Free Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys by Neil Oliver Page B

its forces from the country or face the consequences of riling an overwhelming enemy. On May 31, 1866, Napoleon III announced that he was pulling his men out of Mexico, and by November of that year the French soldiers were on their way home.
    Denied the support of his erstwhile masters, Emperor Maximilian was on borrowed time, and he knew it. A reinvigorated Republican President Benito Juarez gained the upper hand in the fighting and Maximilian was captured on May 15, 1867. He was tried and sentenced to death, and despite pleas for clemency from no lesser figures than Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi, was duly executed the following month. His widow, the Empress Carlota, went into exile, living first in Italy and finally in Belgium. Her estate was surrounded by the German Army during the Great War of 1914–18—but since she was the widowed sister-in-law of the Austrian President, no one was allowed to set foot upon her demesne. She never stopped loving her husband and believed always that he was not dead, that he would one day return to her. It was said she slept every night beside a doll she named Max. She died in 1927.
    For the duration of the French occupation of Mexico all units of the Legion were under orders to halt whenever they had occasion to pass the site of the place they now called Camerone. Tothis day the men of the 1st Regiment wear the Mexican Eagle as their cap badge. The ashes of the dead of that battle are held in an urn carved in the shape of an eagle and it is passed from regimental chapel to regimental chapel in an endless rotation down through the years.
    Some time not long after the Battle of Camerone, a farmer working the land near the former hamlet found the wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou. By a circuitous path it was eventually returned to the Legion and is now their most honored relic. Every year on April 30 the Legion celebrates Camerone Day and the hand of Jean Danjou is paraded before the men of the assembled regiments. All new recruits are told the story of the Demons of Camerone and left in no doubt that those are the standards expected of every Legionnaire.
    On many battlefields since, when the last bullet has been fired and nothing remains but men and valor, a cry goes up from the Legionnaires, Faire Camerone —do as they would have done! And they fight to the last man, and beyond.
    At Camerone itself there is little to see. In the aftermath of the fighting the Mexicans went to some lengths to forget the place where so many of their men had died trying to oust so few. A railway line was deliberately routed through the site of the former farmyard where so many men fell.
    In 1892 the French were permitted to place a commemorative plaque on the low ruins of one partially surviving wall. It has these words on it:
Here there were fewer than 60 opposed to a whole army. Its mass crushed them. Life abandoned these French soldiers before courage.
     

The trouble with the truth
     
    Whenever I try to tell someone the story of the Demons of Camerone—and I’m the sort of person who does that kind of thing—I find it hard to speak toward the end. When I get to the bit where Maudet and his men are trapped in that outbuilding, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, my throat thickens and my voice starts to break. It’s ridiculous and I know it. But that tale will never lose the power it has over me—and its power comes from the way it has become more than just another story from history, it has become a legend. (When I first told my wife, Trudi, the story of the Demons she said, “Stupid idiots,” but she’s a girl and girls don’t understand.)
    Maybe events at the Hacienda Camarón didn’t unfold exactly as described here. But there are more important things to ask of great stories than the truth. Historians spend a lot of time on the details, winnowing the seed from the chaff, trying to pin down precisely who did what, and when, and why. That’s all very well, but sometimes it takes