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French Foreign Legionnairres, wearing their képis blancs

I met someone yesterday who might actually be the Most Interesting Person in the World. Or at least my world, which is pretty interesting anyway.

Nicholas Tobias swanned into the divey Budapest bar on a chilly late winter day wearing, I kid you not, a cape. On others, it would look like an affectation. But I had recently read his excellent forthcoming (April 7) memoir Monastery Of The Damned, about his life as an American who joined the French Foreign Legion. He’s for real. The cape is a good look. Though personally modest, with a CV like his, Tobias seems like the kind of chap you’d have had to go to Victorian-era Oxbridge to meet.

You know that famous story of the caper when Patrick Leigh Fermor led a commando squad that captured Nazi Gen. Heinrich Kreipke in Crete? Gen. Kreipe recited the first part of a line from an ode of Horace, in Latin, and Maj. Leigh Fermor finished it for him, also in Latin.

Nicholas Tobias strikes me as that kind of soldier.

We didn’t have long to talk — he’s in Budapest for a conference — but I’m really glad we had a chance to meet. Though he’s only in his early forties, Tobias has lived quite a life. Born in Texas, he ended up at Oxford, then Princeton, read deeply in history and literature, converted to Catholicism, and in 2008, bored with bourgeois life, left doctoral studies in history to join, get this, the French Foreign Legion. Who does that? Nicholas Tobias, that’s who. He is an American version of Ernst Jünger, the deeply cultured German soldier who was also enamored of military life, and what it teaches about how to be a man.

Towards the end of the book, Tobias repeats something a Catholic priest in Estonia told him. Here’s that passage:

After my confession, he spoke to me for several minutes, expounding his theory that the world was full of biological males, but desperately short on real men. Before giving me penance and absolution, he exhorted me “to be a man.” In his own way, I believe that he was coaxing me to understand a truth of our age that I encountered many years later in Pasolini’s Lettere luterane:

La società preconsumistica aveva bisogno di uomini forti, e dunque casti. La societ. consumistica ha invece bisogno di uomini debili, e perciò lussuriosi. [Translation: “Pre-consumerist society needed strong men, and therefore chaste men. Consumerist society, on the other hand, needs weak men, and therefore promiscuous men.”]

That evening I did not make much moment of this priest’s words. Yet as months and years passed, time and again I found myself recalling this unplanned confession. Believing that I was but a mere male, I wanted to become a man.

This is why Tobias joined the French Foreign Legion — and after that, the US Army.

The French Foreign Legion is a strange institution. It’s a military adjunct to the French armed forces. Any foreign national can join. After three years of service, or being wounded in battle as a Legionnaire, one can apply for French citizenship. It is a famously challenging undertaking, to enter the Legion, both physically and psychologically. Monastery Of The Damned is not really a book about war, but ultimately one about masculinity. His two years in the Legion, which included service in Afghanistan, cured Tobias of certain illusions about war and manhood, but also taught him enduring truths that he will carry with him for life.

Why did he join? Tobias was a graduate student at Oxford, and disappointed by the reality of the place, versus what he, in his Anglophile imagination, thought it would be. One day he met a real live ex-Legionnaire, and that was that. That man was such a contrast to the dilettantish scholars among whom he was living, and who he was. Two years later, while at Princeton, he left for France and showed up to enlist. Entering the Legion, he recalls “was the most bizarre and unsettling moment” of his life — a sentiment Tobias says many other Legionaries share. He writes:

With almost fourteen years of soldiering behind me, whenever I look back now to this time and to what inspired me to join the Legion, I see mostly error and illusion. However noble, natural, or just might have been some of my impulses at that age, I nursed unhinged admiration for military pomp and delusory ideas about the efficiency of military discipline. I held on to a consoling thought that by killing, by risking death, and perhaps by perishing in the world’s far-flung reaches, I could snatch that “life of life” that Lord Byron described in the introduction to his Corsair, verses that long haunted me. I believed that by means of military swashbuckling—or idealized imaginations of it inspired largely by television series and Hollywood films—I could pursue honour in a world without it. To serve in the military would forge me into a man in a world increasingly made up of mere males, who lived meekly and in terror of their womenfolk.

Only years later did I come to understand that I had largely fallen into the disordered line of thinking that Evelyn Waugh described toward the end of his Sword of Honour trilogy. At the conclusion of Unconditional Surrender, a Jewish woman at a refugee camp in Yugoslavia voiced Waugh’s telling insight:

Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in return for having been selfish and lazy.

After a few months of Legion life, the Ivy Leaguer reflected:

Thrust into an environment where forgotten battles and campaigns in Algeria were far more prominent than the latest movements and exchanges of stocks, of commodities, and of other ethereal and nebulous financial products, I learned to speak, to think, and to believe with new vocabulary. Arrogant self-sacrifice, fights against “the devil,” honour, loyalty—such concepts would have seemed foreign and even absurd to my former peers and superiors if not presented to them as mere abstractions and anachronisms to contemplate with the condescending benevolence of conquerors.

There is this passage, on remembering cleaning out the room of a retired Legionnaire from Germany, who died in a retirement home for its veterans. He ends by quoting lines from Pushkin:

As I stood on the cusp of years of intense soldiering, I could not help but reflect on my own future as I sifted through this German’s effects. What I gleaned from them, but could not clearly express at the time, was that disappointed ambition and dashed hopes usually await young men who join militaries not for spoils, for pillage, and for rapine, but for what they believe to be patriotic ideas, just ambitions, and glory. The former’s animalistic appetency is tumultuous but often sated, whereas among the more idealistic latter, only few slowly uncover:

[the] rending pain of re-enactment / of all that you have done, and

been; the shame / of motives late revealed, and the awareness / of

things ill done and done to others’ harm / which once you took for

exercise of virtue / Then fools’ approval stings and honour stains

Tobias is, of course, an intellectual, but many of the men with whom he served in the Legion were anything but. The Legion has long had a reputation of accepting men with dubious pasts, who are looking to escape them, and build new, disciplined lives for themselves. He learned from the company of such men lessons that so many of us middle-class people who have never served under arms rarely have the chance to do. For example:

Before joining the Foreign Legion, I would have seen this Hungarian caporal-chef without university education as someone worthy of my polite disdain. Instead, to this day I would argue that I learned more from this Hungarian than I ever did from all but two or three of my professors at Princeton.

Yet he also comments with great respect about the deep erudition and culture of the French officer corps, which he believes to be unmatched in any Western military. An Englishman told me last year that he believes civil war is coming to both the UK and France, and that while his country is lost, France may prevail, in part because of the quality of its officer corps (which, by the way, is strongly Catholic).

Tobias writes at length, often viscerally, about the physical hardship of Legion training. He’s there with a group of men from all over the world, a number of whom would drop out along the way, unable to endure it (the Legion is an elite force, and as such, does not want in its ranks men who are not committed to it). There is nothing — nothing — romantic about basic infantry training in the Legion. It is brutal and exacting. One standout feature is how it forges Frenchmen out of these foreigners. They all have to learn to speak passable French, but more than that, the Legionnaires also learn a particularly French way of being a soldier. For example, they have to clean their rooms three times each day, and their uniforms must be immaculately ironed. This is not about fussing over appearances. It’s meant to instill manly dignity and honor into each Legionnaire (years later, when he shows up to a US Army recruiting station, he is shocked by the relative slovenliness of the recruiting officer). Learning Legion songs — this is their anthem — was part of building esprit de corps.

Most of the narrative is about the daily routines and trials of training, but Tobias reflects from the distance of years what he learned from that grind:

One North American corporal in the Legion—a man who claimed to be a former Navy Seal but almost surely was no such thing—months later told me during a booze-fuelled Christmas party that he hated to see heady enthusiasm and spunk in soldiers, and that the true legionnaire has totally lost his motivation, but stoically carries out his tasks at a high level. I have come to agree with him to some measure. I had already seen that few recruits who joined with boyish excitement lasted more than a week in Aubagne, before voluntarily giving up and going home. To reach a more stoic state, most of us had to pass through bitter disillusionment with legionary realities and then to discover and to create within ourselves the motivation to perform tasks to high standards.

Some of us never overcame the disillusion, and others only with partial success.

For me, as a Francophile, the best parts of the book come when Tobias learns to love the French way of life. He had not realized how profoundly Anglo-Saxon his own civilizational prejudices were, until he entered the Legion. Years after his Legion service, working as a US Army officer, Tobias found himself frustrated by how difficult it was to maintain military discipline in the ranks. The Legion is a no-bullshit operation; if you screw up, the consequences can be immediate, and physical.

In my later career as an officer, to put a soldier in the US Army into military prison involved tangled procedures that consumed weeks of officers’ lives. It took many months from the time of starting these legal procedures to be able to enforce the appropriate prison sentence, so few officers even bothered to start them save for in the most heinous cases. I always found it challenging to enforce discipline in regular and even “special” US Army units, and I deemed their discipline rather slipshod in comparison with that of Foreign Legion units.

I believe that the remarkably different disciplinary measures of these two armed forces in which I have served reflect the substantial divergences of Latin and Anglo-Saxon legal cultures. However august the law may seem in the former, in practice its limits are considerable. Good order and discipline require that most action and consensus be governed by extra-legal means. In contrast, militaries of Anglo-Saxon origin rely more on explicit laws, such as the US armed forces’ “Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

There are other joys of French life, such as discovering the deep pleasure of eating bouillabaisse (fish stew) in Marseilles:

Both the food and the service embodied the quality and the expertise of family artisans whose secrets are imbibed from childhood and then reproduced and modified for more current tastes, with ambition and sometimes with creativity. Most cultures have some examples of excellence in cuisine and in hospitality, but among such examples there are gradations of objective good and of elegance. To be sure, I have had many more sophisticated and even “better” meals in my life, but I believe nonetheless that the bouillabaisse at Le Rhul as we enjoyed it that summer evening was one of the purest expressions of culinary culture that I had experienced to that point.

Any American who has spent time in France, and is open to culinary experiences there, knows exactly what Tobias is talking about. Unlike us Anglo-Saxons, for whom food is ballast, for the French, it is culture, and part of the secret of a well-lived life. In France, men can have a conversation about the virtues of different kinds of French butter, for example, and this is normal. Try that in America or Britain, and it will sound effete. Even deployed in the wilds of Afghanistan, Legion officers drink good wine.

The Legion taught him French. This line of Tobias’s really stabbed me in the heart: “Not to know French is to be shut off not only from far too many European achievements, but from the formidable culture that enabled them.” If le bon Dieu favors me, He will grant me some years to master French before I depart this earth.

As I said, most of Tobias’s narrative is about the ins and outs of basic training and daily Legion life. What makes the book such a rewarding read are reflections like that one. More about his unlearning “that typical and destructive North American vice, Anglophilia”:

The next day for lunch my kind host took me to taste the many fruits of Toulouse’s marché des Carmes, where we ate a variety of oysters washed down with Muscadet. Later we walked through the city and enjoyed one of the best wine bars that I have ever visited in France, whose skillful owner introduced me to red Lirac. Indeed, this and most of my later visits to Toulouse with this knowledgeable foreign resident tended to include indulgence in fine wines.

The next morning he and I went to Mass with his two sons at the nearby Chapelle Saint-Jean-Baptiste, which belonged to a French religious order that only said Mass according to the “Tridentine” or “extraordinary” form. His wife did not join us since she was not Catholic. I do not remember the Mass, but I do remember lingering outside the chapel after Mass as we chatted with the priest and with several parishioners. Nearby a gaggle of teenage girls—almost all thin, well-dressed, delicately groomed, and attractive owing to their land of birth, social origins, and education—chattered buoyantly as they crowded about the chapel’s entrance immediately after Mass, many of them smoking cigarettes.

It occurred to me then that such a scene would be unthinkable in the United States, even among “traditionalist” Catholics who, for all their supposed reservations about the nation’s larger Protestant culture, nonetheless ape the mores and morality of their more charismatic, Puritan-inspired Protestant countrymen. At a well-ordered parish in the United States in 2009, to smoke with fellow Catholics after Mass would have been socially unacceptable. Anyone indulging in such conspicuous displays of vice would have done so guiltily and probably with intentions to scandalize other parishioners.

I loved too his old-fashioned musing about the virtues of French women. For example:

One remarkable aspect of French women, and especially of French women faithful to Catholic moral teaching in public and within their families, is how they remain attractive well into their child-bearing years, and even after having five or more children. This is in marked contrast to what is customary in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic countries, where women and men alike often see childbirth as an acceptable excuse for subsequent weight-gain and flabbiness. Even in other Latin and Mediterranean countries, women clearly do not show the same discipline as the French after they have children, and there is no other country in the world where mothers of five or more children manage to be as physically attractive and alluring, if not more so, than they were as young brides.

French women also have a way of dressing and of policing their children such that French children are the world’s most attractive, polite, and well-behaved. After having attended Catholic liturgies the world over, some common features are infants and toddlers reacting petulantly, even outrageously, to their parents’ concerns and doting care, and to strangers’ indulgent permissiveness. In any other nation misbehaving children are hallmarks of Catholic religious services, but I cannot remember ever having seen such behaviour among French children.

There must be some false memories of mine here, but I stand by my assertion that French children are extremely well-behaved at Mass. This cannot possibly be the result of their virtue and must be due to their mothers.

If you’ve ever been to Paris, and cast an eye upon the women you see on the streets there, you know that you might not be looking at the most beautiful women in the world (they are beautiful, but I am partial to Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards), but you absolutely are gazing upon the most singular and self-possessed females to stride the earth.

In one interesting passage, Tobias writes about how he had come to develop a devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux. How was it, he asks, that three French female saints — Therese of Lisieux, Catherine Labouré, and Bernadette Soubirous — led the remarkable resurgence of French Catholic life in the 19th century, after the ravages of the Revolution?:

Surely part of what we see here is evidence of the Catholic Church’s feminine traits and characteristics, far stronger than in any Orthodox or Protestant Christian body, in Islam, or even in strictly observed Judaism, whose matriarchal impulses are especially powerful. Left unchecked, this unique femininity of Roman Catholicism can wreak havoc on orthodoxy. Indeed, I doubt that the Catholic Church will again exert real leadership in the world until it regains and asserts a suitably masculine spirituality that balances the exaggerated feminine impulses of its current dominant subcultures, which have given rise to hysterical “devotional” abominations such as Maria Valtorta’s The Poem of the Man-God.

Contemporary Western societies’ unbalanced femininity was exactly what I was trying to escape by joining the Legion. I refused to continue life without martial experience, and I sought out the most extreme possibilities of military service in the Legion to realize something fundamentally manly and to live out what so many men in our times fantasize and talk about doing, but seldom do.

The effort was not in vain. My time in the Legion stilled a rage at the unsexed creature that I was becoming before I joined its ranks—rage that goads and haunts many civilized men until their last breaths. Yet without the example of Therese and of other saintly women of the past centuries, it is possible that I would have taken this quest for manly virtue to exaggerated lengths and abandoned Catholicism, embracing instead some modified form of Iago’s doctrine outlined in Verdi’s Otello, in what remains one of my favourite arias: “Credo in un dio crudele” [“I believe in a cruel God.”] My own temptations are to believe in a God of vengeance and of violence, which perhaps explains my keenness on the Hebrew scriptures.

(I mentioned to Nicholas over coffee yesterday that Orthodoxy really does have a far more masculine ethos than Catholicism, and I have never been able to figure out why. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Orthodoxy frames one’s entire spiritual life as one of struggle to overcome the passions. This is a challenge especially appealing to the male psyche. It is also interesting to go into Orthodox churches in the East, and to see so many military saints from the Roman period — Christian soldiers usually martyred by the Romans — memorialized in large iconic wall frescoes.)

One of the pleasures of Monastery Of The Damned is how Tobias brings his historical education to bear to understand the bellicose world into which he has been thrown. The second part of the book is about serving in Afghanistan. He writes about how Caesar pacified Gaul through ruthlessness towards the barbarian tribes. Sometimes, there is no other way:

Reflecting on Caesar’s treatment of the Veneti made it clear to me that our NATO engagements in Afghanistan were doomed. The moral codes of contemporary Western societies, not to mention their powerful bureaucracies, would not allow their own military forces to use those “cruel” and “immoral” means of prosecuting warfare in ways needed to achieve an acceptable, sustainable peace. It took twelve more years until the whole world understood this in summer 2021.

It’s not that Tobias advocates ruthlessness, necessarily; he’s simply being realistic about human nature, and why it is difficult for Westerners, with our moral standards, to triumph over more primitive, barbaric peoples. A soldier told me recently about an Iraq War veteran he knows who came home deeply disturbed about things he had done there. He said he had killed Iraqi women and children, who had been used by the Iraqi resistance against Americans, knowing of our (entirely right and proper) squeamishness about shooting women and children. But Iraqi men, like their brethren in Hamas, have no such scruples, and did not mind sacrificing their women and children if it meant gaining advantage over the enemy.

Tobias offers this melancholy reflection about how the best way to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghans who worked for NATO troops was to give them artifacts of US popular culture, especially booze and porn:

What does it say about a nation when its most conspicuous worldwide exports are fantastical and predictable films, chemically modified food and drinks, financialization, pornography, costly weapons of war, and psychotropic medications? From the worldwide success of such exportations, I have drawn one unshakable conclusion: decadence and consumerism rarely have trouble winning over hearts and minds of the most stubborn and nationalistic tribes.

Tobias’s experience in Afghanistan did not involve much combat. He says that the French presence in Afghanistan had more to do with politics than with war. Nevertheless, Tobias is an American (and later became a US Army officer; he left the Legion because slight hearing loss meant he could never progress in his career), and he is bitter about what the US Government did to its soldiers in that war:

[T]housands of them gave their only lives in this war. They did not die for nothing. They gave their lives to support unclear and amorphous strategic objectives and to bolster the profits of Western defence contractors.

Surprisingly, I found the first part of the book — about basic training — more interesting than the second part, which concerns his deployment to Afghanistan. No doubt this is because the Legion did little fighting in Afghanistan. I was a bit disappointed that we don’t get to see how the lessons learned in basic training with the Legion play out in actual combat. Nevertheless, Tobias continues to learn life lessons there with the Legion. He learned that the discipline one acquires from military life leaves a man capable of handling any situation. True, he could have gotten that in the US military, with which he later served. But he learned another one that could only have come to him in the French military, with its unfeigned respect for hierarchy:

In our Western societies today, which like to keep their rigid hierarchies hidden under burkas of egalitarian pretences and of joshing familiarity, hierarchies’ visible limitations on human interactions frustrate us. But whereas our egalitarian prejudices are fantastical, hierarchies are real and permanent, and I owe it to the Legion that I learned to appreciate the importance of hierarchy, to respect its limits, and to understand its necessity for the best possible shaping and regulation of human mores and conduct.

Monastery Of The Damned is a book by a well-educated, aesthetically sensitive, privileged young American who wanted to discover if he had it within himself to be not just a male, but a man. It is not a war memoir, except in this sense: Nicholas Tobias fought a war to overcome his own modern softness, through physical prowess, self-discipline, and the cultivation of honor. On testimony of this always-interesting volume, he succeeded. At one point, Tobias quotes the Swiss-French modernist writer Blaise Cendrars (d. 1961), who joined the Legion and fought at the Somme. These could be his own:

“To be. To be a man. And to discover solitude. This is what I owe to the Legion and to those old ruffians from Africa, soldiers, non-commissioned officers, officers, who came to train us and to mix with us as comrades, those desperados, survivors of God knows what adventures in the colonies, but who were men, all of them. It was well worth the risk of dying to meet them, these damned men, tattooed and reeking of galley-sweat.”

Not all cape-wearers are superheroes. Some of them are American veterans of the French Foreign Legion. Monastery Of The Damned comes out this spring; pre-order now; it’ll be in your hands in time to read then pass on to the young male high school graduate you know. It could be life-changing.