecting men, pick up anything in sight and look busy.

King and the other volunteers stayed in Rouen only for a few days. The enemy was indeed advancing and the recruits, by now four companies, were marched to the station and entrained for Toulouse close to the Spanish border. Fifty-six men in each boxcar a forty-eight (40 men and 8 horses), which only gave room for squatting positions until some climbed out on the roof. Four days in these conditions at the height of the French summer resulted in some fatalities and bodies were removed from the boxcar on arrival at Toulouse.

Barrack life began. Thirty-two men in each room. On his left, King had a Belgian butcher who ripened little cheeses under the mattress, on his right his new mate, the elephant hunter Rene Phelizot. They received their equipment. Blue coat and red trousers, hard boots and no socks - just two pieces of cloth to wrap around their feet, the Lebel army rifle and a long bayonet. In Toulouse a number of the Americans had their photo taken.

Each day they went on marches and each day the distance and the weight of equipment were increased, until the recruits after a fortnight could march 20 miles a day with full African Army equipment of a hundred pounds.

Then in the middle of September a battalion of old legionnaires from Africa arrived to be mixed with ‘les bleus’. Tough looking men made of different stuff than the green volunteers. Many had served 10 and 15 years and fought black soldiers in Sudan, pigtailed soldiers in Tonkin and female warriors from Dahomey. As King remarked they were in it for quite different reasons than us ranging from manslaughter to unrequited love.

Most of the volunteers were afraid that the war would be over before they got the opportunity to prove themselves at the front and most were eager to get into battle. They could have spared themselves their worries. Normally, the Legion trained its recruits for six months but in the present dire situation, their military education as soldiers of the Great War was reduced to only six weeks; on Wednesday 31 October 1914, headed by a drum-and-bugle band, the C battalion of the Foreign Legion’s 2nd Marching Regiment of the 2nd Foreign Legion was marched to the station, entrained in the box-cars and dispatched to the front. The Battalion comprised 4 companies of 250 men - each company divided into four sections, each of which was further divided into 4 squads. The Americans were in the 1st company 3rd section - two scores of men in an Army of 4 million. Before departure two or three American volunteers had been invalided out because of health problems, amongst them George Casmeze.

At the first station the train called, King realised that the Legion did not have the best of reputations in France. As a matter of fact the merchants on the platform started to close their shops when they heard who were coming. That didn’t prevent Les anciens from stealing everything they could get their hands on which made the Americans write a marching song to the tune of ‘Boys in Blue are Marching’

We are the famous Legion

That they talk so much about.

People lock up everything

Whenever we are about.

We’re noted for pillaging

The nifty way we steal

We’d pinch a baby carriage

And the infant, for a meal

As we go marching,

And the band begins to play - Gor’blimee

You can hear the people shouting

Lock all the doors, shut up the shop, the Legion’s here to-day

On 4 October they arrived at the huge military Camp de Mailly where they were joined by the D battalion arriving from Orleans. It was here David King saw the effect of shell fire for the first time. The iron shutters of the station were riddled with shrapnels and some buildings were totally demolished. They were getting closer to war and with it the lice: Monsieur Toto & Company as King called them: It was the irony of fate that our poet should be the first to complain of the roughness of army underwear. For several days Alan scratched body and soul in forced aloofness but there was no avoiding them. From that time, like the poor, they were always with us. How Alan must have suffered! He took them as seriously as he did everything else. I never saw him laugh. He was always scribbling and occasionally showed me the results - he could fight as well as write - but that comes later.

After two weeks in Camp de Mailly the march to the front began: thirty-five kilometres a day with full equipment. On the second day les bleus began to suffer. King and his mate Stuart Carstairs were devastated: Our shoes felt like they were filled with painful marmalade. The two men took a break on the roadside to inspect the blistered and bleeding feet and decided they were cases for the ambulance. But that only lasted till the Colonel of the regiment came by on horseback - revolver in hand - and roared Marchez! And they did. One of their comrades, Paul Rockwell, also witnessed the event and claimed it was Carstairs and Bill Thaw who met the colonel but since the story is told by King himself it’s reasonable to believe his version.

King didn’t complain about this or anything else for the rest of the war, no matter how hard the conditions. One of his comrades, John Bowe, remembers the situation with the colonel: I have seen King marching without a whimper when his feet were so sore that only the toes of one foot could touch the ground.

After two days of marching King realised he had learned another lesson: possessions are a curse and travelling light should be taken seriously. Don’t carry more than you absolutely need. King even suggested that they split a box of Bromo paper to reduce the weight.

Bromo paper is toilet paper and this is the only description at all of the American volunteers going off on the call of nature. In every book that has been published about the American volunteers - their letters, diaries and memoirs - going to the loo is simply excluded. This was clearly not an issue one talked about. Nor was sex.

On the third day as the battalion reached the little town of Verzy near Epernay the soldiers were exhausted and when the commanding general saw the incoming legionnaires he said dryly: I asked for reinforcements. Do you call those fresh troops?’

Someone must have realised this was a wrong approach to transportation because a few days later, according to King, motor trucks suddenly arrived out of the blue and for the rest of that day Battalion C rolled along the roads to the town of Fismes close to the Aisne front in the North of France. This was where the Miracle of Marne had happened; here at the Marne and Aisne Rivers the French had finally managed to stop the intruding German troops a month earlier.

That night, the shells started to detonate around the green legionnaires and several times the soldiers were woken by violent fusillades and called to arms. War was close now. In Fismes the 2nd Marching Regiment was joined by yet another battalion coming from Blois,