French Foreign Legion: Declared Identities, Binôme Pairs and Danjou's Hand

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The French Foreign Legion, drawn from about 140 nationalities, began in 1831 as a practical fix for King Louis Philippe. After the July Revolution, Paris was full of unemployed foreign mercenaries and refugees, so the king enlisted them on condition that they serve only outside mainland France, starting with the conquest of Algeria. Recruits arriving at Aubagne today can still take a declared identity with a new name, birthdate and parents' names. After a year they may regularize their real identity, after three years of honorable service they can apply for citizenship, and a legionnaire wounded in action can claim citizenship at once as French by spilled blood.

The Legion's loyalty rests on the unit, not on France, and its founding story is Camerone on April 30, 1863, when Captain Jean Danjou's company held a hacienda in Mexico against about 3,000 soldiers until the last six men charged with bayonets. The model was tested when the rule against fighting in France broke in 1870, when legionnaires fought each other in Syria in 1941, and when former Wehrmacht soldiers joined for Indochina and Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Today the Legion makes up roughly 11 percent of France's operational ground troops and has served from the 1991 Gulf War to Mali.

• Danjou's wooden prosthetic hand is paraded down the Voie Sacrée at Aubagne each Camerone Day.
• French intelligence screened postwar German recruits for SS blood group tattoos and scars under the left arm.
• No single nationality may exceed about 25 percent of the force, to stop cliques from forming.
• In the binôme system a French speaker is punished alongside a non-French partner who misunderstands an order.
• The Legion marches at 88 steps a minute, a cadence traced to the sand of Algeria, and its bearded pioneers carry axes and leather aprons.