was able to assist our volunteers in the French Foreign Legion, and incited a number of them against the National Council and against me personally by alleging that we did not desire the formation of an army, and that we were not disposed to admit volunteers from the Foreign Legion into it.
The question of these volunteers was one of the most painful problems which I had to deal with at that time. The reputation of the Foreign Legion is well known. The discipline in it was severe, and it contained representatives of every European nation. Owing to the conditions under which it was recruited, it included numbers of men whose moral characters were dubious. Life in these surroundings was a terrible ordeal to those of our troops who entered the Legion out of sheer enthusiasm, and were now spending their fourth year in it. They found scarcely any congenial spirits among the men serving with them, with the exception of a few of the French commanding officers. Moreover, owing to the enormous losses sustained by the French, the Ministry of War naturally tended to assign the most exposed positions to the Foreign Legion, which under these circumstances was destined to be wiped out.
The number of Czech troops in the Legion at this time was about 300, and it was only by means of the utmost self-restraint that they had managed to hold out so long there. They accordingly welcomed the establishment of a Czechoslovak Army as a release from what was nothing short of a hell upon earth, but their applications for discharge from the Foreign Legion encountered serious obstacles. The supreme French command had hitherto systematically opposed a transfer of any considerable number of troops from the Foreign Legion, fearing that if this were granted to one nation, the same request would be made by all the others, and this would have meant the complete disappearance of the Legion. My efforts to secure the transfer of our troops to our army naturally met with opposition for months at a time, and this difficulty was overcome only when we were in a position to point to the existence of our complete regiments, in which it was possible to make better military use of our experienced legionaries from the French front.
I here recall one of the saddest and most touching episodes of my life during the war. One morning, in the spring of 1918, at the time when this seditious agitation in the colony against
