Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (77 page)

• In 1483 Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of a fanciful craft he called a
helical air screw
, but it never got off the drawing board. His concept of “compressing” the air was similar to that used by today’s helicopters. However, when a prototype was built recently at the Science Museum of London, it didn’t work.

*        *        *

REAL-LIFE COURT TRANSQUIP

Prosecutor:
Did he pick the dog up by the ears?

Witness:
No.

Prosecutor:
What was he doing with the dog’s ears?

Witness:
Picking them up in the air.

Prosecutor:
Where was the dog at this time?

Witness:
Attached to the ears.

South Florida is the only place on Earth where crocodiles and alligators coexist in the wild.

THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION

Generations of kids—including Uncle John—dreamed of running away to join the Foreign Legion. In its day, it was probably the second most popular runaway destination (after the circus). It’s been the subject of countless books, films, and TV shows, too. Here’s a look at its history
.

A
TTRACTING FREE RADICALS

In July 1830, revolution broke out in France and after just three days of unrest the unpopular King Charles X was overthrown and the new “Citizen King,” Louis Philippe, was installed in his place. The historic event inspired revolutionaries all over Europe—free thinkers and libertarians who felt stifled by their own monarchical governments. And these admirers began to pour into France by the tens of thousands.

However flattered Louis Philippe may have been by the attention, he wasn’t happy with the idea of so many foreign radicals coming into the country. The revolution of 1830 was France’s second in just 41 years, and Louis Philippe didn’t feel like trying for a third.

The situation in France was made even more unstable by the fact that much of the French military was in North Africa. For more than 200 years, pirates operating out of the port city of Algiers had been disrupting shipping in the Mediterranean. In 1830 the French army captured the city, which ended the piracy. But France intended to colonize the entire region, so the army was staying…indefinitely.

A CREATIVE SOLUTION

Louis Philippe devised a plan: In 1831 he created the Foreign Legion, hoping to solve both problems with one stroke. By drafting foreign-born males between the ages of 18 and 40 and sending them off to fight in North Africa, the king would clear France of foreigners and strengthen his forces in North Africa at the same time. And there was a bonus: The plan reduced the political cost of the colonial wars, because the Legion’s casualties would be foreigners, not French.

Joan of Arc was 19 years old when she was burned at the stake.

“So what if 100,000 rifles fire in Africa?” Louis Philippe is reported to have said. “Europe does not hear them.”

NOM DE GUERRE

What would become one of the most famous features of serving in the Foreign Legion—
anonymat
, or serving under a false identity—came about because French officials cared more about getting the rabble out of the country than it did about confirming their identities. Even if they had wanted to verify the names people gave upon enlistment, there was no real means of doing so. So the Legion just enlisted people under whatever names they gave—even when people gave their true names, they were assumed to be false.

Over time the practice of enlisting under a false name became institutionalized, not to mention one of the Foreign Legion’s strongest selling points: people with shady pasts could join up and begin their lives anew.

NOBODY’S PERFECT

Getting foreign “undesirables” into the military and out of France turned out to be relatively easy. Shaping them into an effective fighting force was another matter.

More than thirty legionnaires deserted on the very first day in Algeria; the next day, the soldiers of one unit got drunk and attacked their commanding officers. Some legionnaires sold their pants and other parts of their uniform to buy alcohol, then returned to their units half naked and drunk. General René Savary, commander of the French forces in Algeria, insisted that the Legion be split into small groups and stationed in separate locations, fearing that “it would take only one drunken binge to touch off an insurrection.”

Part of the problem was that officials back in France were so eager to clear the streets of foreigners that they sent
all
of them off to Algeria, even the sick and the insane. But the larger problem was that the French army did not take the Legion seriously as a fighting force. Legionnaires were given the worst and most dangerous jobs, such as draining mosquito-infested marshes, so that French casualties would be kept to a minimum.

Result: between 1831 and 1835, more than 3,200 legionnaires in Algeria—about one out of every four—were killed or incapacitated by dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, malaria, cholera, and other terrible diseases. That’s in addition to those who died in battle.

Raised in a barn? The average cow belches 35 cubic feet of gas per day.

GONE TO SPAIN

Then in 1835, Spain asked for French help in putting down a military rebellion of their own. Louis Philippe didn’t really want to help, but as an ally of Spain he was obliged to do something. His thoughts soon turned to the legionnaires—he could send
them
. This led to another crafty plan: rather than
lend
the Foreign Legion to Spain (which meant that he might one day have to take it back), he
gave
it to Spain, severing all of its ties to the French army in the process.

Now the Legion was the property of Spain, which meant that if the legionnaires were defeated, Spain, not France, would lose face. Plus, France wouldn’t have to go to the trouble and expense of withdrawing the troops when the battle was over. The Legion was now Spain’s problem, and it treated the legionnaires even worse than France had. Worn down by hunger, neglect, disease, desertion, and a string of military defeats (plus the fact that when legionnaires finished their term of service, they were free to go home), over the next several years the Foreign Legion dwindled away to almost nothing.

THE FOREIGN LEGION, PART DEUX

That might well have been the end the Foreign Legion experiment, were it not for two factors: 1) Foreigners were still streaming into France, and 2) Louis Philippe still wanted to get rid of them. So on December 16, 1835, even as the original Foreign Legion was still limping along in Spain, the Citizen King created a
nouvelle légion
and started all over again. “The experiment,” military historian Douglas Porch writes in
The Foreign Legion, “
gained a new lease on life almost as soon as it was abandoned.”

The first waves of new recruits were handed over to Spain to reinforce the old Legion; then in late 1836, Louis Philippe started diverting them back to Algeria, which France had formally annexed two years earlier and was still trying to pacify.

This Legion was as unruly and unreliable as the first. In 1842 the governor-general of Algeria, General Thomas Bugeaud, complained to the minister of war, Marshal Nicolas Soult:

Top speed of a desert tortoise: 8 feet per minute.

…the Foreign Legion will never offer a force upon which we can count.…They fight badly; they march badly, they desert often. They try whenever the opportunity presents itself to sell the enemy their arms, their munitions, and their uniforms, and equipment.…There is not one general officer who does not prefer to march with two of our good battalions than with five of the Foreign Legion.…I seriously believe that we should cease to have such soldiers in Africa.

And yet somehow the Foreign Legion not only survived, but over the next few decades evolved into one of the most respected and feared fighting forces in Europe. How did that happen?

TURNING LEMONS INTO LEMONADE

As it turns out, the fact that the soldiers in the Foreign Legion were considered expendable by the folks back home in France proved to be instrumental in turning the Legion’s fortunes around.

These “disposable” soldiers were frequently the first men sent into battle and the last withdrawn; in the process, the survivors gained more fighting experience and skill than soldiers in other French military units. They also earned a reputation for incredible toughness.

Because the Foreign Legion saw so much action, it became a magnet for the most ambitious officers in the French army. These officers wanted adventure and also hoped that by leading units in combat while other officers sat at home, they would rise more quickly through the ranks.

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Just how much the Foreign Legion changed over the years became evident during fighting in Mexico on April 30, 1863, when three officers and 62 legionnaires near the village of Camerón found themselves surrounded by more than 2,000 enemy soldiers.

The Legion had been sent to Mexico by French Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew) with the ambition of setting up Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperor and turning the country into a French colony. (Napoleon III failed at both: Maximilian was overthrown and shot in 1867, and Mexico never did become a French colony.)

Cameron was the Foreign Legion’s finest hour. Outnumbered by more than 30 to 1, did the Legionnaires desert? Did they sell their pants and spend the money on booze? No—the 65 men took shelter in a hacienda and held off the Mexican army for nearly twelve hours, fighting until only five Legionnaires were left standing, each with only one bullet left to shoot.

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Did they surrender then? No—after each man fired his last bullet, they charged the enemy with their bayonets. The fight didn’t end until only three of the men were still alive, and then only when the Mexican commander agreed to let them keep their weapons and to provide medical treatment for a wounded lieutenant. More than 500 Mexican soldiers are believed to have died in the battle.

“Is this all that is left?” an astonished Mexican colonel asked when the last three were led from the hacienda. “These are not men. They are demons.”

THE FOREIGN LEGION TODAY

Since its founding, the Legion has been sent all over the world, fighting in every war that involved France. They’ve been sent to fight in a lot of losing causes, too, yet in spite of this—or maybe
because
of it—the Legion has retained its reputation as one of the toughest fighting forces in the world.

As the number of French possessions around the globe has dwindled in modern times, so has the size of the Foreign Legion, down from more than 36,000 troops in the 1960s to around 8,000 today. What do legionnaires do? France still has a few overseas possessions here and there, including French Guiana in South America and French Polynesia in the South Pacific, and it still has military ties to some former colonies that are now independent. The Legion is sent to these areas when needed, or to hot spots around the world—Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and even Iraq during the first Gulf War—whenever France participates in United Nations peacekeeping efforts.

The Legion has proven very effective in this role. The United Nations has even debated creating a similar force of rapid-reaction troops, so that it doesn’t have to rely on member nations to contribute their troops when needed. Who knows? Maybe someday soon if you decide you need a fresh start in life, you’ll have
two
legions to run to instead of just one.

Every year in the U.S., 7 tons of gold are used to make class rings.

JOIN THE PARTY: THE REPUBLICANS

We’ve already told you where the Democrats came from (see
page 153
). Now here’s the background of the Republican Party.
In a nutshell, its story is the story of the country’s growing resistance to slavery, which culminated in the Civil War. (For the previous chapter on the Whigs, see
page 452
.
)

T
HE GREAT DIVIDE

By the time that Zachary Taylor, a Whig, was elected president in 1848, the country was deeply divided on the issue of slavery. Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy, and the South was convinced that the only way to preserve it was to extend it into new western territories as they were admitted to the Union. The North was just as determined to confine its evils to those states where it was already entrenched. Nobody knew how to abolish slavery entirely without starting a civil war.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

President Taylor’s election only served to make matters worse. For starters, he was a plantation owner with more than 300 slaves, so even though he’d kept a low profile on the issue of slavery during the election, it was clear where he stood.

The idea of having a pro-slavery Whig president was more than many anti-slavery Whigs could take. Rather than support Taylor in the election, these “Conscience Whigs,” as they became known, split off from the party and joined with the “Barnburners,” an anti-slavery faction of New York Democrats. Together, they then merged with a third abolitionist party called the “Liberty Party” to form the “Free Soil Party.” The Free Soil candidate for president was former president Martin Van Buren.

Taylor managed to win, anyway, thanks in large part to slavery supporters who hoped his administration would be strongly pro-slavery.

They were wrong. When California applied for admission to the Union as a free state, Taylor agreed and asked Congress to admit it immediately. But that created a problem: admitting California as a free state would upset the even balance of free and slave states, putting the free states in the majority.