French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  As has already been made clear, the Legion's first years in Algeria were more often spent in the hospital or building roads than in combat. This was probably just as well. Until 1840, the French relied principally upon heavy columns launched from their few coastal enclaves into the hinterland to crush the Algerian resistance. This operational approach worked only when the Algerians decided to accept battle, which increasingly they did not. Their preferred method of operation was to allow the French to exhaust themselves in the struggle to push their artillery and supply wagons through the parched, roadless bled, as the North African hinterland was called, and then to attack the demoralized columns once they turned for home. This was a marvelous tactical approach, for it denied to the French their superiority in firepower and discipline while exploiting the superior mobility and resilience of the Arabs. The native resistance retained the advantage of surprise and was able to control the level of its casualties.

  Nor was it evident that the Legion was any more prepared to confront the Arabs in combat than was the rest of the French army. A tactical approach that emphasized close-order drill and volley firing with relatively short-range muskets was more appropriate to the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe than for the type of war the French encountered in Africa, one of ambush and surprise where individual audacity and initiative counted for more than the ability of men to act as automatons, in choreographed unison like some well-rehearsed stage act. Perhaps General Voirol was paying the Legion a splendid compliment in 1833 when he wrote that it was “better at war than on the exercise field.”63 Already in 1831 Berthezène had complained that the Legion was poorly trained,64 a fault which was probably remedied only slowly given the lack of enthusiasm of many officers, the constant turnover of men, the large numbers in the hospital and the fact that the Legion spent most of its time building roads.65

  Yet the role of an army is to fight, and in June 1835, three companies of the 4th Battalion, made up of Poles, and the 5th Battalion, mostly Italians, of the Legion under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Conrad were part of a column commanded by General Camille Trézel dispatched against Abd el-Kader, who was preaching resistance to tribes in the east near Oran. At five o'clock on the morning of June 26, Trézel organized his column, made up of three-and-one-half battalions of infantry, four squadrons of Chasseurs d'Afrique, a small amount of artillery and a large convoy, in a square with the Poles in the lead and two squadrons of cavalry and the Italians on the left flank, and directed it through the “forest” of Muley-Ismael, a large copse of jujube, lentisk and tamarind trees, spread over a series of small hills that rose up between the wadis of the Sig and the Treblat. As the column followed a shallow ravine that wound through the thinly wooded hills, Arab skirmishers began firing on the avant-garde and the flanks. The 4th Battalion moved forward in a line to clear the skirmishers from the column's front, only to be attacked by a larger number of Arabs and driven back. With the convoy seriously threatened, the Chasseurs d'Afrique charged, only to have its colonel shot down. In the confusion, a bugler blew the retreat, which caused the considerable convoy to do an about-turn. The 5th Battalion counterattacked on the flank with a battalion of the 66th Infantry Regiment, driving away the Arabs who had already reached the wagons. By midday, Trézel's column had fought its way out of the forest onto the plain. Two of the wagons were so damaged that they had to be burned, while those carrying the tents were unloaded to accommodate the wounded, who numbered 180. The bodies of fifty-two dead were left behind.

  On the 27th, Trézel camped beside the Sig while he attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with Abd el-Kader. On the morning of June 28, he moved toward Arzew across the broad plain, the convoy organized in three files, the three companies of the 4th Battalion of the Legion on the right flank and the 5th Battalion on the left. Large numbers of Arab horsemen shadowed the lumbering column but remained at a respectful distance. At two o'clock in the afternoon the column reached a point where the track ran between the Macta marshes on the right and the hills of the Muley-Ismael forest to the left. It was at this narrow defile that Abd el-Kader chose to attack. Arabs, mounted and on foot, threw themselves at the front of the column as others blasted away from the underbrush on the left. The 5th Battalion was ordered to hold the enemy at a respectful distance but to remain close to the convoy. Although the legionnaires of the 5th Battalion carried out the order, it was done at a considerable cost, for they remained in an exposed position while the enemy shot at them from the underbrush. To end this difficult situation, Lieutenant Colonel Conrad, whom General Trézel subsequently described as “having a lot of energy and spirit, but little reflexion,”66 led his men in an attack that pushed the assailants back into the trees. There, however, the legionnaires ran into a wall of fire that drove them back in confusion, causing elements of the 66th Infantry in the rear guard to panic also. Worse, the retreat uncovered the left flank of the convoy. The confusion was increased by the fact that the Arabs had set fire to some of the vegetation, which swathed the battlefield in smoke. The companies were cut off, scattered, and panicked. Conrad ordered the three companies of the 4th Battalion who were guarding the wounded to rally to him, and eventually collected his legionnaires behind the safety of a small hill.

  General Trézel gave Conrad the lion's share of the blame for causing the defeat at Macta. When Trézel rode up from the rear guard, he discovered that Conrad “and a large number of officers wanted to pass this river (Macta) at a ford and march to Mostaganem. It was a mad scheme already underway which I halted only with difficulty,” Trézel wrote. Worse, however, Conrad's action had uncovered the column. Without protection, the drivers cut their traces and rode off on their mules, perhaps following the example of much of the cavalry, which, Trézel complained, he only saw again when he reached the sea. Others drove their wagons into the marshes, only to bog down to the axles before they had gone more than a few yards. The Arabs had seldom had it so easy, and it was almost at leisure that they shot down the fleeing drivers, finished off the wounded who in their helplessness screamed for aid, and stole whatever took their fancy.

  In the rear guard, the soldiers of the 66th whose commanding officer had been killed panicked and joined other French soldiers who were wading into the marshes. Trézel led a charge of two cavalry squadrons that had not deserted to reach the convoy, or what remained of it. Protected by a few steady infantry units, mainly Legion and penal Bataillons d'Afrique, and the artillery, which had maintained its discipline and protected its cannon, Trézel was able to lead his soldiers to Arzew on the Mediterranean, constantly shadowed by Arab horsemen, who, however, elected not to attack. When the exhausted column heaved up at the coast, it counted about 300 wounded, including Legion second lieutenant Achille Bazaine, destined to become French commander-in-chief in the Franco-Prussian War, 62 dead, including two Legion officers abandoned on the field of battle, and 280 missing. The infantry was taken off to Oran by ship while the cavalry, reenforced by friendly tribal levies, returned by land.67

  French morale was seriously battered by the Macta debacle. The government ordered the Oran garrison to remain on the defensive, and mutual accusations and recriminations broke out among various corps. The Legion was not spared. Macta had brought out rivalries between the Polish and Italian battalions, each of whom accused the other of incompetence, so that the Legion commander, Colonel Bernelle, decided to amalgamate the largely segregated battalions into nationally mixed ones.68 This step may also have been forced upon him by the fickle nature of national recruitment, which made it impossible to maintain a national battalion at strength. Already, in 1834, complaints had been voiced that the absence of Spanish recruits, caused by the outbreak of the Carlist Wars in that country, might force the amalgamation of the battalions.69 Of equal significance, at least in the short run, was the fact that the amalgamation order reached the Legion on August 17, 1835,70 the day it disembarked at Tarragona. The Algerian adventure was suspended so that the Legion could participate in a campaign which would very nearly
become its last—Spain.

  Chapter 2

  “BETWEEN POLITICS, DIPLOMACY AND THE CANNON” – THE LEGION IN SPAIN, 1835-1839

  IN 1835, THE LEGION was handed over to Spain. A harsh fate in the best of times, this was especially so in the early decades of the nineteenth century when Spain was what she would again become in 1936—a turbulent power vacuum that tempted the nations of Europe to intervene. The grand era of the Spanish Hapsburgs, when New World bullion fueled a foreign policy whose dynamism made Europe tremble, was well and truly past. Shattered by the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, which touched off a war of unimaginable savagery, stripped of most of her empire by the colonial rebellions of the 1820s, Spain by the 1830s was an exhausted country, and one barely recognizable as European, justifying in full the popular observation that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.” In the absence of a strong government, the regionalism and deep social and political divisions that were never far beneath the surface had begun to reassert themselves. Madrid, once a political and cultural capital of world-class status, was reduced to a quaint backwater, a fortress city from which successive governments attempted to impose order on a mosaic of peoples all demonstrating an innate genius for creating chaos. However, foreign statesmen continued to view Spain's endless and dreary quarrels, her chronic and bloody instability, as a battleground of international ideology and national prestige. The specifically local nature of the disputes within this imperfect nation-state, Spain's traditional preference for anarchy over centrally imposed order and her desire to be left alone by the outside world were subtleties lost on the political generation of the 1830s, as they were a century later. However, in this case, the Legion was to pay the price for this political misperception.

  This particular chapter in the ongoing Spanish civil war opened in 1833 when a series of uprisings against the “liberal” government of Isabel II erupted in Castile, Navarre and the Basque provinces in favor of the late King Ferdinand VII's brother, Don Carlos. Smaller Carlist guerrilla bands materialized in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. The stakes, both ideological and strategic, were crystal-clear to the governments of Europe. Britain, France and Portugal feared the success of a reactionary, proclerical rebellion in Spain, which would damage their prestige and threaten their interests. In April 1834, the four governments formed the Quadruple Alliance, which was a diplomatic triumph for Isabel II but of little practical value in quelling her domestic disturbances. However, further afield, there were a number of governments that preferred reaction for its own sake. The conservative Italian states of Turin and Naples recognized Don Carlos outright. Austria, Prussia and Russia found the man congenial but for the moment withheld diplomatic recognition.

  The war against the Carlists did not go well for the government. The rebellion found the bulk of the Spanish forces preoccupied with disorder in Portugal. The remainder were set to catch the elusive guerrilla bands in Castile and Navarre, which at the time appeared to pose the more immediate threat. However, this dispersion of force allowed the rebellion in the remote, mountainous Basque country of the north to put down firm roots. There the combination of a traditional, largely self-sufficient society with its own language, led by a class of landowners and priests deeply suspicious of the liberal Madrid government, and a leader of genius in General Tomas Zumalacárregui soon made the three Basque provinces and much of western Navarre an inhospitable area for the government.

  In July 1834, Don Carlos slipped out of his English exile, traveled in disguise through France and appeared in the rebellious Basque country to take command. By the spring of 1835, Zumalacárregui had defeated every general Isabel had sent against him, raised a force of thirteen thousand men largely through conscription and was virtually inviolate in his mountain fastness. Don Carlos had established a court which, though rustic, bore enough resemblance to the real thing to invite diplomatic recognition—and hard cash—from the well-disposed powers of central and eastern Europe. A catchbag of French legitimists and other conservatives and even a Prussian general appeared to offer their services to the rebellion. Madrid was on the verge of panic, fearing that if the Carlist forces broke south across the Ebro they would touch off a general rebellion that would shake Madrid to its very foundations. In May 1835, Isabel appealed to her allies for something more substantial than moral support.1

  The reaction in France was at first cool. The king, Louis-Philippe, was just beginning to feel secure on his throne and was not eager to risk it, and European peace, with an untimely intervention in yet another Spanish quarrel. The ex-war minister, Marshal Soult, had experienced firsthand the dreadful fighting of the Peninsular War under Napoleon and warned his countrymen against stirring up the Spanish “hornet's nest” once again. Austria, Prussia and Russia also opposed French intervention. However, no one was prepared to confront Adolphe Thiers, the young firebrand journalist whom the 1830 Revolution had catapulted into the political imperium. As minister of the interior, on June 6, 1835, he persuaded his colleagues in the government to dispatch the Foreign Legion to Spain to aid the constitutional government there. Louis-Philippe gave his assent two days later, and on June 28 a convention between the governments of Spain and France ceded the Legion to Madrid. On the following day, by royal ordinance, the Legion ceased to be part of the French army.

  Left to his own devices, Thiers would no doubt have done more to aid the Spanish constitutionalists, especially after he became prime minister in February 1836. Thiers saw the Spanish conflict as the vehicle for the “renaissance of French diplomacy,” a way in which France could begin to reassert influence on the world stage, which she had failed to do since Waterloo. He also argued that in her delicate internal state, France could not tolerate the establishment of a conservative Carlist monarchy, which would transform Spain into “the Vendée of Europe,” a reference to the pro-Bourbon rebellions that plagued western France following the revolutions of 1789 and 1830. However, the clincher was the decision by Britain and her Portuguese ally to raise volunteers for Isabel's beleaguered government. Thiers was loath to see French influence in Madrid eroded to the advantage of London. To force his points home, he threatened to resign unless he got his way. Louis-Philippe decided that Thiers would do less damage inside the government than in opposition and gave in. However, Thiers could not ignore altogether the opinion of Soult, who reminded him in January 1837 that by sending soldiers to Spain, “it is impossible to place French troops in a more equivocal situation.”2

  The nature of this political compromise demonstrates in part how the Legion survived infancy against the odds. By sending the Legion, France could affirm diplomatic support short of a binding commitment. If things turned sour in Spain, Paris would not confront the difficult problem of extracting her forces while at the same time struggling to save face, for, after all, wars are often easier begun than terminated. Once France turned over the Legion, its fate would be in Madrid's hands. For its part, Isabel's government may have preferred French support to come in the form of regular regiments. But this simply was not realistic given the political situation in Paris. And besides, the Legion offered tangible evidence of French interest, with no strings attached. A substantial commitment of French forces most certainly would have required more French interference in the political and military affairs of Spain. But the Legion was a different matter—it was a gift, a disposable item, and so appealing to the politicians and diplomats precisely because it was expendable. Already, in 1834, the 439 Spaniards of the 4th Battalion of the Legion had been sent to Oran, from whence they were shipped to Spain at the request of the Spanish government, an indication that even then the French government had envisaged employing the Legion in the Iberian peninsula.

  The news of this little bargain was badly received in the Legion. But was the French government really being unfair? Its attitude was that legionnaires were mercenaries, after all, men hired to do the government's bidding. And besides, what difference should it make to them for whom they fought, so long as they were paid? (The
fact that the Spanish seldom were to pay them was not factored into the argument.) There are historians who argue that this transfer of the Legion to Spain was perfectly in keeping with the fairly common practice of “loaning” troops to foreign governments in need of professional military expertise.3 However, two things must be said: First, the Legion was not loaned, but handed over lock, stock and barrel. In fact, the word “cession” does not appear in the official agreement between the two governments, but was used in a letter of July 2, 1835, by the war minister, Marshal Nicholas Maison. Minutes of a meeting on July 27 between the two governments prior to signing the accords on the following day speak of the “delivery” of the Legion to Spain, as if it were so much merchandise. It was precisely this absence of precision that subsequently would allow both governments to shirk responsibility for the Legion's welfare.