His face was taken from a photo of an American poet-warrior who wrote one of the most moving poems ever penned on war: "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." His name was Alan Seeger. We haven't space for the poem here, but you can find it.

The first on a long list is "a rendezvous with Death"; I turn to the quote, a poem by Alan Seeger, 1888-1916, written during World War I, and its underlying message is that being a patriot is far more than just a privilege:

Among the most familiar are Homer, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Alan Seeger, who at age 28 wrote "I Have a Rendezvous With Death," moments before he fell in a fatal flurry of machine-gun fire.

Milner loved literature in which the writer told a story, especially Tolstoy, Dostoyesvky, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, Alan Seeger, Ellison, Faulkner, O'Neill, Himes, Wright, Baldwin and Bellow.

Other unlikely Legionnaires include American poet Alan Seeger (1914-16), 1909 Tour de France winner Francois Faber (1915) and Hungarian-born writer and philosopher Arthur Koestler (1940).