COLUMN ONE : Days of Glory for the Legion : After several decades of decline, France’s legendary fighting group has three desert-tested regiments in Saudi Arabia and a wave of recruits from Communist regimes.

The illuminated yellow cross shines brightly these days inside the Crypt of the Wooden Hand.

Legionnaires in crisp khaki uniforms and white kepis--caps with flat, round tops and stiff visors--march the length of the “Sacred Way” parade ground at the center of the headquarters compound here with a renewed sense of purpose.

Things are so upbeat, in fact, that a colonel in the commandant’s office was overheard the other day singing an almost forgotten tune, recorded years ago by the throaty chanteuse Edith Piaf:

He was young

He was handsome

He smelled good, like hot sand,

My legionnaire.

After several decades of decline and neglect, punctuated only by periodic police actions in obscure locales such as Chad and Rwanda on the African continent, the glory days are back for the French Foreign Legion.

The legion has three of its desert-tested regiments on the front-lines in Saudi Arabia. Its ranks have been restocked with a new wave of able-bodied recruits from the crumbling Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. And like similar military forces designed for quick deployment, the Foreign Legion, a key part of the French Force Action Rapide, or rapid deployment force, is enjoying new-found strategic status in the post-Cold War era.

The combination of events has revived the fortunes of one of the world’s elite fighting units, and certainly one of the most unusual.

The legion’s most treasured possession, for example, is an age-darkened wooden hand kept in a black marble vault here in a separate wing of the Foreign Legion Museum. The prosthetic hand once belonged to legion hero Capt. Jean Danjou, who was killed in battle in Mexico in 1863. He had lost his real hand in Algeria when his musket exploded.

Given a chance to retire, he refused and went on to lead legion troops in the Crimean War and Mexico, where he died facing down 2,000 foes with only a handful of legionnaires.

Once a year in the spring, Capt. Danjou’s wooden hand is removed from its glass-enclosed case and carried in parade by the soldier deemed the best example of the legion’s standards of courage and discipline.

Other legion traditions differentiate it from the rest of the French army and build up its sense of elitism. For example, the legion is the only unit to wear the kepi, an inheritance from its service in the North African desert where such headgear helped to deflect the brutal sun. And its march, a slow, almost funereal pace, also sets it apart on parade: 88 steps a minute, compared to 120 for the regular army.

The Foreign Legion was created in 1831 by French King Louis-Philippe to help in the conquest of Algeria. Most of the original legion troops were refugees from revolutions that had taken place in several European countries the year before.

The use of foreign troops to fight French battles was part of an older tradition. The Bourbon kings employed the famous Swiss Guard, Napoleon had his Polish Lancers and even the early French revolutionaries recruited an army of foreign soldiers, the “Legion Franche Etrangere.”

Originally created to fight only on foreign soil or in French possessions overseas, today’s legion is the only one of the several historical foreign legions to survive. An integral part of the French army, it is led by French officers. But the majority of its 8,500 troops are foreigners, recruited from 106 countries.

According to Lt. Col. Pierre Fromager, chief of recruiting here at Aubagne, 67% of today’s legionnaires are foreigners. Last year, he said, the legion accepted 10 Americans into the ranks.

The legion accepts only a fraction of those who apply. In the past year, there were 7,500 applicants for only 1,200 openings.

The key to the legion system, celebrated in dozens of books and movies like the classic “Beau Geste,” starring Gary Cooper, is the Legion Code of Anonymity. Once accepted, every recruit is assigned a new identity. Foreign recruits are given French names and assigned false nationalities from French-speaking countries. French enlistees are given new names and foreign identities.

Later in his career, the legionnaire has the option of resuming his real name or sticking with his legion identity. But whatever he decides, his secret past is secure with the legion.

“The Legion Provides You a Sanctuary if You Are Looking for One,” announces the giant recruiting posters that peer down at passengers in the Paris train stations.

Obviously, the idea of sanctuary is attractive to a lot of men. Those who have been jilted by their lovers or have unhappy marriages, for example, find refuge in the legion.

“When you are accepted in the legion,” says the recruiting officer who stars in a 20-minute film, available in 10 languages, that is shown to potential recruits, “you are considered to be single, whether you are married or not.”

Once in the legion, the recruit gives up his right to return home for three years. If he decides to get married, the legion will interview his fiancee and decide if she is the right woman.

The legion’s Latin motto is: “ Legio patria nostra “ -- the legion is our homeland. A legionnaire’s first loyalty is to the legion. His second is to France.

The legion does have some restrictions on who it will accept.

“We don’t accept hard-core criminals, perverts or people who are wanted by international police,” said Col. Gerard de Lajudie, a deputy to the commandant, Gen. Raymond Le Corre. “But once a candidate is accepted, we don’t ask any more questions. We don’t answer any either.”

The policy, along with the promise of almost certain French citizenship at the end of a five-year tour, has provided the legion with an almost endless stream of refugees, fugitives, misfits and adventurers, each with his own reason for wanting to change his name and start over.

Each dramatic event of history has provided its own wave of recruits: French-speaking Alsatians came after the Prussian invasion of France in 1870; White Russian military officers joined after the Russian Revolution and Spanish Republicans after the Spanish Civil War. Even German soldiers joined up with their recent enemies after World War II.

“We had a German general of the Saar who started from the bottom with all the other recruits,” said Col. De Lajudie.

Accordingly, the latest wave of foreign recruits comes from Eastern Europe. The political changes that swept the old East Bloc starting last fall have produced eager recruits from that part of the world. More than 30% of the new recruits in the past year have come from Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, said recruiting chief Fromager.

He described the Eastern Europeans as tougher and more resourceful than their Western European and American counterparts.

“They are accustomed to living in groups where there is very little privacy,” he said. “They can talk so only the walls can hear them and they always manage to get the best piece of meat in the canteen. They are survivors who are accustomed to adversity. These are the same qualities needed on the battlefield.”

And unlike Western recruits, Fromager said, they are unlikely to have experimented with drugs.

Fromager selected what he said were six typical recruits--a Czech, a Pole, a former East German, a Scot, a Swede and an American--to meet a visiting reporter.

Mustered into a training classroom at legion headquarters on a recent morning and looking more like refugees than fighting men, each gave his reason for joining the legendary French fighting unit. In keeping with the tradition of anonymity, they did not give their names.

For the Czech, the Pole and the German, the motivations were economic: The legion offered them a chance to escape their depressed homelands.

“There are no jobs left where I grew up in the East,” said the German, a stocky, blue-eyed 18-year-old with a bad complexion and a wispy mustache. “When I went to West Germany they said I would have to work as an apprentice for two years before I could get a decent job. I had no friends. I felt like I was sinking.”

The Scot said he had signed up because he was unemployed and afraid of getting into trouble with the law in the tough, hard-drinking pub scene back home. The Swede said he was bored to death in Sweden. And the American, a tall, apparently high-strung 20-year-old Southern Californian, said he was fed up with American “greed and materialism.”

He said had grown up in an affluent suburb near Pasadena, where his father owns a company that makes airplane parts. After spending his high school years in a Los Angeles prep school and a military school in another state, he said he was accepted at UCLA but decided to join the legion instead.

“We had a lot of family problems at home,” he said. “I had the feeling that my parents didn’t love me. They cared more about their friends and their cars and houses than they did about me. I just wanted to get about as far away as I could. I remembered reading this story about a legionnaire dying. The legion has a kind of mystique about it.”

In its century and a half of history, the legion has had many ups and downs.

The low point probably came in 1835, when the original legion was loaned to Spain only four years after it had been created and had participated in the conquest of Algeria. Legion histories are full of horror stories about the way Spanish officers abused the starving, barefoot legionnaires under their command.

Probably the second-lowest moment came at the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1961, when many legionnaire officers and men joined in the attempted coup d’etat against President Charles de Gaulle and the French government in Algeria.

The legion had been at the spearhead of the harsh but unsuccessful campaign to suppress the independence movement. Those who took part in the coup attempt hated De Gaulle for deciding to cut France’s losses and grant independence.

Most of the French army remained loyal and put down the “revolt of the generals” in only four days and five nights. One of the mutinous regiments was the 1st Parachute Regiment of the Foreign Legion based in Zeralda, Algeria. Before the regiment surrendered to its fellow French forces, its soldiers destroyed their barracks. As they marched to the stockade they sang the Edith Piaf song, “ Je ne regrette rien “--”I Regret Nothing”--at the top of their lungs.

The French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 meant that the legion lost its headquarters at Sidi-bel-Abbes and was forced to move to its present headquarters in southern France. It ceased to be a Foreign Legion based on foreign soil.

Today the legion has six posts in France and four overseas: Djibouti, on the East African coast; Mururua, a Pacific atoll near Tahiti; Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean, and French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America.

But the Algerian experience left the legion with a stigma of insubordination and a reputation for right-wing political stances that stuck with it for years. The one thing that saved it was the deep affection felt by French officers who had commanded in its ranks.

A French army officer’s career is not complete without a tour in the legion and there are many examples of officers who gave up chances for advancement to stay with the legion.

Not so long ago the French Foreign Legion was written off by many Paris politicians as a romantic, mystic relic of France’s colonial past. In the context of the Cold War, the desert-fighting skills of the legion appeared useful only in seemingly minor police actions in places like Chad, Zaire and Djibouti.

Then came the current Persian Gulf conflict. It was just what the heroes of “Beau Geste” needed in order to be relevant again. Among the 13,000 French troops on the front lines in Saudi Arabia are three regiments of the legendary “men without names.”

As the rest of the multinational forces in the gulf are now painfully aware, the legion is one of the few Western military forces with extensive recent desert combat experience.

In the context of the gulf crisis, the legion’s presence in Chad, where its units have been fighting on and off since 1970, has emerged as a coveted asset rather than a footnote from an obscure war. Likewise, the legion’s practice of training in the broiling desert heat of Djibouti, only a few miles across the Gulf of Aden from the Arabian Peninsula, is an advantage that none of the forces oriented to the European theater can match.

“A lot of our personnel have already been in desert conditions,” observed Col. De Lajudie, who was the officer overheard singing Piaf. “We have experience firing missiles in extremely hot conditions. Our helicopters are equipped with filters to keep out the sand.”

This feeling of competence in desert settings has produced a certain braggadocio among legionnaires that may rile American troops and other soldiers assigned to the gulf. Legionnaires, for example, brag that they can get by on only two gallons of water a day in Saudi Arabia, rather than the five gallons that the Americans are ordered to drink.

“In the sand,” one legionnaire boasted to French reporters recently in Saudi Arabia, “we are like fish in water.”

“It’s true that the Americans are 10 times more numerous than we are,” another young legionnaire told a reporter for the weekly magazine Paris Match, “but one of us is worth three of them.”

The puffing and strutting aside, Western military officials say there is considerable merit to the French bragging.

“They have experienced the desert from Chad and many other campaigns,” said an admiring military strategist from another Western country. “They can deploy quickly and their force as a whole is especially suited to desert action.”