Word: regimentals
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Coolly poised to repel the attack, the British forces moved forward, Hessian grenadiers in fearsome mitred helmets, the Scottish Black Watch regiment resplendent in tartan kilts. Almost as one, the Continentals opened with a fusillade of musket and rifle fire. The British responded with a volley of their own. The smoke cleared. A Red Cross truck lumbered across the field to pick up the fallen, all of them victims of heat exhaustion...
...Camp Raffali in Corsica, officers and men of the Deuxèeme REP (Second Foreign Parachute Regiment) listened in silence to radio newscasts from Zaire. There was no sign of mourning when Foreign Legion casualties from their unit were announced, even though punishment squads of delinquent recruits were already digging graves in a military cemetery near the legion's paratroop base. "If they get you, they get you," said a veteran. "One legionnaire is worth 20 of the opposition...
Then came the Algerian war. The legion's strength was near its postwar peak of 40,000, and as the struggle became increasingly unpopular at home, the now disbanded First Parachute Regiment joined the generals' putsch against Charles de Gaulle. After De Gaulle accorded Algeria its independence in 1962, the legionnaires disinterred their most illustrious dead from their desert graves and transported their pink Saharan granite Monument aux Morts from 118-year-old headquarters in Sidi bel-Abbés in Algeria to metropolitan France, together with their battle-worn flags, standards, regimental colors and a multitude...
Today, the Foreign Legion has a total strength of 8,000 men. It is an elite strike force whose members have been trained for counterterror and commando-type operations. The Second Parachute Regiment, for example, which recaptured Kolwezi, is expert in night combat, alpine warfare, urban cleanup operations, amphibious landings, demolition and sabotage. The average age of recruits: 22. Virtually all the legion's officers are French. Technically, French nationals are forbidden to enlist in the legion, but many do, pretending to be Belgians, Swiss or Canadians. Although the new legion tries hard to exclude professional thugs and officially...
...there was a generals' putsch that failed ignominiously. At its end, the battle-tested "green berets" of the proud First Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, who had backed the coup, were trucked off to Zéralda for the disbanding of their disgraced unit. The watching pieds noirs wept; the Legionnaires roared out the words of Edith Piaf's plaintive song, "Je ne regrette rien. " The Algerian war has elements of epic grandeur and terror that cry out for a Thucydides, if not a Gibbon to describe them. British Historian Horne, whose previous books include three studies of Franco...