"Our Friends Beneath the Sands"

Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The French Foreign Legion in France's Colonial Conquests 1870-1935 (Martin Windrow)

I got pretty much what I expected with this book - like Windrow's The Last Valley, this is a massive brick of a book overflowing with information. I liked this book pretty well, but it shares the previous book's flaws, namely that the endless details of which military organization each battalion, squad, etc. belongs to can get a little tiring. The book also suffers from a common historical pitfall the other book didn't in that it just reaches a stop line and ends without a climax, and honestly I felt like the end of the book was more interesting as the legion beings experimenting with cars and trucks instead of camels. These are mostly minor issues, though, and the Legion's history in Indochina and Morocco is quite interesting, even if the book never quite raises to the level of excellence from the author's previous work.

Grade: B+