Global Recruitment: The Wartime Origins of French Mandate Syria

Abstract

On Saturday 6 October 1917, in a French military training camp near the village of Akanthou, on the northern littoral of Cyprus, a man climbed onto a bed and began to speak.1 He was a medical nurse in the sixth ‘Syrian’ company of the Légion d’Orient, a volunteer infantry division composed of Ottoman and diaspora Syrians, Lebanese and Armenians.2 The Legion was organised in 1916–17 to fight with Entente forces in the Middle East against the Ottoman Empire.3 The unit participated in the Entente’s 1918 campaigns in Palestine before its elements were dissolved or transformed into groups of French imperial auxiliaries. The nurse is named in the French military report simply as ‘Saab’.4 Addressing his fellow Legionaries in Arabic, a language not spoken by most of his French commanders, Saab protested vehemently against the matrix of forces that had brought the company of around 180 men to Akanthou.5 He criticised the committees of Syro-Lebanese diaspora (S-LD) notables in Paris and around the world that had organised the recruitment of the Legion in 1916 and 1917, thus echoing widespread complaints among his fellow Legionaries about these committees’ misleading promises of generous enrolment indemnities.6 From his improvised platform Saab then chastised the Syrian non-commissioned officers who staffed the company and attacked the French officers who presided over its training, calling on his fellow Legionaries, in the inherently unreliable words of the French military report, to ‘rebel’.7