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The only woman in the French Foreign Legion

1:42 AM Fri, Sep 25, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry

The only woman in the French Foreign Legion in the BBC Magazine comes from Wendy Holden, who helped Susan Travers write her memoir (Tomorrow to Be Brave) in 2000 at age 91. You might hunt this one down for a spirited girl you know.

A detailed obit at the Telegraph in December, 2003 -- probably written off the book -- quotes Travers saying,"I had become the person I'd always wanted to be."


susantravers.jpg

...Travers stayed on with the Legion seeing action in Italy, Germany and France driving a self-propelled anti-tank gun. She was wounded after driving over a mine.

After the war, she wanted no other life and applied formally to the Legion to become an official member, omitting her gender on the application form.

The man who rubber-stamped her admission had known her in Bir Hakeim. After creating her own uniform, Travers became the first and only woman ever to serve with the Legion, and was posted to Vietnam during the First Indo-China War.

It was there that she met and married a fellow legionnaire, Nicholas Schlegelmilch, who had also been at Bir Hakeim. They had two sons and lived a quiet life on the outskirts of Paris until their deaths.

When I met her in the last years of her life, she was finally ready to tell her story only because "everyone was gone and I was left alone with my medals". What she wanted, she said, was for her grandchildren to know how "wicked" she had been.

She did not, however, want to hurt his husband's feelings with tales of long-ago lovers, and waited until after his death to tell her swashbucking story.

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