Since the beginning of the present war many enlisted, no doubt, from love of France; but it is difficult to understand how this large membership was maintained prior to the war. None enlisted for protection of their homes or families. Nor for glory as scarcely any Legionary has even become a general. Not for money; the pay is one cent a day, a wage the meanest outcast in the street would spurn with scorn. Not for comradeship; the ranks being recruited from the whole world are too cosmopolitan for lasting friendships. Not for an easy life; for they were assigned, before this war, to duty in the unhealthy waste places of Africa and Asia. Answers to this riddle would be almost as diversified as the volunteers are numerous. No weakling can be accepted, for it takes a good physique to stand the training necessary to develop a man to fight for his life and the country. For example it is part of the routine of the Legion for each company to march once a week, in full marching equipment, twenty-eight miles within ten hours. Historians cannot agree as to when this Legion was first organized, but it is conceded that it was in existence in the time of Clovis who stands out in history as the founder of a new France, and with whose rule French history begins. He employed this very organization in the year 486 when he defeated the last of the Roman power in northern Gaul, at Soissons, which city is still in existence and stands less than ten miles from the place where their equally courageous successors gave up their lives for that same France, but now a glorious republic, fourteen hundred and twenty-nine years later. In our country we consider an institution that is one hundred years old as ancient, our government itself being in existence less than a century and a half, yet here is an organization that when Columbus discovered America, was a thousand years old. Mercenaries, or troops who serve alien countries for pay, were used from the very earliest times. Thirteen thousand Greeks fought in the year 401 B. C. under Cyrus, the Persian, against his brother Artaxerxes; and even the all powerful Romans often availed themselves of the services of foreign soldiers. The French always employed large numbers of mercenaries, and in the year 886 their King, Charles le Gros had a bodyguard of foreigners: an example followed by St. Louis in the year 1226. In the protracted wars between France and England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries these mercenaries formed the major part of both armies. The last mercenaries used by England were twenty-two thousand Hessians hired from the landgrave Frederick II of Hesse-Casse, Prussia, and for whom they paid about £3,191,000, or $16,000,000, to assist in the war against the American colonies. These were the troops that Washington so decisively defeated at Trenton on Christmas night, 1776. The Foreign Legion continued under all the French rulers, and Napoleon frequently acknowledged their great worth to him.