AZR dreamed of a different "legion" — of agricultural instructors — and opposed a military legion in the depths of his heart, from the same moral principle that underlay his vegetarianism:
"We… stand on the threshold of 'they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,' and here are our young men, many of whom have already mastered the spade and the plow, coming to grasp sword and spear… once again an aspiration to killing and murder…" AZR, "The First Jewish Legion," "Sefer HaShanah" 5686 (1926); Project Ben-Yehuda.
From a military standpoint too he considered it worthless, against the mighty British army he had seen at Sejera:
"There — an iron fist, a mighty hammer; when it strikes, the pillars of the world tremble. And here — the fist of an infant, capable of shooing away a fly." Ibid.
He wrote down his reflections and showed them to Brenner, who "said that he agreed with me and wanted to print my words on a hectograph and circulate them among our young people."
Yet faced with the enthusiasm of the young men, who had suffered terribly under the Turks, he did not dare place an obstacle in their way, and came to see in the Legion the renewal of the ancient valor:
"The Jewish Legion was one of the wonders. Not a passive army disposed to discipline out of fear… This was an active army in which every single man was imbued with one spirit — a spirit of valor and love of the homeland and a mighty aspiration to redemption and revival." Ibid.
And when he saw the Legion marching through Tel Aviv in song, with Margolin riding at its head:
"I felt an elation of spirit such as I had never known in my life. I saw that Israel's honor, which had been profaned at the hands of oppressors, had been restored. Our hope is not yet lost!…" Ibid.
The Legion's commander, Colonel Eliezer Margolin, had been AZR's pupil in his youth:
"He was my pupil, when I was a teacher in Belgorod, Kursk Governorate… and when I learned that little Eliezer had grown up and become a colonel, I wrote to him… but he hastened to come to my house, to pay a teacher his honor (in his letters to me he always wrote 'my dear teacher')." Ibid. (His brother: the scholar Moshe Margolin in Leningrad.)
AZR describes the Legion's moral strength at decisive moments. When the British sought to send the Legion to Egypt to suppress riots, all refused — without having conferred among themselves — at the risk of severe punishment as mutineers:
"We volunteered to give up our lives only for the Land of Israel, and we have no business with other lands." Ibid.
And Margolin himself, in the Jaffa riots of 5681 (1921), did not wait for orders but gathered demobilized soldiers and armed them to block the rioters from Tel Aviv. At the trial held against him he said:
"In my heart there was no other thought but to defend Tel Aviv." Ibid.
AZR closes with criticism of the British administration, which forced many of the Legion's men (Margolin among them) to leave the land for which they had fought, lest they claim their share in its soil:
"'The spoon is precious at mealtime, and afterward it can be tossed under the table,' says the Russian proverb… They left, but their traces are kept in the hearts of those who knew them; the people, too, will not forget them." Ibid.
And the Legion's valor, in his view, "passed on to Tel Hai, to the conquest of the Valley through creative agricultural labor" — a return to the central ideal: "when the time came to beat swords into plowshares, our pioneer did not refuse to fulfill this task too with the same self-sacrifice."