Kim Wallace, age 8, of Gastonia, North Carolina, for her question:
Will you tell me about the French Foreign Legion?
Most nations keep trained armies to defend their homelands. And sometimes the citizens of one nation volunteer to help protect some other land. The soldiers of the French Foreign Legion fight not for their own countries, but for others.
Maybe you have been enchanted by a movie about the men of the famous Foreign Legion. Perhaps you yearn to wear that glamorous uniform and ride to battle across the hot and sandy Sahara Desert. Perhaps you long for a life of action and excitement. You are not scared of hard work, low pay, poor food and sometimes a few mighty tough companions. If this is your dream, you must wait until you are 18 before you can enlist in the famous French Foreign Legion by which time you have every right to change your mind. You can enlist until you reach your 40th birthday, and once you enter, you are expected to endure the harsh discipline of army life for a term of five years.
If soldiering is definitely your chosen career, then you would be with the world's toughest, most famous fighting men. No other troops have deserved and been given so many honors and decorations. Yet strange to say, these brave legionnaires are not fighting for their own countries. The Legion is a branch of the French Army and most. of its officers are French, but Frenchmen cannot enlist in the ranks. When the legion was founded in 1831, the idea was to enlist foreign soldiers for duty outside France, especially to help conquer and subdue French colonies and other lands in North Africa.
About 4,000 volunteered for the first Legion Italians and Germans, Spaniards and Poles and ex soldiers from the Swiss Guard. Their flag has a rooster standing on a globe centered on the red blue tricolor of France. It bears the words, "The King of the French to the Foreign Legion." Only regiments of the famous Legion have the right to fly the banner of the French Legion of Honor along with their own flag. Until 1962, the Legion headquarters was in Sidi Abbes along the fertile coastline just north of Africa's Sahara Desert, and much Legion activity was centered in this area. Between scraps and skirmishes, the sturdy legionnaires did construction a monk named Guido was choir master at the monastery of Arezzo. He planned a system of writing notes to make it easier to read music and developed a standard scale. Tie musical scale we use today grew out of Guido's work. A look at history tells us that work on the musical scale began ages ago. Contributions were made by many people over the centuries and no one person created it from start to finish.