French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  So, too, did the Legion. The arrival of reinforcements was the signal for the departure of Carbuccia and his legionnaires, who, on November 10, marched out toward Biskra. While they were assigned to escort convoys through the Kantara Gorge, they missed the final act of the siege of Zaatcha, which, predictably, was a bloody one. The honors of the day went to Canrobert and his zouaves, who charged the breach where, over a month earlier, the 43rd had lingered for two horrible hours. Once inside the town, all resistance was extinguished within an hour by zouaves who simply massacred everyone in sight. Canrobert claimed that he was so overwhelmed by the losses in his regiment that he left his men to their revenge and went back to his tent to sleep. When he awoke, the head of Bouzian was grimacing from atop a pole outside his tent.85

  Herbillon argued in his memoir on Zaatcha that the result was to produce “a terrible effect on the spirit of the Saharans” and consolidate the French conquest in the south of Constantine Province:86 Others, however, saw Zaatcha as one of the great tragedies of the conquest of Algeria, the ruined oasis as a monument to an unimaginative policy that favored force over diplomacy. “I am afraid to say that the glory of the vanquished eclipsed that of the victors,” wrote the French consul in Tunis, Péllisier de Réynaud, citing the orgy of rape, murder and destruction carried out by the zouaves upon the captured fortress as especially sickening.87 Zaatcha also appears a monument to a misconceived and wasteful military strategy. Julien's estimate of 1,500 French dead and wounded “without counting the victims of cholera” as against 800 Arabs appears exaggerated. Official figures, including those for Carbuccia's July attack, while they do not include those lost to disease, list 193 killed and 804 wounded, many of these latter only bruised or “concussed” by stones and spent shot.88 Still, by the standards of Algerian warfare, this was an enormous, and unnecessary, loss of life. In the view of Canrobert, “The siege of Zaatcha was one of the toughest campaigns of the African war. The army—for a real army was employed—lost a quarter of its strength.”89 Its length, the climatic conditions, and the toll in human life, both French and Arab, makes the siege of Constantine in 1837 appear as a relatively surgical operation by comparison.

  How does one rate the performance of the Legion at Zaatcha? One has already noted that the expedition, from the beginning, was underequipped. Too much of the strain of the siege fell upon the ordinary soldiers. Still, Herbillon cites two incidents when the Legion fell back a trifle too quickly— from the breach on October 20, and during the palm-cutting episode.90 Of course, even he lay the main blame for the failure of the October 20 assault on the lack of reinforcements, while the collapse of the tower exposed the attackers to a murderous fire. It is also fair to point out that the south breach, at the time considered the most practicable, was never successfully stormed. As for the palm-cutting episode, the combination of surprise, the fact that the soldiers were scattered and vulnerable, and the lack of adequate protection explains a momentary tendency to flee. Of course, all the troops involved briefly faltered, not merely the Legion. Again, this appears to be a failure of command, which neglected to anticipate an attack and take adequate measures to defend against it, even to turn it to the advantage of the French.

  Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte noted that the Legion counted only one officer per company.91 The shortage of officers created a vacuum that often left the soldiers leaderless in critical moments. The quarrels at the top, especially the friction between Carbuccia and Herbillon, could not go unnoticed further down. Likewise, Herbillon's reputation as a commander of more than ordinary mediocrity must have decreased the confidence of the rank and file, especially as the progress of the siege was so slow as to be imperceptible. Herbillon complimented his men: “This unfortunate affair nevertheless reflected the greatest honor upon the troops,” he wrote.92 And so it did. It would have been asking too much of the Legion, or of any corps, to compensate entirely for the serious shortcomings of the command. Alas, that task would too often fall to them in their history.

  Chapter 6

  “CORPS SANS PASSÉ ET SANS AVENIR”: THE LEGION, 1850-1859

  ORAN IN MID-CENTURY was one of the most bizarre towns in a very bizarre land. Its buildings, built in every conceivable architectural style, climbed the steep sides of a narrow ravine that opened to the sea. “Everywhere there are ramps, everywhere stairs, never a flat piece of ground,” wrote Louis de Massol, a Belgian who came to the Legion in 1852.1 The fortress of Saint-Grégoire stood sentinel above the town, while below a garden planted with lemon, orange and fig trees followed the bottom of the ravine to the Chateau of Santa-Cruz on the seafront. Despite the fact that Oran's twenty-five thousand inhabitants, divided almost equally among Spaniards, Arabs or Berbers, and Jews, seemed to be constantly in motion, the town had yet to acquire the air of prosperity that it was to possess by the century's end. On the contrary, to those arriving on the weekly packet from Marseille, Oran appeared distinctly down at heel.

  Fifty miles to the south of Oran lay Sidi-bel-Abbès. The trip there from Oran took approximately ten hours, not because the roads were especially bad, but because the coach stopped frequently at roadside inns where travelers spilled out to drink absinthe and “champoraux,” an Algerian cocktail of sugar, coffee and throat-scalding brandy. Fights among the inebriated passengers at these halts were fairly frequent. They lengthened the journey still more, but added interest to what was otherwise a rather tedious trip.

  The arrival at Sidi-bel-Abbès was an agreeable surprise. The road climbed steadily through an empty, desiccated countryside sprinkled with dwarf palms and other stunted bushes, until it leveled off onto a plain. There, in the middle of a patchwork of green, irrigated gardens and golden fields of wheat, rose up the walls of the town. When Second Lieutenant Charles-Jules Zédé, fresh from Saint-Cyr to take up his first posting with the 2e régiment étranger, saw “Bel Abbès” in 1857, it was already losing its frontier roughness. The last attack on the town had occurred in 1845, when fifty-six Ouled-Brahim disguised as beggars had infiltrated the settlement while most of the garrison was out on patrol and opened the gates to their brothers outside. The outlying units had been drawn back by the sound of the guns to restore order. From January 1,1848, the town became the center of a military subdivision whose commander was also the colonel of the 1st Regiment of the Foreign Legion. A year later, Sidi-bel-Abbès was incorporated by order of the president of the Republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.

  A decade later, the town was gradually taking on the air of a settled community. Almost half of the town's population were Spaniards, who ran the bars that in the evenings filled with legionnaires, or who otherwise made their living from the garrison. An Arab shanty that was off-limits to legionnaires (the prohibition was seldom respected) had already grafted itself onto the European settlement. There, legionnaires might wander the teeming streets at dusk (it was not wise to go alone) to buy a lamb kebab prepared by men squatting before charcoal braziers, follow an Arab woman through a door and up dark stairs or, if the soldier had it in mind to desert, exchange his uniform for a suit of civilian clothes. Periodic sweeps by patrols would scatter the soldiers down dark alleys and cul-de-sacs. Sidi-bel-Abbès was hardly paradise, but it offered the advantage of allowing legionnaires to earn extra money in off-duty hours by working for the townsfolk. Already a small but fairly prosperous community of retired legionnaires had formed.

  The spread of cultivation into the surrounding plain had helped to reclaim the marshes that had made Sidi-bel-Abbès such an unhealthy place in the 1840s—in 1846, for instance, 146 legionnaires in the garrison had died of disease. The Legion cultivated its own large garden beyond the walls, but even here the vine had yet to make its appearance and would not do so until the 1870s, when the phylloxera epidemic temporarily wiped out the French wine industry, and when enough wealth had been accumulated to allow farmers the luxury of waiting four years for the first crop.2

  By mid-century, the Legion had survived its adolescence, but its future was far from
secure. In 1850, French military opinion was divided on its usefulness. Some even regarded the Legion as a national embarrassment— it was one thing to organize penal battalions like the zéphyrs for French delinquents, but why should the army be required to absorb the refuse of Europe as well? It had already been written off once in Spain, and had been tolerated during the 1840s because the French command needed all the rifles it could muster in Algeria. However, by 1850 the conquest of what was to become Algeria was virtually complete from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, with the exception of the mountainous Kabylia. North Africa, where so many brilliant careers had been made in the 1840s, now became a military backwater, allowing the French to reduce the garrison of occupation. What would the role of the Legion now be?

  “They are talking of abolishing the Legion,” the future general Ed-ouard Collineau wrote on September 8, 1851. “In that case, where shall I go?”3 By early 1852, however, the immediate future of the Legion appears to have been secure, for the new governor-general of Algeria, General Cesar Randon, suggested a reorganization of the Armée d'Afrique that would increase the Legion to three regiments, one stationed in each of the three provinces of French North Africa.4 And while the third regiment was not created, on May 10, 1852, representatives from the two Legion regiments were present in Paris to receive the eagles distributed to all regiments to replicate those carried by the units of the First Empire, an indication that the danger had passed for the moment.

  The next two decades of its history would present the Legion with some serious challenges, however. It had made its reputation (such as it was) as a colonial force. The question was, How well would a force trained essentially for the conditions of Algerian warfare adapt to the set battles and bitter sieges of the Crimean campaign of 1854-56, and to the classic battles of the Italian campaign of 1859? At the same time, it must not lose its colonial touch, for it would help to shore up Louis-Napoleon's ill-fated Mexican adventure of the 1860s, where again it would come within a whisker of being left behind by the French government. Finally, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, where it would serve on French soil in violation of the law of March 9, 1831, an unhappy year capped by the “Bloody Week” of May 1871 in which perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand members of the Paris Commune were massacred by French soldiers, the Legion was thrust into the cauldron, and the historical controversies, of a French civil war. Adaptability and military efficiency might not guarantee the survival of the Legion, but its failure to rise to new challenges in the next two decades could certainly place its future in doubt.

  Given the restricted esteem in which the Legion was held in this period, its prospects did not appear secure. Despite the fact that it had been the object of some flattering remarks from senior officers, the Legion seemed to exist on the margins of the Armée d'Afrique, a situation little changed from the previous decade when legionnaire Clemens Lamping complained that few officers “... had the courage to protect the interests of the Foreign Legion against the French general officers.”5 “It is distressing to think that this regiment which for so long has rendered such services to France, alternatively as a fighting regiment and as a colonizing one, is so little favored by successive war ministers,” de Massol lamented in 1852,6 even though the war minister at the time was none other than Saint-Arnaud.

  It was a complaint that would follow the Legion through much of its history. In 1854, when the Englishman William Stammer inquired of a French general about enlisting in the French army for the Crimean campaign, he was told that the only regiment open to him as a foreigner was the Legion, which he could not recommend—“Poor devils!” he was told. “They have all the fighting and no glory.”7 In 1863, Legion lieutenant Diesbach de Torny complained that there was little of either to be had in the lethal duty of escorting convoys through the yellow-fever-infested lowlands behind Veracruz, Mexico, which had been assigned to the Legion precisely because its soldiers were considered “the pariahs of the army.” When the French commander in Mexico, General Elie Frederic Forey, was asked to transfer the Legion, which was melting away from disease, to the more salubrious highlands, he is alleged to have exclaimed, “What!... Those rogues, that rabble of the Legion isn't dead yet?”8 “I had to leave the foreigners, in preference to the French, in a position where there was more sickness than glory to acquire,” Forey admitted.9 All of this caused French writer Antoine Camus, who paid an extensive visit to the Armée d'Afrique in the 1860s, to label the Legion as the French army's orphan regiment, “a corps without a past and without a future.”10

  Clearly the image of the Legion as an assemblage of cutthroats, deserters and adventurers was a serious stumbling block to its acceptance as a unit equal to others. Officers with more traditional attitudes found it difficult to imagine how a collection of mercenaries recruited from the scrapings of humanity, disciplined in a way that revolted many of the most hardened veterans and whose soldiers were prepared to desert at the drop of a hat could possibly be taken seriously as a fighting unit. And they had a point. Even Lamping admitted that, “Like all hirelings, our corps has much of the character of Wallenstein's [a celebrated commander of Catholic forces in the Thirty Years’ War] camp.”11 But the Thirty Years’ War had ended more than two centuries earlier, and many officers might have been forgiven if they believed that “hirelings” had no place in a modern army whose esprit de corps should be based upon patriotism.

  The sort of unit that Zédé discovered at Sidi-bel-Abbès in 1857 sent cold shivers down his spine—“The Legion was then permeated with the wreckage of [Europe's] vanquished parties,” he wrote, which included both Spanish Carlists and Parisian revolutionaries of 1848 who enlisted under strange names like Tetu (stubborn). There were also the defrocked bishop of Florence, a descendant of an Eastern European royal family and a Hungarian general who had chosen the wrong side in 1848. Most of Europe's nationalities were represented, “and even a Chinese who looked strange with his pigtail hanging from beneath his kepi....”12 It was commonly assumed that hunger, or some other personal misfortune, rather than a vocation for soldiering had driven them into the Legion.13 William Stammer noted that his messmates were so poor that”... the breaking of a clay pipe was regarded as an irreparable calamity.”14

  How was the army to make soldiers out of such unpromising material? The task was generally perceived to be a difficult, and some thought an impossible, one. Even Antoine Camus, who believed the Legion to be much misunderstood, conceded that a whole category of legionnaires could be characterized by “daily rebellions against certain military practices which irritate them in the extreme.”15 It is quite possible that these “rebellions” stemmed from the fact that legionnaires, most of whom counted prior service and had a greater experience of the world than did many of their French counterparts, resented many of the disciplinary regulations and practices designed for an army of conscripts in their early twenties. It is equally possible that many legionnaires had acquired habits and attitudes that ran counter to any sort of discipline at all.

  The worst offenses occurred during the four yearly periods when legionnaires were paid whatever was left of their quarterly uniform allowance of thirty-five francs. When this occurred, Sidi-bel-Abbès usually dissolved into an alcoholic orgy that lasted until the money ran out.16 Following these drinking sprees the retribution was distributed to those who were drunk on duty, who drew their bayonets in the course of a fight, those accused of theft or who sold equipment to prolong their celebrations—the worst offenders were dispatched to the discipline sections in the bled, as the Algerian hinterland was called, while the guard rooms of Sidi-bel-Abbès filled with soldiers who forfeited their pay until the Legion was reimbursed for the missing pieces of uniform.17

  Discipline in isolated garrisons or on campaign might be more rough and ready. Some might be trussed up and placed in cacolets —metal stretchers lashed on muleback used to carry wounded—which made for a very uncomfortable journey. But the favorite rural punishment in this period was the silo
. These were grain cellars dug into the ground by nomadic North Africans, which the Armée d'Afrique quickly discovered served admirably as bucolic jail cells. In the French camp at Gallipoli at the beginning of the Crimean campaign, the prisoners were confined in this manner during the day, and at night brought out to gather up the corpses of soldiers who had died from cholera. When the men in the silos began to protest and to insult their superiors, a channel was dug to the sea to let in water: “... Homeric shouts, some bravos were followed by swearing,” Legion captain Paul de Choulot recounted.18 Not one of these men perished from the cholera epidemic, and when the disease had run its course, their punishments were lifted.19