French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Bugeaud's strong opinions, usually expressed in a “corporal's language,” and volcanic temper were bound to make him the focus of controversy. One of his first soldierly duties was to guard the duchesse du Berry, mother to the Bourbon pretender to the throne, who was arrested and confined in a chateau at Blaye near Bordeaux after she attempted to raise a proroyalist rebellion in western France. This task caused him to be both belittled by the left and excoriated as a renegade by aristocratic supporters of the Bourbons. However, by undertaking this politically unpopular task, Bugeaud confirmed his usefulness to King Louis-Philippe and assured his future under the new regime. Ironically, during the 1830s Bugeaud was also one of France's most outspoken opponents of the adventure into which France had plunged in Africa—ironic not only because he condemned an enterprise with which his name was later to be most closely associated, but also because on this issue he made common cause with the liberals, whom he despised. The extreme left especially never forgave Bugeaud his harsh repression of the April 1834 insurrection in Paris, which resulted in the massacre of several innocent civilians by soldiers in the rue Transnonain, an incident immortalized by French artist Honoré Daumier in a popular lithograph. “Massacreur de la rue Transnonain” was one of the epithets Bugeaud was awarded by his enemies on the left, and not necessarily the most unflattering. But Bugeaud was not the sort of man to take an insult lying down—he demanded satisfaction when a popular young liberal deputy, Charles Dulong, had the effrontery to call him a “jailer” during a parliamentary debate in 1834. As the offended party, Bugeaud exercised his option to put the first shot cold-bloodedly into the brain of his unfortunate adversary, who never recovered from his coma and died several hours later. After this, his detractors usually preferred to express their uncomplimentary opinions anonymously or in private.4

  And well they might! Canrobert wrote that Bugeaud's reputation had preceded him when he arrived in Algeria for the first time in 1836. However, nothing had prepared them for the scene he pitched when, in the middle of a route march, a courier arrived with a packet that included a newspaper with an article critical of Bugeaud. The general halted his troops, drew the entire division into one vast square, and, placing himself in the middle, “walked backwards and forwards, livid and trembling with rage, shouting a string of oaths and insults. Then he started to read some lines from a newspaper article in which he was called a hard and boastful leader, as incompetent and cowardly before the enemy as he was brave with words.... Without pausing for breath, he raised his head: ‘Which one of you is the depraved person,’ he said, ‘who is the scamp, who is the animal!’—I leave out the most vulgar—‘who dared to write such a piece on me? I'm sure he's among you.... Identify yourself! He won't find his general before him, but a man, his equal, named Bugeaud, who will run him through with his sword!’ ” Everyone watched this astounding performance in stupefied silence, not sure whether it was a joke or whether their commander had reverted to the state of a semidemented sergeant-major. After a very long silence, Bugeaud launched into a brief diatribe against journalists and then ordered the march to resume.5 In fact, Bugeaud's little performance was less absurd than it seemed. In the volatile atmosphere following the 1830 revolution, some officers had denounced their superiors in anonymous articles in opposition newspapers. No doubt Bugeaud sought to discourage similar excursions into the world of hackery by officers in his command.

  Bugeaud's objections to France's invasion of Algeria were twofold and reflected his major interests in life: “I can tell you,” he explained before his parliamentary colleagues, “... after having seen Algiers, that it is worthless, both for crops and for war, and that sooner or later, we shall have to leave it whether we like it or not.”6 He was correct, of course, but about a century off in his calculations. As a farming man, he believed that “The Regency is not cultivatable,” although later as governor-general he was to do his best to encourage European settlement and even a “model farm” manned by ex-soldiers who had stayed on as colonists.7

  However, it was his views on war that were of immediate interest to the Legion. As a soldier, he recognized the remarkable similarity between the military problem the French faced in Algeria and that which he had witnessed in Spain between 1808 and 1814: How does a modern army encumbered with all of the impedimenta required for a campaign in Europe manage to fight efficiently in a roadless, waterless terrain against a mobile, elusive enemy? He provided part of the answer in 1836 when sent with a division to reinforce the French camp at Tafna, which had been besieged by Abd el-Kader. Canrobert was present when the general called the officers into his tent and lectured them on their mistakes: “You drag thousands of wagons and heavy artillery with you which slows your movements,” he told them. “Rather than surprise the Arabs with rapid, offensive marches, you stay on the defensive, marching slowly. Your enemies follow you and attack at their convenience. All this is going to change!” After explaining how he had operated against Spanish guerrillas in Aragon, he laid down his new order of battle: “To begin with, no more heavy artillery, no more of these heavy wagons, no more of these enormous forage trains.... The convoys will be on mule back and the only cannons permitted will be light ones.” Despite the heat, when he emerged from Bugeaud's tent Canrobert felt as if he had just stepped out of a cold shower. The overwhelming opinion among the officers was that, by abandoning his heavy artillery, Bugeaud had just set out a recipe for collective suicide. After a private conclave, the officers sent their most senior colonel to talk some sense into the newly arrived general. Bugeaud sent him packing.8

  It proved a wise decision. Only a few days later, Bugeaud surprised the Emir with the flexibility of his newly mobile columns, feinting up a heavily defended gorge and then moving by a more circuitous route onto a plateau above the Sikkak River. When Abd el-Kader recovered enough to attack, Bugeaud formed his division into a V, confusing the Arabs, who were accustomed to attacking simultaneously the front and rear guards of the etiolated French columns. The Arabs were repulsed by massed infantry fire rather than by heavy artillery—he had introduced them to an old trick used by harassed French troops in Spain, which consisted of cutting a musket ball into four parts and ramming it down the barrel on top of the already introduced ball to create a sort of small-arms “grapeshot,” very useful against an enemy that liked to work in close, at knife-point. Bugeaud then ordered his men to drop their packs and counterattack, driving a large number of Arab soldiers over a bluff to their deaths in the Sikkak River below. Another five hundred, cornered at the foot of a rock outcropping, surrendered, the first time the French had bagged so many POWs.9

  When, in 1840, Bugeaud apparently underwent a change of heart and returned as governor-general, he transformed his tactical success on the Sikkak into a strategic system. At the same time, his victory in 1836 had taught Abd el-Kader the futility of assailing massed French firepower. If anything, the Emir became even more elusive, refusing battle on anything other than his own terms. Therefore, Bugeaud found that he could no longer count on the Arabs to attack him. He had to make his columns even more mobile, more rapid, able to exist for days on short rations while they climbed into the desiccated hills of Algeria in search of the enemy. If the Algerians refused to fight, then he would make war on their livelihoods— the razzia, a form of basic economic warfare that assumed that even an Arab would submit when he could no longer eat. The entire Armée d'Afrique was obliged to adapt to these new methods. It would be a difficult transition, not the least for the Legion.

  The French system before Bugeaud consisted of scattering forces in fixed garrisons surrounded by blockhouses. In 1842, Louis Lamborelle, a legionnaire from Belgium, found that half of his battalion remained in Bougie housed in wooden sheds waiting to rotate every fourteen days or so with the other half, which guarded the outlying blockhouses.10 Lamping described these blockhouses as usually two-story affairs constructed of oak planks sent from France and thick enough to stop a musket ball, assembled on high ground around the m
ain coastal towns. The larger ones were surrounded by a ditch and wall, and might have “two cannons and some wall pieces, which are of great service.” Combat usually consisted of the natives shouting “a torrent of friendly epithets, such as ‘hahluf [swine], etc., which is quickly followed by a shower of balls. We are no less civil in our turn, allowing them to approach within a short distance, when we treat them to a volley of musketry and a few discharges from the field pieces; whereupon they usually retire somewhat tranquillized but still vehement in abuse. We of course have much the best of it behind our walls and ditches, but from time to time some of us are wounded or killed.” More determined attacks might require the use of grenades: “I need not add that on these occasions every one does his duty,” concluded Lamping, “for each fights for what he values most, namely his head.”11

  However, the outcome might be quite different if the North Africans were able to ambush a party outside the blockhouses, as happened to a group of legionnaires in May 1841 near Algiers. Lamping's company, marching to the sound of the guns, arrived too late:

  . . . [T]heir bodies still lay as they fell, side by side, and there was not one among them that had not received several wounds. The number of dead and wounded horses scattered around showed how bravely they had fought. The Hadjutes had, as usual, carried away their fallen comrades. Of the fifty soldiers who had left the blockhouse one only escaped who, having been wounded at the beginning of the fight, had fallen among some thick brushwood, where he had lain concealed . . . [and] thus been a spectator of the whole of this horrid scene, and had been forced to look on whilst the Hadjutes massacred his comrades and finally cut off their heads, which they bore away as trophies hanging to their saddle bows. . . . During the whole way home I did not hear a single song nor one coarse jest, of which there were generally no lack; even the roughest and most hardened characters were shaken by that which they had just seen. Every one reflected that the fate of their comrades might one day be their own.12

  The siege of Miliana demonstrates just how dreadful life could become in one of these posts. And while Miliana was perhaps a particularly grisly example, even in posts that were not under constant threat of attack existence was barely tolerable. Poor, not to say inedible, rations meant that soldiers usually preferred to forage for roots, and put dogs, cats and even rats in the cooking pot rather than rely on the bacon distributed by the intendance, which provoked violent diarrhea. And while accounts of life in these isolated garrisons in the 1830s and 1840s are scarce, those that exist for later periods suggest that these outposts were also torn by human conflict brought on by boredom—fighting, insanity, even suicides, self-mutilation and homosexuality.

  When he arrived in Algeria in 1840, Bugeaud found the army wasting away. In December of that year he questioned the official statistics, which put the number of deaths among the soldiers for 1840 at eight thousand. This, he insisted, could only refer to the province of Algiers, excluding Constantine and Oran. A few days later, Soult agreed that the sanitary state of the army in Algeria was “truly disastrous.”13 This was apparent to Lamping when he visited a comrade in a military hospital only to find “a host of ghostlike beings crawling slowly along in their grey capotes and white night-caps . . . their glazed eyes looked sadly out of their sallow emaciated faces, all of which bore traces of misery, and most of melancholy and homesickness. . . . Several times I heard the mournful exclamation, ‘Ma belle France!’ Poor devils! Many of them will never see fair France again.”14

  Bugeaud's plan was to get his troops out of these pestilential posts and put them on the road, a plan that had the full backing of War Minister Soult: “The war against the Arabs cannot be conducted as it would be in Europe,” he wrote to Bugeaud in January 1841. “The poor results of the regular military operations have demonstrated this conclusively. Therefore, place the troops under your command according to the system which is most likely to break all resistance and pacify the country as quickly as possible.”15 On the face of it, this was all to the good, if for no other reason than it would improve the health and morale of the soldiers. The obvious question to ask, however, is, How well was the Legion able to adapt to this new way of warfare?

  The “new Legion” had grown steadily since the first battalion arrived in Africa in 1837. By December 30, 1840, it numbered five battalions and was large enough for the government to order the Legion split into two separate regiments on that date. The 1st Regiment of the Foreign Legion was stationed in the province of Algiers, and from 1843 extended its activity into the hinterland of Oran to the west. The 2nd Regiment remained in Constantine province in the east. Despite the fact that national battalions had been abandoned in principle, in practice the two regiments developed distinctly different characters, with the 1st Regiment composed of a majority of “men of the North,” while the 2nd Regiment specialized in Mediterranean recruits. Until the Crimean campaign of 1854, the two regiments were to lead an almost totally separate existence. Both were kept about equally busy in their respective spheres of operation until the surrender of Abd el-Kader in 1847, after which the 2nd Regiment in the Constantinois saw the bulk of the action, fighting twenty-seven engagements between 1847 and 1852, compared to only one major action in Algeria and three in eastern Morocco in 1852 for the 1st Regiment.16

  Despite the growth and reorganization of the Legion, its new commander-in-chief behaved like a man who had just taken delivery of a consignment of damaged goods. In an 1842 report never before reproduced, Bugeaud complained that the Legion was so inefficient that it should be abolished: “The principal cause for worry is in the Foreign Legion,” he wrote to Soult on June 18.

  I seize this opportunity, Monsieur le Maréchal, to tell you that, in my opinion, the Foreign Legion will never offer a force upon which we can count. It has some very good officers and a few good NCOs. But the composition of the soldiers is detestable —one can count on them neither in a serious combat, nor for sustained marches. They fight badly; they march badly; they desert often. They try whenever the opportunity presents itself, and sell to the enemy their arms, their munitions, and their uniforms and equipment. The first regiment seems better than the second, and one was even unhappy with it around Mascara. I took with me a battalion made up of elite companies, and I was quite satisfied with them. But these companies were select, made up of only the healthiest men. And, despite this, they marched less well than the others.

  I seriously believe, Monsieur le Maréchal, that we should cease to have such soldiers in Africa, for they are more expensive than French regiments, and they are far from projecting the same image. There is not one general officer who does not prefer to march with two of our good battalions than with five of the Foreign Legion. This troop is therefore more costly than the others because twice the numbers offers fewer guarantees.

  Therefore, I propose that the Foreign Legion no longer be recruited, and successively to combine one battalion with another, then one regiment with the other, and eventually disband this regiment once its strength is too small to maintain it. The officers will be gradually reassigned in the army, or retired, or mustered out on medical grounds. Unless, however, the spirit of the 1st regiment changes under the beneficial command of Colonel Despinoy, or through a more scrupulous recruitment, because it would be less numerous. Keeping only one regiment would assuredly be enough.17

  Of course, Bugeaud was never a man to mince words or nuance his views. However, it is patently clear from his report that he considered the Legion deficient in at least two categories essential to his new style of warfare—marching and fighting. It must be said that life under Bugeaud was no bed of roses. The rigors for Europeans of campaigning in a land as harsh as that of North Africa were daunting. Canrobert mentions that when Bugeaud launched his forces on the relatively short marches that preceded the Battle of the Sikkak River, he was forced to shed two regiments newly arrived from France simply because they could not keep up.18

  When he returned in 1840, things if anything got tougher,
because he was now commander-in-chief in Africa and therefore able to implement his system countrywide. And because the native resistance now had to be avidly pursued, often for great distances, Bugeaud made no concessions to his troops: “If we allow ourselves to be dominated by the very natural desire, very good in most cases, to save the troops, we would rarely arrive at good results,” he wrote. “... If we hunt and ruin Abd el-Kader, our infantry and our cavalry will have plenty of time to recuperate.”19 The future general Charles-Nicolas Lacretelle, who joined the Legion as a second lieutenant fresh from Saint-Cyr in 1843, was certain that he marched at least 250 days a year: “My life in those days was that of all troop commanders, walking a lot, without seeing much or rather without understanding much of what I saw,” he remembered. “Usually when we arrived in a town or made camp, the first thing that was said to us was that we were leaving at dawn.”20

  Louis Lamborelle recounted that Bugeaud's infantrymen were said to require “the thighs of a buck, the heart of a lion ... and the stomach of an ant.” While Bugeaud ordered much to be carried on muleback, mules were relatively scarce beasts in Algeria, so the “soldier camels” shouldered the rest, and that could be substantial: cartridge belt and a rigid rectangular leather pack containing eight days’ rations, forty bullets, spare boots, shirts, underwear and socks, sewing and musket-cleaning kits, fork, several knives, at least two spoons, boot polish, soap and whatever condiments were required for the cooking. Outside the pack hung a groundcloth, sheepskin, tent half, liter canteen, tin cup and “a chamberpot in which the soldier cooked his supper.”21 To this already substantial load, one must add a musket, bayonet and often sticks, which were picked up en route for the evening campfire and placed on top of the pack. Most soldiers also carried a walking stick, which served three purposes: to help climb steep hills; when placed beneath, to support the pack during halts on the march (throwing off the pack or lying on the ground to take the weight off the shoulders was the sign of a raw recruit); and as a tent pole.22