Alan Seeger: The American Poet in the French Foreign Legion

In northern France on July 4, 1916 — American Independence Day — a tall, twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate rose from a wheat field near the village of Belloy-en-Santerre and charged a line of German machine guns. He was not French, and his country was not yet at war. He was Alan Seeger, member of the French Foreign Legion, and within minutes he would be dead on the ground he had chosen to defend two years earlier. Today he is remembered as one of the most famous foreign volunteers ever to serve in the ranks of the Legion. A poet whose life, and whose death, became a symbol of the Franco-American bond forged in the trenches of the Great War.

Alan Seeger - American Poet - Foreign Legion Etrangere

From the United States to France

Alan Seeger was born in New York City on June 22, 1888. Childhood years spent partly in Mexico gave him an early taste for foreign landscapes, and by the time he entered Harvard University in 1906 he had already committed himself to literature.

After graduating in 1910, Seeger tried the bohemian life of New York’s Greenwich Village, before deciding that his city of birth could not satisfy him. In 1912 he crossed the Atlantic and settled in Paris, where he found the artistic and intellectual atmosphere he had been searching for. He wrote poetry, contributed articles to French and American periodicals and, by his own account, fell thoroughly in love with his adopted city and country.

In the Foreign Legion

When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Seeger did not hesitate. Along with roughly forty other American volunteers, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion in Paris on August 24, 1914 — twenty-three days after the outbreak of war. He was posted to Battalion C of the 2nd Marching Regiment (Régiment de Marche), 2nd Foreign Regiment (2e RM/2e RE), a unit that would later be absorbed into the famous Foreign Legion Marching Regiment (RMLE).

Seeger was explicit about his motives. He insisted he bore no hatred toward Germany, whose civilization he admired; he had taken up arms, he wrote, purely out of love for France and a conviction that a man’s highest duty was to stand with the cause his sympathies commanded, win or lose. It was an unusually principled form of patriotism, and it shaped both his conduct as a soldier and the poetry he wrote in the trenches.

Seeger’s service took him through some of the war’s grimmest sectors. He fought along the Aisne in the autumn of 1914, an experience that produced an early sequence of war poems, and took part in the costly Champagne offensive of September 1915, where he was briefly and falsely reported killed. That winter a severe bout of bronchitis put him in hospital in Paris, and he did not rejoin his regiment until just before the Somme offensive began in the summer of 1916.

Throughout, Seeger kept up a remarkable correspondence — letters to his mother and to American newspapers, notably the New York Sun, along with a diary that would later be published as an unusually vivid record of trench life. He wrote at night after fighting by day, and his fellow legionnaires regarded him with a mixture of affection and bemusement for a discipline that never let the war interrupt his writing. When offered the chance to transfer to a unit that might have kept him further from danger, he chose to remain with the Legion, telling a correspondent that he was content there among good comrades.

It was during this period, sensing with growing clarity that his own death was approaching, that Seeger composed the poem for which he would become immortal: “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” This was a short, elegiac meditation on a soldier’s premonition of dying in spring, framed as a rendezvous he could not break. He also wrote, at the request of French organizers, an ode to be read in Paris before the statues of Washington and Lafayette in memory of the Americans who had already fallen for France — verses that would later be carved onto his own memorial.

Death at Belloy-en-Santerre

By the beginning of July 1916, the RMLE under Lieutenant Colonel Cot had been thrown into the Battle of the Somme as part of the Moroccan Division of the 1st Colonial Army Corps. Its objective was the fortified village of Belloy-en-Santerre. In late June, Seeger wrote what would be one of his last letters, telling a friend that the coming assault would likely be the largest battle he had yet seen, that his unit had the honor of going in with the first wave, and that if he did not survive, his only earthly concern was for his poems. At the time, he served with the 1st Platoon, 11th Company, 3rd Battalion of the RMLE.

The attack went in at midday on July 4. Seeger’s platoon formed the right flank and vanguard of his company, advancing through standing wheat under a hot summer sun. A fellow legionnaire, Rif Baer, was among the last to see him alive: as the legionnaires bounded forward and dropped to the ground under fire, Baer spotted Seeger’s tall silhouette moving ahead, waved, and received a smile in return before Seeger disappeared toward the village — the last glimpse his comrade ever had of him. Moments later, German machine-gun fire cut down the advancing legionnaires. Seeger was mortally wounded and died on the field, reportedly cheering on the men still moving past him as he lay dying. The assault succeeded; Belloy-en-Santerre was taken the same day, including 750 prisoners. However, the victory came at a heavy cost: the Legion lost 25 officers and 844 men killed or wounded.

Recognition and Memory

Seeger was posthumously awarded the Military Medal (Médaille Militaire) and the War Cross (Croix de Guerre) with palm. His divisional citation praised him simply as a young legionnaire, enthusiastic and energetic, who loved France passionately. He has no individual grave: like many who fell at Belloy-en-Santerre, his remains rest among the thousands interred in the ossuaries of the Lihons national necropolis in the Somme.

News of his death, coming so soon after the false report of the previous year, prompted genuine mourning on both sides of the Atlantic. His collected letters, diary, and poems were gathered by his family and published within months; when the United States finally entered the war in 1917, the volume of his poetry sold out six editions in a single year, and his verses became required reading for a generation of American doughboys headed for France.

His memory has endured on French soil as much as American. In 1923, a monument by the sculptor Jean Boucher was unveiled in Paris’s Place des États-Unis (United States Square), honoring the Americans who volunteered before their country entered the war; Seeger’s face, taken from a photograph, gave the statue its features, and lines from his own ode were engraved on its base alongside the names of twenty-three fellow legionnaires who died with him. More than a century later, his best-known poem remains one of the most frequently quoted pieces of American war literature — a favorite, famously, of President John F. Kennedy, and cited by French President Emmanuel Macron before the U.S. Congress in 2018 as a reminder of a friendship sealed in blood.

For the Legion, Alan Seeger occupies a particular place. Not because he fought and died for France, as thousands of ordinary legionnaires did, but because of who he was: a well-born, gifted writer who chose the Legion freely, with every reason to stay safely at home, and whose voice carried the war — and the Legion itself — across the Atlantic to an America that would eventually enter the conflict the following year, in 1917.

I Have A Rendezvous With Death… by Alan Seeger

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Alan Seeger - American Poet - Foreign Legion Etrangere - Legionnaire — Legionnaire *Alan Seeger*, as pictured in the French weekly *L’Illustration*, January 1917.

Alan Seeger - American Poet - Foreign Legion Etrangere - Military Medal certificate — Certificate for the posthumous award of the Military Medal to *Alan Seeger*, issued by French Foreign Legion headquarters at *Sidi Bel Abbès*, Algeria, July 1921.

Alan Seeger - American Poet - Foreign Legion Etrangere - American Volunteers - Champagne - 1915 — American volunteers of the 2nd Marching Regiment, 2nd Foreign Regiment (2e RM/2e RE) photographed during the Champagne offensive, September 1915. *Alan Seeger* is identified as the third figure from the left.

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