French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The fact that legionnaires were generally believed to be criminals—an impression their leisure-time activities did little to dissipate—caused them to be shunned on the outside. Rosen noted that at Sidi-bel-Abbès even the women drew their skirts close around them when they passed a legionnaire in the streets.173 Ever the gallant Italian, Merolli asked a Spanish girl to dance at a bal populaire, only to find himself immediately surrounded by her brothers. In his opinion, it was this civilian

  disdain which prevents legionnaires from finding outside the barracks, the softness of a friendship or the charming and graceful smile of a woman, which causes them to adopt this independent and off-hand manner with civilians, an artificial attitude which would melt like snow with a friendly handshake or kind word.

  This forced isolation also helped to explain “the inclination of legionnaires toward drunkenness.”174 Nor, as Martin suggested, was this disdain confined to civilians. Charles des Ecorres was amazed when, during the Bou Amama insurrection of 1881, the colonel of a line regiment forbade his conscripts to have any contact with legionnaires with whom they were sharing a bivouac.175 Le Poer found that “French regulars and even the native Algerian corps had more scorn than sympathy for us. It is true that we paid them back in kind.”176

  Legionnaires obviously led a very lonely life. In military terms, the fact that the Legion was at once despised and feared was not altogether a bad thing, for it created a sort of negative integration, a solid front against the outside world. It led to the external manifestations of pride such as impeccable dress (another manifestation of group superiority and “narcissism”), marching ability and ferocity in combat, whether in bar fights or against the enemies of France, for which the Legion was famous. It also perhaps helped to counter those characteristics of the Legion that might otherwise have caused divisiveness and undermined an esprit de corps. National divisions, especially in an era of high patriotism, offered perhaps the greatest threat. However, the “us against the world” attitude also helped to force a cohesion among men whom Dangy insisted were by nature “aggressive loners,”177 Hamlets without their Ophelias, and in a society whose motto, Raoul Béric believed, was “every man for himself.”178

  This, then, was the Legion's initiation. Though some sniffed at the quality of Legion training, the truth is that it was probably as good as it had to be. The legionnaire was not called upon to fight an enemy with the military skill of a European opponent. The primary quality of a legionnaire was endurance, the ability to march miles, under a blistering sun, with little food and water. And that requirement was well catered for in Legion training. The absence of more formal drill and discipline helped to assimilate a heterogeneous and largely unorthodox soldiery who might have rebelled at more formalized training. Regimental pride, a produa in great part of the social atmosphere of the Legion, and the general perception of that corps on the outside as hovering on the fringes of the criminal classes, sort of Bat d'Af with funny accents, did the rest. It left a residue of pent-up hostility and aggressiveness that made legionnaires like chained dogs ready at any moment to be unleashed. The danger, of course, was that aggressive behavior produced by esprit de corps and high morale might slip over into indiscipline, individual or even collective, that the chained dogs might slip the leash.

  Yet these great tensions of Legion life had another advantage, for they allowed the Legion to shift quickly to a wartime mentality, to make with relative ease the psychological leap from peace to war because the behavioral requirements for each were not substantially different. In 1885, the action was to be found in Tonkin.

  Chapter 10

  INDOCHINA —THE INVASION

  DESPITE AN IMAGE that inextricably binds the Legion with North Africa, it was Indochina that provided both its most popular garrison and ultimately its calvary. After 1883, the Legion burst the narrow confines of its North African existence, which had contained it for over a decade, to join in the Scramble for Africa and the French expeditions in the Far East, an extension of tasks that required tripling Legion strength from a modest four battalions in the summer of 1883 to a dozen by the turn of the century.

  The history of the French penetration of Indochina is fairly complex, but the ingredients were typical of French imperialism, including fear of British colonial rivalry, the desire to tap the reputedly rich markets of China's Hunan province via Tonkin, pressure by the French Catholic Church to protect their missionaries and, above all, the presence of a handful of French officers ambitious to advance their country's future there and not content to wait upon events. In the 1840s, the French had begun to cast about for a base in the Far East to offset that of the British at Hong Kong. Their chance came with the outbreak of the Second Opium War in 1857, during which a combined Anglo–French force occupied Canton and in 1860 Peking. As the Catholic Church was one of the pillars of Napoleon Ill's Second Empire, the French seized the opportunity offered by the concentration of military force in the Far East to chastise the Annamese—the contemporary term for Vietnamese—for their persecution of Catholic missionaries. They bombarded Da Nang in 1858 and seized Saigon in 1859, which the Annamese signed over to them in 1862. In 1867 the French took the rest of Cochinchina, the southernmost province of Annam, and declared it a French colony.

  The advance of the British into Burma kindled fears among some Frenchmen that perfidious Albion was about to open a southern route into Hunan. The exploration of the Mekong River by young French naval lieutenant Francis Gamier in 1866-67 proved that to be a dead end. However, in 1873, French trader and arms merchant Jean Dupuis proved the Red River to be navigable from Hunan to the Gulf of Tonkin. Furthermore, he had discovered that in Hunan salt fetched thirty times its Hanoi price. However, problems arose when the Annamese pointed out that the exportation of salt from their country was illegal. Not to be deterred, Dupuis mobilized his small army of Chinese thugs, captured the chief of police in Hanoi, seized a dozen river junks filled with salt and prepared to tow them up the Red River by steamboat. The Annamese attempted to negotiate an end to the crisis. But in June 1873 Dupuis's patience cracked—he seized a portion of Hanoi, ran up the French colors and sent word to Admiral M. J. Dupré, the governor-general in Saigon, that either France back him or he would call on the English.

  Of course, Dupré knew that Dupuis was only making empty threats. Besides, he had formal orders from Paris not to intervene in Tonkin. However, Dupré hoped that by ending the increasingly bloody confrontation in Hanoi he could persuade the Annamese government in Hue to recognize officially the aggrandizement of French control of Cochinchina in 1867, while heading off any competition by European rivals. Therefore, he sent none other than Francis Gamier with 180 men to Hanoi to extricate Dupuis from the difficulties of his own making. It proved to be a serious mistake. Once in Hanoi, Gamier and Dupuis discovered that they were two of a kind—Gamier began to issue proclamations declaring the Red River open to commerce and in November stormed the Hanoi citadel. Urged on by Christian missionaries, he proceeded to impose his rule in the Red River Delta. However, Gamier was killed in December leading what amounted to a single-handed bayonet charge against a force sent to recapture Hanoi. Dupré ended the crisis by signing a treaty with Hue in March 1874, which gained recognition for Cochinchina as well as established French concessions in Haiphong and Hanoi.

  The 1874 treaty was fraught with complications. Annam was nominally a vassal state of China. The Chinese regarded Indochina, and especially the northern province of Tonkin, as vital to the security of their southern frontier. However, the French interpreted the treaty to mean that Chinese suzerainty was at an end. Continued frustration over the failure to open the Red River, and the insecurity of the small French garrisons at Haiphong and Hanoi, caused Saigon to dispatch fifty-five-year-old naval captain Henri Rivière to Tonkin with 233 French marines and Annamese auxiliaries to reinforce the French concessions there in March 1882. If the French had wanted history to repeat itself, then they could not have contrived a more congenial
set of preconditions. Despite formal orders to the contrary, Rivière stormed the Hanoi citadel. A French fleet sailed to his rescue, but in May 1883 Rivière was killed when his force, ignoring the most elementary notions of security, was ambushed outside of Hanoi.

  When news of the events in Hanoi reached Paris, the Chamber of Deputies voted five and one half million francs to support operations in Tonkin and earmarked reinforcements of three thousand men for the Far East, promising that “France will avenge her glorious children.”1 A French fleet sailed up the Perfume River and seized two forts that guarded access to Hue. They then forced the Annamese to accept a treaty of full protectorate. In December 1883, a French force, which included one battalion of the Legion, captured strategic Son Tay on the Red River. This caused the Chinese to reinforce Bac Ninh, correctly thought to be the next French target. However, after desultory resistance, the poorly disciplined Chinese abandoned Bac Ninh on March 12,1884. In May 1884, the Chinese agreed to withdraw from Tonkin.

  The war appeared to be over. However, in June, when a French force was dispatched to occupy Lang Son, the last substantial town in Tonkin before the Chinese frontier, they were stopped thirty miles south of their objective by a Chinese garrison near the small town of Bac Le. What happened next depends upon the version one reads. One sympathetic to the Chinese claims that their commander explained that he realized that France and China were now at peace, however, he had received no orders to withdraw. He asked the French to wire to Beijing for instructions on his behalf. The French commander, Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Dugenne, gave the Chinese one hour to clear off. When they did not, he attacked, but was repulsed with twenty-two dead and sixty wounded.2 Dugenne, and later official French propaganda, advanced the claim that they were treacherously ambushed at Bac Le. Whatever the case, this time France, under pro-colonialist prime minister Jules Ferry, intended to make a better job of it. The French prepared a full-scale invasion, one that included the Legion.

  The problem for the French was how best to bring about a decisive victory over China. They decided to divide their forces, one group striking at Formosa while a second would reinforce Tonkin. It proved to be a costly and nearly disastrous decision. After bombarding Fuzhou on the Chinese mainland, and thereby eliciting a declaration of war upon France by China, the French under fiery Admiral Amédée Anatole Courbet landed a force on the northern coast of Formosa near Chi-lung in October 1884. It was hard to see what the French hoped to achieve by an invasion of Formosa. The island was far from Beijing. And while it is true that Courbet seized the coal fields of northern Formosa, the coal was low grade and its loss of little value to China. Apparently Paris felt that a campaign on the mainland of China was too risky and so settled for a peripheral operation more easily supported by the navy.3

  The Formosa action of 1884-85 is one of the little-known campaigns of the Legion, and with good reason—it got nowhere. The Chinese had anticipated the attack, and stiffened their garrison with twenty thousand soldiers, over three times the number the French would bring against them. The French got ashore with a ridiculously small force of 1,800 men and, after a hard struggle, seized the heights above Chi-lung. However, they were repulsed at Tan- shui twenty miles along the coast. The monsoon broke over this condition of stalemate, turning the French camp into a morass through which cholera raged. The Formosa invasion, meant to bring pressure on the Celestial Empire, soon had the French squirming in discomfort—their army was melting away from disease, and their front line was so porous and poorly manned that the Chinese would creep between the outposts at night to exhume and decapitate the bodies of dead French soldiers.4

  In January 1885, with the garrison at Chi-lung down to six hundred men, reinforcements were landed, one of whom was Lionel Hart. He discovered the town to be hardly more than a pile of cinders in an amphitheater of mountains whose heights were occupied by the enemy. The marines and joyeux welcomed the legionnaires, but “they are all very pale and very tired.”5 With these reinforcements, the French launched offensives in late January to disengage Chi-lung and, in March, pushed to the outskirts of Tan-shui. However, it was clear that Formosa was a dead-end theater, that the French had nothing to gain from persisting there but more casualties and a diversion of scarce resources. The real decision had to be sought in Tonkin.6

  The situation in Tonkin was far from reassuring. Although nine thousand French troops occupied it in the spring of 1884, a garrison that would eventually grow to forty thousand by the summer of 1885, they were on the strategic defensive. Quite apart from the Chinese buildup over the border in Kwangsi, troops that already had begun to infiltrate south, the French faced another, more persistent enemy in Tonkin—the Black Flags. The Black Flags took their name from the fact that each section, and each officer, carried a black flag. The result was that their lines were so festooned with standards that one legionnaire preparing to attack the fortress of Bac Ninh in March 1884 was moved to declare, “Look.... They've done their washing. It's hanging out to dry.”7

  The French referred to them as pirates, which they certainly were— most were Chinese who drifted south because of poverty or after the failure in 1864 of the Taiping rebellion against the Chinese government. But they were more than that. Organized by an intelligent but illiterate Chinese named Liu Yung-fu, the Black Flags dominated the upper reaches of the Red River from their base at Lao Cai on the border with Yunnan. Despite their semi-brigand status, they enjoyed official relations with both the Vietnamese and Chinese governments—the Vietnamese recognized them because they controlled the primitive and predatory montagnards populations, who were not ethnic Vietnamese, to the northeast of the Red River Delta, while the Chinese saw them as an extra measure of Chinese control in Tonkin. L. Huguet, a marine officer, described the Black Flags as very well armed with Remingtons, Spencers, Martini-Henrys and Winchester repeaters.

  Their uniform(!) is made up of a jacket and light trousers of blue wool. Their legs from the bottom of the knee to the ankle are protected by cloth bands of the same color. As for their headgear, it varies enormously. Most often it consists of a large hat with a wide brim, sometimes doubled inside with a piece of fabric like the rest.8

  The French spent most of the spring and summer of 1884 securing the Tonkinese delta and moving into the highlands as far as Tuyen Quang on the Clear River. The Chinese and the Black Flags had three primary strengths—they were very numerous; they were much better armed than were the French, whose 1874 model single-shot Gras rifles gave them a lower rate of fire; and they were expert at building defensive fortifications. So impressive were their fortifications that Western wisdom assumed that they must have had European help. After viewing one such fortress, which was made up of a series of palisades separated by open ground and trenches filled with bamboo spikes, Martyn was of the opinion that “a company of Royal Engineers could not have made a better job of it.” His fellow legionnaires believed that an Englishman by the name of “Sir Collins” had directed its construction.9 Furthermore, these fortifications were often surrounded by bush of such density that the attacking force might have to hack a path to it and then emerge one by one into open ground before deploying for an attack, a lengthy and extremely lethal process.

  However, the French criticized the strategy of the Chinese and Black Flags as timorous and unimaginative. Huguet, who fought on the Red and Clear Rivers, found that the enemy “are past masters in the art of moving earth. That which makes their strength is also their weakness. Used to the shelter of deep trenches where they burrow like moles, they lack the daring to march and manoeuvre in open country.” Their insistence on fighting from prepared defensive positions meant that they rarely ambushed advancing French columns often strung out along narrow jungle paths: “In such places our small troop would have been infallibly destroyed if we had encountered a few audacious enemy,” Huguet believed. “Fortunately for us, the Black Flags did not know how to profit from the abundant advantages which the exuberant tropical vegetation offered them.” As
for the Chinese regulars, he found them individually courageous, but their tactic of passive defense was “even less comprehensible given the fact that they benefited from superior numbers. In truth, if they had been more flexible, Tonkin would not belong to us.”10 Dick de Lonlay, who participated in the Lang Son expedition, was of the opinion that in the open field the Chinese lacked “unity of direction, cohesion.” Their fortifications, while well built, were usually badly sited. “Our troops are fighting against men who are sufficiently disciplined, battle-hardened, but who are almost always badly led,” he concluded.11

  A strategy of occupying defensive positions deep in the country and forcing the aggressive French to come to them might have worked well, especially given the desperate logistical problems that the French encountered in Tonkin. However, the Chinese seldom demonstrated the tactical skill required to capitalize on their superior firepower. Although they possessed artillery, they seldom used it. They were also miserable marksmen: “The Chinese . . . never put the rifle to the shoulder as Europeans do when about to fire,” wrote Le Poer.

  Instead, they tuck the rifle-butt into the armpit and try to drop the bullet, as it were, on the attacking party. They cannot well do this until the attack comes within five hundred yards of the defence, nor can they do it when the enemy is within two hundred yards of their line ... as we closed with the bayonet and were practically at point-blank range, the Black Flags wavered and fired at the sky rather than at us.12

  Everyone agreed that the Chinese tended to become a bit windy when the French got close enough to skewer them. However, their fortifications could break the momentum of an attack, so that both sides might fire at each other through holes in the bamboo palisade until the French could blast their way in using dynamite or their light artillery. Then the Chinese would flee, abandoning their fort. This was perhaps because they tended to place their best troops in the front line, and when these suffered heavy casualties (which they invariably did) or were broken, those in the second echelon tended to take to their heels.13 In any case, the French seldom had enough troops to surround these fortresses and cut off the retreat, so the Chinese, while badly mauled, simply retired to another defensive position, and the process began again.