The following article is from our March 2006 issue.

Once Teutonic, Now Slavic. The 'foreign sons' of La Grande Nation still sing old 'Wehrmacht' songs but speak East European tongues. By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Since its creation 175 years ago, the French Foreign Legion has spoken and sung with a German accent. Most of its senior noncommissioned officers have been German, and so were a majority of the legionnaires who died in Indochina. Today, many more legionnaires hail from the former Soviet bloc. The Atlantic Times visited a legion's regiment in French Guiana.

On South America's northeastern hump, where France once banished its convicts, the 19th century fuses with the 21st. French Guiana, Brazil's neighbor, is home to the Foreign Legion's Third Infantry Regiment (3e REI). Its soldiers hail from 40 nations. They strut in khaki shorts through the town of Kourou. Stiff white caps called "képis blancs" cover their shaven heads. Green, gold, red and pink aiguillettes dangle from their left shoulders, evoking their unit's past victories or heroic defeats. The 3e REI is the second most highly decorated regiment of the French army.

Kourou is also the world's busiest commercial space center, Europe's Cape Canaveral. The 3e REI shields it against potential terrorists or spies. One evening a while ago, a full-scale mockup of Ariane-5, Europe's most advanced rocket, glowed in pink floodlight at the base's entrance. Beside it, a huge soldier stood guard as if to demonstrate the consonance between the technologies of prehistory and the 21st century. His beard showed his legacy; so did his ceremonial garb, an apron and gloves of white leather. His hands were gripping an ax.

This was senior corporal Andreas Slyk. He epitomized the legion's transformation from Teutonic to Slavic. Slyk was from Gdansk, a port city known as Danzig when it was German - just as the legion was once a largely German force. A total of 210,000 German speakers served in this French elite force from 1831 until 1961; the Italians were second with 60,000 men.

Gone now are Germany's homeless war veterans ensnared by the legion's motto "legio patria nostra" (the legion, our fatherland); gone, too, are most of its soldiers of fortune, rogues and adventurers. Young men like Slyk have taken their place; East Europeans make up 40 percent of all new recruits. Like their predecessors, they have an average IQ of 120, 20 points higher than regular soldiers. Unlike some of their rambunctious forerunners, "they are very serious young men," said Lt. Col. Alain de Guillebon, the 3e REI's commanding officer at the time of our visit. Call them square, if you like, given that their favorite drink is fruit juice. "Rarely must I discipline anybody for alcoholic excesses anymore," he said.

What attracts them to a force still liable to go first when France must send troops into combat, for example, in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Chad or the Congo? "Money to attend university or start a new career once they leave after a minimum of five years service," the colonel explained.

This is what Private Sergei had in mind. He was a former Red Army captain with a Ph.D. in psychology. Sergei bade farewell to his wife and 10-year-old son temporarily and put on a French uniform "to make money for starting a practice in the Ukraine." As a lowly trooper he earned $1,340 per month.

We met Sergei under three different circumstances, first sitting on his bunk reading a scholarly journal while waiting for lunch. Superb smells wafted over from an open-air kitchen where chef Oliver Noack, one of the regiment's last Germans, defied the tropical heat as he prepared a Saxon winter dish of roast rabbit with a rich gravy of mushrooms and cream. "Good meals are a Foreign Legion tradition," explained Col. de Guillebon.

The next day we saw Sergei as a sentry snapping to attention before two Oyampi tribesmen in loincloths. They wore crowns of toucan feathers and had tricolor sashes slung over their bare chests. These were Gaullist party aldermen of Camopi, an American Indian village on the Brazilian border.

Finally we found Sergei at the edge of the 3e REI's Camopi compound peering through binoculars across the Oyapock River. Opposite was the hamlet of Villa Brasil - one church, three bars and one house of ill-repute. In this steamy place, Oyampi men, virtually all unemployed, celebrated the receipt of their dole payments with one-liter bottles of a Brazilian "Antarctica" beer.

Sergei, meanwhile, tried to guess the cargo and passengers of every pirogue puttering by. Were they clandestine gold diggers from Brazil? Did they carry equipment with which to rob French Guiana of its meager deposits of this precious metal?

Not that Sergei could do much about that. All he could do was to pass intelligence to the 3e REI's headquarters, which forwards it to the military high command in Cayenne, from where it goes to the prefecture, which alone has the authority to activate the three gendarmes in Camopi, whose chief we had watched trotting around the village in only a red loincloth.

When night fell, a sergeant chuckled into his Kronenbourg beer: "This is what has become of the legion that once did battle with bare-chested black amazons in the African kingdom of Dahomey, conquered and lost Indochina, and fought victoriously in Norway and Germany. Today, we are an oddly benign lot enforcing the European Union's 'Green' policies in South America."

If truth be told, gold mattered little in Sergei's mission - or the assignment of Foreign Legion platoons slogging in regular intervals through the rainforest with nearly 100 pounds of equipment on every soldier's back. Their chore was worthy. When they reached shacks bearing names such as "Boeuf-Brulé" or "Saut Tigre-Rouge," they only worried about mercury.

One needs mercury to separate gold dust from mud. If Brazilian intruders handle it clumsily, it will poison brooks and rivers, fish, fowl and game, and ultimately Indian tribesmen. So as a result, in French Guiana, the legion has become a defender of nature.

Well, not just. Some 110 miles southeast of Kourou, the 3e REI lords over 3,700 acres of rainforest. Its center is a camp by the Approuague River. At night, we heard jaguars bellow and vicious boar grunt. They were not wild, though, just residents of the camp's little zoo, along with two boas, caimans, an anaconda, a parrot and a tapir. This zoo was a teaching utensil for course 101 in jungle survival: What kind of animals do you encounter? How do you hold a snake? Which is the most dangerous creature here? The answer is: probably the pig.

The camp is home to CEFE, the legion's jungle warfare school, scorned by disgruntled noncommissioned officers as an adventure park for VIPs. While we were there, a bus dropped off a class of France's War College students who were quickly outfitted with fatigues. All were star-bound colonels from around the world. Pirogues took them to a clearing. There, Narcisse, a Brazilian, fixed them a lunch of fish, caiman, tapir and forest chicken. This being France, red and rosé wines also flowed, nectar from the legion's own vineyards near Puyloubier in the Provence. Thus nourished, the colonels, some with their wives, went off to an obstacle course taking five-meter leaps into muddy waters.

At this jungle base, yet another facet of the postmodern legion emerged: The legion has become an educator and trendsetter - not just for foreign officers but also France's future military, which has grown smaller but more professional since the end of the draft. The legion, too, was downsized from 8,500 to 7,700 men hailing from more than 140 countries. Worst hit were regiments stationed overseas, which lost 60 percent of their original strength. The 3e REI used to be 900 strong. Now it numbers a mere 250. But they are joined for four months at a time by 400 regular soldiers from mainland France. So now this venerable infantry regiment had become a curious amalgam of legionnaires, artillerymen and alpine rangers.

Inculcating trainees with the ways of the wilderness, the legionnaires occasionally display what's left of German "Gemütlichkeit." As they sat around a campfire drinking hot coffee with rum one night, the regiment's Polish, Japanese and British instructors introduced their pupils to vestiges of the legion's musical heritage, intoning one of its favorite songs: "O, du schöner Westerwald." The Westerwald is a forest north of Frankfurt where, as the lyrics say, the wind whistles cold. All its drastic changes notwithstanding, this small band of elite soldiers has remained what it had always been - a conservatory of mostly forgotten Old World traditions. They are, for example, the only ones to remember lieder of Germany's pre-World War I colonial forces in Africa.

We happened to be in Kourou on Camerone Day, the legion's most important holiday. It commemorates a quite senseless act of heroism: Camerone was a Mexican Hacienda where on April 30, 1863, 63 legionnaires battled 2,000 Mexicans for 11 hours. In the end, only three of the mercenaries survived.

As always at Camerone time, the regiment's officers served their troopers a breakfast of blood sausage and white wine. Then at lunch, all intoned the legion's anthem: "Tiens, voilà du boudin," the song of the blood sausage composed by a German bandleader named Wilhelm in 1856. After that, they chanted, in German, the hymn of the 3e REI in an eerily measured meter: "Mein Name ist Annemarie." This used to be the song of Rommel's "Afrika-Korps."

Everybody at my table knew the German lyrics: the British master sergeant, the Tahitian staff corporal, the Indonesian to my left and the Frenchman to my right. Annemarie was also the name of Warrant Officer Peter Giese's pet sow. Giese, a German old-timer, was in charge of catering. He presented the pig to Col. de Guillebon but swore that Annemarie would never be slaughtered.

At night, the regiment switched to a Latin beat more fitting to the venue. Ten women from Brazil competed for the title of "Miss Képi-blanc." The winner was Priscila, an 18-year-old high school student. Under the horrified eyes of a major from Marxist Zimbabwe, and to the thigh-slapping delight of a visiting Swiss Air Force colonel, the commander of French forces in Guiana opened the regimental ball with Priscilla. Afterward, the French ambassador to neighboring Suriname led Cheyenne, the runner-up, to the dance floor.

Then it was Col. de Guillebon's turn. He is a devout Catholic like so many of the nobles in the French officers' corps. He passed up the opportunity of a whirl with a contest candidate and danced instead with his wife, the mother of his seven children.

- Uwe Siemon-Netto is a Washington-based columnist and university lecturer.