author
Russell Anthony Kelly
b. 1893
A young American who volunteered for the French Foreign Legion before the United States entered World War I, he left behind vivid letters that bring the war close and personal. His writing is direct, earnest, and shaped by the courage and uncertainty of a very short life.
1 Audiobook
Kelly of the Foreign Legion: Letters of Légionnaire Russell A. Kelly
by Russell Anthony Kelly
About the author
Born in 1893, Russell Anthony Kelly is remembered for Kelly of the Foreign Legion, a collection built from the letters he sent home while serving in the French Foreign Legion during World War I. Those letters were first published in the New York Evening Sun and later gathered into book form with an added historical sketch of the Legion.
Kelly was only 21 when many of these letters were written, and that youth comes through in the book's mixture of adventure, homesickness, humor, and clear-eyed detail. His account stands out because it is not a distant history of the war, but the voice of someone living through enlistment, training, trench life, and battle as they happened.
His life was cut short in 1915, making the book both a war memoir and a lasting personal record. For listeners today, his work offers something rare: the immediacy of a firsthand witness and the moving sense of a promising writer speaking across time.