March Or Die

A history of the legendary French Foreign Legion by the bestselling author of Who Dares Wins.

Tony Geraghty analyses the legend and re-examines the battle honours of the Foreign Legion, and his revelations illuminate the darker side of its historic relationship to the motherland. Called into being in 1831 as a device to absorb the footloose veterans of Napoleon’s old armies, the French Foreign Legion subsequently won astonishing victories in the farflung battlefields of Spain, the Crimea, Algeria and Morrocco, Italy, Mexico, Syria, Indo-China, Madagascar, and West and Central Africa.

March or Die also traces the Legion’s diminished fortunes in recent years. It has fought in the Gulf War, Rwanda and Kosovo among other conflicts, but has found itself in ‘a world of political correctness which left the Legion marooned on an island of admirable but anachronistic values’. Forced to accept women in its ranks and no longer unique now that conscription has been abolished, it is searching for its place in the modern world.