French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The French manhandled their seventeen guns onto the Coudiat-Aty and began to throw up siegeworks about four hundred yards from the wall. On October 7, an Arab attack was repulsed. Two days later, the French opened their bombardment. On the 11th, the Algerians launched several attacks on the French saps, one of which was opposed by two companies of legionnaires who, General Valée reported, “... attacked the enemy with the greatest resolution: the Arabs were bowled over and pursued, swords in their kidneys, as far as the escarpments which cut the terrain at this point permitted. [The enemy] left many dead. For our part, we had several men killed among whom we have to regret Captain Marland: 14 men were wounded, among them Captain Raindre who had a leg shattered and Captain MacMahon, aide-de-camp of the Governor General, who was wounded by a bullet.”4

  The French had constructed more batteries in the night and continued to pound the outer wall, seeking to silence the Turkish cannon. Only on the 11th could Valée begin to concentrate upon creating a breach. “By the evening, the breach was clearly visible,” he wrote. But the wall proved more resilient than he had imagined. “Its thickness was 1 meter 40 centimeters, but it was built against some old buildings that added considerably to its thickness. The facing of the wall was constructed of very hard limestone blocks.”5 This was of more than mere academic interest—the solidity of the walls combined with the harassing fire of the Turkish guns, which obliged the French to give more attention than planned to counter battery fire, meant that the provision of two hundred shots per cannon might prove inadequate. And the supply depots were too far away to repair the miscalculation.

  As was customary in siege operations, when the wall was breached a messenger was dispatched (in this case “a young Arab from the Turkish battalion”) to invite the town to surrender and therefore avoid the subsequent horrors of street fighting and pillage. He is reported to have returned with a defiant message: “If the Christians lack powder, we shall send them some; if they have no more biscuits, we will share ours with them; but, as long as one of us lives, they will not take Constantine.” “Those are brave people,” Damrémont is reported to have said. “The affair will be even more glorious for us!”6 Valée gives a more laconic version in his official report: “[The messenger] returned the next day without having been mistreated, but brought a verbal response from the inhabitants which announced their intention to be buried among the ruins of the town.”7

  Throughout the night of October 11-12, the French worked to build more batteries closer to the wall, but not without opposition: “The enemy who discovered probably because the moon was bright the operation which we were preparing, directed a violent musket fire at us which obliged us to abandon our work momentarily.”8 The defenders who watched from the surrounding hills swarmed as if to attack, but seeing the French in their trenches preparing to receive them, they wisely reconsidered. At 8:30 on the morning of the 12th, Damrémont went forward to inspect the breach and was blown away by a Turkish cannon ball. Command fell to Valée: “[I] ordered all the means to terminate promptly the operation,” he wrote. He redoubled the fire of his guns, which silenced the Turkish batteries—“Even the musketry ceased to be heard”—so that his siege mortars could continue to enlarge the breach. At 3:00 in the afternoon, an emissary came out of the town to ask for a truce. Valée, suspecting correctly, no doubt, that the defenders were attempting to stretch out the siege until the French ran out of food and munitions, replied that negotiations could only follow a surrender. He ordered his batteries to fire at irregular intervals throughout the night to disrupt attempts to repair the breach. At 3:30 on the morning of Friday October 13, two captains crept to the wall and returned to report that the breach was wide enough to fit twenty-five men attacking in line, and that no attempt had been made to repair it.9

  By 7:30 that same morning, Legion lieutenant Achille de Saint-Arnaud had already spent three and one-half hours hunkered down behind the most advanced line of guns, barely one hundred yards from the breach: “The noise of the artillery was deafening, one blast following upon another,” he wrote to his brother. “The shells and musket balls of the Arabs passed overhead or next to us, showering us with fragments of rock or earth.”10 But he was not frightened, or, rather, his obvious nervousness was that of impatience rather than fear. Saint-Arnaud was stoking himself up to do something that would be judged either completely foolish or completely sublime, for he was well aware that this was perhaps his last chance to salvage what, so far, had been a career of embarrassing mediocrity.

  Of course, no one can control his own birthday. It was sheer bad luck that Saint-Arnaud's career came on line in 1815 just as a quarter-century of European warfare ended abruptly and spectacularly at Waterloo, for he was just the sort of impulsive young man whom Napoleon might have chosen to lead his hussars in some madcap mêlée with the enemy. Typically, the sort of juvenile flamboyance that might have earned for him admiration on the battlefield landed him in deep trouble in peacetime. Saint-Arnaud's aristocratic lineage secured for him a sublieutenancy in the king's exclusive garde du corps. But his petit bourgeois pocketbook meant that attempts to keep pace with the extravagant life-style of his wealthy contemporaries soon plunged him into impossible debt and forced his resignation in 1817, not yet twenty years old. The following year, a place was found for him in a line regiment, but his tempestuous nature was ill-suited to the dull routine of provincial garrison life. Indeed, he seemed ill-suited to army life in general—by 1820, he was again a civilian after he attempted to provoke a duel with a superior officer, strictly against regulations. He drifted to Greece in 1822, but found life as a mercenary among the Greek independence fighters little to his liking. He accepted an offer of a sublieutenancy in a detachment destined for Martinique, but neglected to appear at the unit's departure and instead offered his resignation, an act that ignited a family quarrel after which even his mother would not let him in the house. Subsequent attempts, and one can imagine that they were fairly frantic ones, by his family to get the Bourbon government to take him back came to nothing.

  The Revolution of 1830 offered Saint-Arnaud, like so many others, a second chance. In February 1831, at the age of thirty-three, he was again a sublieutenant, but this time determined “to obliterate this past which I would not buy back at any price.”11 Saint-Arnaud had undergone, quite literally, a change of heart. Barely two months into his new assignment with the 64th Infantry Regiment at Brest, he met Laure Pasquier, the daughter of a retired naval commander, whom he soon married. In December 1831, he became a lieutenant. But he soon discovered that, despite zealous service, years were easier lost than regained. The final blow came in the spring of 1836 with the death of his young wife. A thirty-eight-year-old lieutenant, a widower with two small children, his life a tissue of failure, Saint-Arnaud did a perfectly logical thing—he volunteered for the Foreign Legion.

  Now, almost a year after he reported to the nouvelle Légion at Pau, he at last had been brought face-to-face with his opportunity: “At Constantine,” he had decided, “I will get myself killed or I will make up for lost time and get noticed.”12 Valée signaled the start of the attack. The siege guns shifted their fire beyond the breach. Lieutenant Colonel Louis de Lamoricière rose up and led his three hundred zouaves, forty sappers and two elite companies—voltigeurs [skirmishers] and grenadiers—of the 2nd Light Infantry Regiment toward the yawning gap in the wall. Within seconds they were swarming over the breach. The plan called for the second wave, of which Saint-Arnaud and his legionnaires were part, to surge forward as soon as the first attack had fought its way through the breach and into the town. But from his position, Saint-Arnaud could see that they were stuck—the bombardment had failed to destroy a second curtain wall that held Lamoricière in the breach while, from all sides, the defenders poured a deadly fire into them. The shout went up for ladders. To Saint-Arnaud, it seemed an eternity before sappers ran forward with them, as well as ropes and sacks of powder. Then he heard a terrific explosion—just as the French prepa
red to scale the wall, the Turks blew a mine that toppled it onto the attackers. Forty Frenchmen were buried under the debris, including the battalion commander of the 2nd Light Infantry. Lamoricière was badly burned.

  Although Valée's report makes no mention of it, Saint-Arnaud reckoned that at this point the assault was within an ace of failure: ‘Those who escaped, half burned, wounded, disfigured, their clothes in tatters, ran out of the breach shouting: ‘Look, friends, comrades, don't attack! Run! Everything is mined. You will be blown up like us!’ Our soldiers hesitated and looked toward their officers,” Saint-Arnaud wrote to his brother. Because the lack of artillery ammunition made a second attempt impossible, at least in 1837, the French had only one option opened to them. History credits Colonel Michel Combe, ex-colonel of the Legion and commander of the second wave, and Major Alphonse Bedeau of the Legion with hurling their troops into the balance at this critical moment. Saint-Arnaud, with typical absence of modesty, recorded that it was a spontaneous and simultaneous initiative on the part of several officers, including himself: “Anyone might have done it, but it took initiative, and at the moment when an exploding mine always makes one suspect a second, it required audacity to charge into certain danger.”13

  “The progress of [our] troops in the town became more rapid after the wall collapsed despite the resistance of the enemy,” Valée reported.14 Saint-Arnaud agreed that the defenders had made a serious tactical error in blowing down their own defenses. But for those on the inside, including Saint-Arnaud and his hundred legionnaires, the most murderous part of the operation was just beginning. He later admitted that he was “carried away” and completely “forgot himself” as he charged into the streets of Constantine,15 most of them mere alleyways where the roofs of the houses were so close that only a sliver of sky was visible above the men who struggled in the semi-twilight below. Saint-Arnaud ordered his men to follow as he threw himself at a battery to the left of the breach: “The Turks defended themselves with desperate courage. They fired and we killed them while they were reloading: What admirable soldiers! Our bayonets did not leave one alive. We did not take prisoners.”16

  They then moved toward the sound of the fighting when some sappers came to ask him to remove a barricade that was holding up progress. Saint-Arnaud rushed to a narrow street crowded with legionnaires and soldiers from the Bataillon d'Afrique, all leaderless and in a state of great agitation, so great in fact that they did not notice that they were trampling the body of a captain of engineers who had already been killed by fire from the barricade. Saint-Arnaud took time to notice that the obstacle that blocked the street only a few yards away was “artistically constructed: doors, beams, mattresses, nothing was lacking.” He placed some of his best marksmen in the houses that overlooked the street, took sword in hand, and sprinted forward, followed by a jostling queue of soldiers. “I threw myself on the barricade which I crossed by falling on the other side. . . . There, on the ground, I was happy to hear the soldiers shout furiously: ‘Help the Captain! Help the Captain! He's wounded, on the ground!’ ” However, he was not wounded but up like a flash carving his way through the defenders.17

  Soon, however, enemy fire became so intense that all progress was brought to a halt “by a rolling cross fire which destroyed anyone who tried to get across. The soldiers refused to go forward.” The fire was coming from a house which, Saint-Arnaud subsequently discovered, was a barracks. By now, most of the French troops were so jumbled together that it was a motley of regiments under five or six officers that stormed the building: “What a scene, brother, what carnage!” Saint-Arnaud wrote. “The blood flowed down the steps.... Not a cry, not a complaint escaped from the dying men. We killed and died with this hopeless rage that makes you grit your teeth and consigns the cries to the bottom of the soul.... Very few of the Turks looked to escape, and those who withdrew took advantage of every nook and cranny to fire upon us.”18

  The fall of the barracks ended the last organized resistance in Constantine. Finally, the son of a sheik arrived to surrender. “The Arabs ran in every direction shouting: ‘Semi! Semi!’ to stop the fighting.”19 But not before Colonel Combe was mortally wounded. Saint-Arnaud stood next to him as the first bullet struck: “A simple nervous shudder betrayed his suffering. He began walking toward the breach when he was struck by a second bullet, which produced the same reaction. Without a complaint, without uttering a word, he continued to walk toward the breach.”20

  With a handful of men, Saint-Arnaud plunged into the back streets: “It was a great imprudence,” he admitted, “[because] we had not taken a twentieth of the town when it surrendered.” But after an initial panic at the sight of his force, the Arabs rushed forward to kiss his clothes and show their submission. Not all accepted defeat and occupation so easily: “Near the Casbah ... we discovered an awful spectacle,” he wrote. “Around two hundred women and children lay broken on the rocks which enclose the town on this side. The Arabs ... attempted an impossible escape through these precipitous ravines. Terror hurried their steps and made them even more uncertain, and quite a few women, quite a few children perished in this horrible way.”21

  Near the breach, the army was dissolving into chaos: The soldiers who had not taken part in the attack began to flood into the town and pillage everything in sight. Despite the fact that General Joseph Rullière “shouted at the pillagers, threatened to take the most severe measures ... nothing stopped the soldiers.... The pillaging ... soon spread to the officers and when we evacuated Constantine, as usual the richest and most abundant part of the spoils had been accumulated by the army command and by the staff officers.”22 And there was much to pillage; so confident had the inhabitants been of a successful defense that they had taken no steps to hide valuables: “Everything was pillaged, nothing was respected. The soldiers found coffers full of money.”23 Soon, the French camp resembled a huge market where Jews appeared to buy up many of the most valuable pieces from the ignorant soldiers for a few worthless Turkish copper rubles used by native children in their games. The pillaging was stopped only after three days, and the task of burying the dead in a huge common grave outside the town began. Saint-Arnaud was more than a little bitter that his legionnaires, as well as other corps who had taken part in the storming of Constantine, were ordered to bivouac on the Coudiat-Aty while the staff officers moved in to occupy the most sumptuous houses in town.

  Saint-Arnaud's reputation has suffered at the hands of historians, who have tended to see him as someone so churned by ambition that he was willing to do almost anything to advance his career—such as turning out the French parliament on December 2, 1851, in a coup d'état that brought Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to power as Emperor Napoleon III and subsequently resulted in the exile of some of his most illustrious colleagues in the Armée d'Afrique. It might be tempting to see Saint-Arnaud's performance during the storming of Constantine as one of the first documented instances of his willingness to build a future on the dead bodies of his legionnaires. After all, Saint-Arnaud did win his “cross” of the Legion of Honor, and Bedeau a promotion to lieutenant colonel, while most of the crosses awarded to his legionnaires were wooden ones. Of a Legion battalion five hundred men strong that marched to Constantine, Major Bedeau had selected one hundred to participate in the second assault wave, of whom twenty-one were killed or wounded. But while one could argue that the legionnaires were exploited for the ambitious ends of their officers, this does not get us very far when we attempt to explain Legion performance. The only evidence we have of what Saint-Arnaud's legionnaires thought of his mad dash through the streets of Constantine comes from the man himself. But the indications are that even he was slightly amazed by their enthusiastic reaction: “My soldiers have declared me brave at the top of their voices,” he told his brother, “and even though I did not spare them, for of fifty who were with me, ten are dead and eleven wounded.”24 At one point, a legionnaire named Keller threw himself between Saint-Arnaud and some Turks and paid for it with his life: “The po
or boy died for me, because the bullets were aimed in my direction.”25 Such things do happen in combat, especially if the officer is popular. The German Clemens Lamping, who enlisted in the Legion in 1840, found his comrades “for the most part brutal and undisciplined, but ready to encounter anything. They form a band who, under an energetic leader, might do great things.”26 What Saint-Arnaud's experience would seem to suggest is that popular, intrepid, even reckless officers did have the ability to galvanize their legionnaires into extraordinary performance. Saint-Arnaud's legionnaires followed him precisely because he did not spare them.