That the Legion was able to achieve as much as it did in Mexico was probably due to the quality of its officers. In common with other regiments, especially those in Algeria, it was largely a celibate group—Zédé noted that only four officers in the regiment were married, almost all of whom occupied administrative positions.43 In many respects they were as diverse as the troops they led. Zédé found that the foreign officers at Sidi-bel-Abbès counted the Spaniard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Martinez, who “spoke a quite extraordinary French,” and a Prussian Second Lieutenant Ernst Milson von Bolt, who would fight the French in 1870. The Legion also served as a refuge for those whose families were in political disgrace, like the son of Marshal Bourmont, the man who had deserted Napoleon on the eve of Waterloo, who needed to maintain a discreet existence during the Second Empire.44 Others, like the Swiss Diesbach de Torny, were impoverished aristocrats who lived by their sword.45 A few like Zédé had excellent prospects but chose the Legion because they sought action. However, many more joined because they lacked the credentials for success in other, more prominent corps, “where one succeeds only through contacts with powerful superiors whom one must always please.”46
So, despite their heterogeneous origins, the Legion officer corps was a distillation of men who craved action, eschewed comfort and had little to lose but their reputations in the eyes of their fellow officers. Add to this the conscious cultivation of a macho image expected of officers whose troops, by common consent, were little better than jailbait, and the inevitable result was an atmosphere of uncommon aggressiveness in the mess. Zédé confirmed that the Legion officer corps was “a violent milieu.”47 “We fought for the pleasure of fighting,” Charles Clemmer discovered when he joined the Legion in Algeria. “Without rime or reason, we intentionally sought a quarrel with people we did not even know, whom we had never seen. Anything served as a pretext in the bars and cabarets: a song begun at another table, a glass of wine poured ‘en quarte,’ that is to say the hand turned to the right, a gesture, a look, was interpreted as requiring a duel.” One evening while dining in a restaurant, a man came to his table and drank his glass of wine. After a moment of surprise, Clemmer suggested that if he wanted a glass, he should be happy to buy him one. The officer then began to insult him so that he broke a bottle over his head. Four days later (presumably after the man had sufficiently recovered), they fought a duel.48
Incorrigible duelists, nicknamed “buveurs de sang” or “blood drinkers,”49 were in fairly plentiful supply in the French army of the Second Empire. So common were duels among officers in this period that dueling probably produced the highest number of casualties among officers after enemy bullets. Two captains in Zédé's regiment were killed in duels by fellow officers, while a third lost an arm to a saber. Lieutenant (later general) Lambert was wounded in the chest by the saber of Lieutenant Bournhommet. However, though victorious, the unfortunate Bournhommet was cashiered from the regiment “for having hesitated to cross steel with Lambert.”50 Even Lieutenant Evariste Berg, who had miraculously survived Camerone in 1863, fell victim the following year to a duel.51
The argument in favor of dueling was that it preserved high standards of honor in the army, both among officers and soldiers, so long as certain minimum rules were respected—an attempt to legislate those rules for the French army in 1848-49 failed. The first was that duels must be fought among men of equal rank, although Clemmer reckoned that if officers and NCOs did not fight each other often, it was simply because they did not frequent the same bars.52 Officers were also prohibited from fighting civilians of inferior social position, although given the low social position of most officers the cutoff point must have been fairly obscure. Last, regulations required that a doctor and a “master of arms” must be present. In the cavalry, the master of arms decided if the pretext were sufficient for a duel. But the French never went as far as the Prussians, for instance, who required that all quarrels be submitted to a regimental honor council, which decided if a duel were warranted. On the contrary, virtually any pretext was sufficient, and any man who hesitated to take up a challenge, like poor Bournhommet, risked disciplinary action and disgrace.53
One need only find a few examples to demonstrate that the need to demonstrate aggression, rather than to defend honor, was more often than not at the origins of these duels. On the trip from France to Mexico, Legion officers were forbidden to come into the wardroom outside of meal times. When one of the Legion's future battalion commanders, Captain Alexis Hubert de La Hayrie of the zouaves, wandered in during a prohibited hour to get a glass of water, he was placed under arrest by the ship's second in command. De La Hayrie accepted the punishment because, he said, they were on shipboard, but added that he intended to kill the naval officer as soon as they set foot on shore.54 It is certainly possible that the captain's order excluding army officers from the wardroom may have been inhospitable. It may even have smacked of snobbery. However, perhaps the officers in his command preferred not to frequent men who had the disconcerting habit of threatening death to anyone in a blue suit who looked at them sideways. A duel between Diesbach de Torny and a fellow captain who had tricked him into dancing with an unattractive and heavy-footed Mexican woman was avoided only because no swords were available and it was felt that pistols were a trifle too final given the nature of the dispute.55 In August 1866, twenty-one Belgian officers sent their cards to an equal number of French, mostly Legion, officers at San Luis Potosi after the Frenchmen made unflattering comments about Belgian courage and, at the suggestion of Legion captain Auguste Ballue, proposed that they be excluded from the officers’ mess.56
Duels, therefore, became the vehicle through which officers sought to validate their personal bravery, to keep their aggressive instincts honed, to demonstrate to themselves and to those about them that they were warriors, fearless, even careless for their personal safety, prepared to take on any enemy or, for that matter, any friend. The aggressiveness of Legion officers, and especially of the battalion commanders—Gustave Saussier, Alexis de La Hayrie, and Paul-Amiable de Brian—formed one of the great strengths of the corps in Mexico.57 Time and again they pushed their men to the very brink of endurance, and beyond. Without them, the Legion might never have been able to achieve the mobility and striking power they demonstrated in Mexico, all by applying Bugeaud's dictum that once the enemy is destroyed, then the troops “will have all the time they need to rest.”
However, aggressiveness, especially when it was confused with honor, could have baleful consequences, as was demonstrated at the hacienda of Santa Isabel on March 1, 1866. In the second week of February, the 2nd Battalion of the Legion under de Brian chased a group of Mexicans out of the small town of Parras, about sixty miles east of Saltillo, Coahuila. His orders were to remain in Parras long enough to organize a local defense force but, according to the official report, not to venture out of Parras. In late February, a band of 1,200 horsemen under the Mexican chief Trevino eluded Legion cavalry near Saltillo, and on February 28 joined another group of seven hundred rebels at the hacienda of Santa Isabel, about ten miles north of Parras. “Convinced that the French garrison at Parras, whose strength he knew, would not hesitate, despite its numerical inferiority, to attack, he decided to wait in an advantageous position,” reads the French report. “He made an intelligent choice in Santa Isabel.”58
Santa Isabel was a fairly typical Mexican farm utterly devoid of architectural distinction. A slab of crumbling masonry laid along the road running north from Parras through a dessicated plain, Santa Isabel appeared to be a fairly straightforward place to attack, except from the west, where it backed against a high, boulder-strewn hill. There is no evidence, however, that de Brian was actually aware of this. The report subsequently faulted him for, among other things, failing to make a reconnaissance. Whatever knowledge he had of Santa Isabel must have been gleaned from some of the four hundred Mexicans whom, together with three stripped-down companies of legionnaires numbering 185 officers and men, he led
out of Parras after dark on the night of February 28, 1866.
In assuming that the French would attack him, Trevino showed remarkable insight, as well as an ability to turn one of the Legion's strengths—its aggressiveness—against it. Paul-Amiable de Brian de Fous-sières Fonteneuille was not a man who could pass up a scrap. Joining the 2e étranger straight out of Saint-Cyr in 1849, de Brian had earned the coveted Légion d'honneur by 1851 for bravery against the Kabyles. Wounded and promoted to captain in the Crimea, he had fought in Italy and Algeria before coming to Mexico with the 62nd Infantry Regiment in 1863. However, he lost little time in searching out his old regiment, which he rejoined as a battalion commander in March 1864. “My orders are not to come out,” he is quoted as saying in the official report. “But I cannot allow the enemy to come insult me at three leagues from Parras without dishonoring myself.” Obviously, for de Brian combat was simply another duel from which one could not back off without losing face. He might also have assumed that the Mexicans, even if superior in number, would turn tail in the face of a vigorous French assault, as they had so often done in 1864 and 1865.
The column marched at a fairly leisurely pace, as the major was in no hurry to arrive before dawn. However, at three o'clock in the morning, they were fired upon by Trevino's sentries about eight hundred yards south of the hacienda. De Brian deployed his troops, one company of legionnaires to the left of the road, one company to the right of it, while the friendly Mexicans were in the center. The third Legion company was kept in reserve. He ordered everyone to lie down. The defenders continued desultory fire, but in the darkness they did no damage. He gave orders that everyone march forward on signal, and then took up his position with his Mexicans on the left, probably because they were in greatest need of leadership.
Just before dawn, the bugle blew the charge and the line of attackers rose up and jogged toward the hacienda, which could have been nothing more than a dark silhouette in the distance. Things began to go wrong almost immediately. On the left, the charge of the company of Legion voltigeurs was stopped dead by a barranca that ran like a deep dry moat between them and their objective. This forced them to slide to the right to join the other troops attacking up the road. There, however, all was confusion. The linear attack had disintegrated into a jumble of men, legionnaires and Mexicans, running up the road toward the farm. By the time everyone had covered the eight hundred or so yards between the attack line and the walls of Santa Isabel, they were little more than a disorganized mob of men heaving for breath, “the officers no longer know their soldiers, the soldiers are no longer with their officers.”
Now, just as the eastern sky was beginning to throw a little light on the battlefield, de Brian began to appreciate the strength of Trevino's position. The attackers were now fired upon by swarms of riflemen from the top of the hacienda wall, in some places twenty feet high, and from the crown of the hill to their left, which rose 130 feet out of the plain. It took no genius to realize that if they were to survive, the French must seize the high ground. Spontaneously, the legionnaires abandoned the wall and began scaling the hill under heavy fire. De Brian went down barely thirty feet up the slope, as did several other men. But as the wave of legionnaires approached the summit, the rebels could be seen drifting to the rear, despite attempts by their leaders to beat them back into line.
Then, just as the French appeared to be within an ace of success, a curious incident happened that turned a merely bad morning into a disastrous one. From the hacienda, a voice shouted in French, “Retreat!” The order was repeated several times. The legionnaires began falling back down the hill, their numbers reduced to around ninety. At this point, a large number of Juarista cavalry galloped from behind the hacienda. This spectacle was more than the Mexican cavalry that had accompanied de Brian could stand, and they opted to live to fight another day. The rest was sheer butchery. Trevino unleashed the thousand horsemen whom he had gathered behind the hacienda, who swept down the road and cut in behind the retreating French. In twos and threes, the legionnaires attempted to defend themselves, but without much success. De Brian was killed while he was being carried down the road by a Legion sergeant. All the wounded on the slope were finished off, as was the doctor who had brought the ambulance to the wall of the hacienda. Those who were able threw themselves into a barranca that paralleled the Parras road to escape the rebel cavalry. There they were organized by a Sergeant Desbordes into two lines and began to walk down the canyon. But they were able to travel only four hundred yards before they hit a cul-de-sac. Mexicans crowded on the lip of the barranca to shoot down on the French. When the fire of the legionnaires discouraged many from showing their heads, they began to pelt them with stones and shout that they would bury them alive. After an hour of this, Desbordes surrendered his 82 survivors, 40 of whom were wounded. The Legion lost 102 officers and men dead. One straggler had escaped.59
Amiable, who was sent to rescue the 44 legionnaires and 26 soldiers from the transport corps who subsequently held out for five days in the Parras church, visited Santa Isabel a few days after the battle. “The spectacle before our eyes was awful,” he wrote. “... We buried at least 200 men of our legion.... We dug ditches three yards deep and four yards across and put twenty cadavers in each. Several had already been buried; their hair and parts of their clothes came out of the earth. It stank. The ground in many places was full of dried blood, which formed large pools. I was sick for several days . . .”60
Santa Isabel did have one curiously face-saving footnote for the Legion. The Legion prisoners were taken to a remote desert camp not far from the American border where, under the command of German sergeant Fiala, they overpowered their guards and escaped across the Río Grande. Somehow they made their way to New Orleans and caught a boat to Veracruz, where they reported for duty. Marshal Bazaine decorated Fiala, and upon his retirement from the Legion, he was made custodian of the chateau at Pau near the Pyrenees. Fiala's story is all the more remarkable as he was one of the few legionnaires to leave the United States for Mexico. Unfortunately for the Legion, the traffic was usually in the opposite direction.
Desertion, of course, has from the earliest days been associated with the Legion. No desertion figures exist for the Crimea or Italy, although the Italians who joined the Legion in Milan in 1859 managed to disappear before the regiment re-embarked for North Africa.61 Nevertheless, the Legion's reputation for taking French leave was alive and well in the 1860s. General Ulrich complained in 1861 that 648 men had deserted the 1er étranger in Algeria, a whopping 22 percent, which is all the more astounding as Algeria was a very difficult place to desert from. Once the Legion reached Mexico, however, it appeared as if desertion might become a hemorrhage that would seriously undermine its combat effectiveness. The inspector of the régiment étranger in Mexico in 1863 noted that, although morale was high, “desertions have unfortunately been too numerous since its arrival in Mexico.” Yet there was no great cause for worry, as those who had left were merely “des misérables”62 Therefore, desertion might be beneficial if it allowed the Legion to eliminate a small number of unenthusiastic soldiers.
In 1864, General Brincourt reported 404 desertions in a corps of 3,471 men, a desertion rate of 11.6 percent, which had been about normal for the 1830s.63 Once the Legion was able to shed its reluctant elements, desertion rates appear to have dropped to more manageable levels—6 and 5.8 percent for 1865 and 1866, respectively. However, these figures must be opened to question, for complaints about Legion desertion redoubled in these years: “In the expeditions in the North [of Mexico], the number of desertions multiplied to the point that they became a real plague,” wrote General Felix Douay in 1866. “Twice on the banks of the Rio Bravo, they took on the character of a defection.”64
General Castelnau believed that
The régiment étranger is well beneath the quality of the old Foreign Legion. A good percentage of the men who make it up today only enlisted for a free trip to America, and as soon as they have the oppor
tunity, one sees them desert en masse. When the régiment étranger occupied Matamoros in 186S, and when it operated in 1866 near the frontier of the Rio Grande, there were up to 80 desertions in a single day. Isolated cases of desertion are in any case constant there, not only during marches but also in garrison, and even in Mexico City.
Especially troubling, however, was the large number of legionnaires going over to the enemy: “... each guerrilla band counts several deserters from the régiment étranger in its ranks,” Douay reported.65 The rebel leader Porfirio Díaz even had formed a separate corps of three hundred French deserters, most of them legionnaires, which gave a good account of itself.66 The Belgian consul in Mexico reported that ninety-three legionnaires deserted during the expedition to Mier on the American frontier in June 1866, while the French vice-consul in Galveston complained that European deserters were flooding into Texas.67 General Daudignac recorded that entire squads of legionnaires were deserting with arms and baggage on the road out of Veracruz because they believed the United States to be only two or three days’ march away, which probably prompted the September 1866 complaint by an English observer that deserters from “those irregular regiments which are formed from the refuse of France and Europe” had been committing atrocities on the road between Mexico City and Veracruz.68
To be sure, the Legion could claim no monopoly on desertion. Médecin major Jules Aronsshon noted that “On our side, we have seen corps where desertion has cleared out the ranks promptly. Thus, in the Legion, one deserts in groups of twenty, thirty at a time.” But he also cited trouble in other units, including the zouaves, and with Austrian and Belgian forces. “Odd sort of campaign, don't you think?” he concluded.69
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