French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  So if the military significance of Tuyen Quang is unclear, its symbolic importance became immense. And all the more so because the place was virtually undefendable—a square each of whose walls measured three hundred yards built on the banks of the Clear River. The fortress was dominated by a number of wooded hills. Captain Champs, a sergeant-major in 1885, was of the opinion that if the Legion had been sent to garrison Tuyen Quang, “then the post wasn't worth much.”38 But the legionnaires and tirailleurs tonkinois defended it for three months with a dogged tenacity that suggested that they valued their reputations, and their lives, even if the place was a strategic backwater.

  On January 16, the Chinese began to dig their lines of investment around the garrison, which were complete by the 20th. On the night of January 26-27, a mass of Chinese charged through the Annamese village 400 yards from the garrison, set it alight and then surged toward the French positions. The warm reception they received from the legionnaires drove them back in confusion: “We must have killed more than a hundred,” the Protestant chaplain Th. Boisset wrote in his diary, “and the cannonade does not seem to be finished yet.”39 This convinced the Chinese to begin more methodical siege operations. Soon trenches began to snake toward the French positions, despite the best efforts of the garrison's four light cannon to dispute their progress. The Chinese objective was a blockhouse that stood on a small mole 350 yards from the southwestern angle of the French position. When it became obvious to the French that the Chinese had driven mine shafts beneath the blockhouse and were prepared to blow it up, they pulled in the garrison on the night of January 30, and then destroyed the fortification with their artillery.

  The Chinese continued their siege with admirable, if unsettling, persistence. During the day they made fascines—bundles of sticks used to shore up parapets—and kept up a constant sniping on the garrison that caused one or two casualties each day. At night they pushed their saps relentlessly forward, while bombarding the garrison with a constant, casualty-producing fire. For their part, the French worked feverishly to shore up their positions, but were hampered by the fact that the garrison counted only twenty-nine shovels. On February 3, an Annamite crept out to take news of the garrison's predicament to Hanoi, but Boisset speculated that the operations around Lang Son might prevent a relief from being sent.40 To prevent surprise attacks, the French lowered lanterns from the wall at night. So close were the approach trenches that some enterprising legionnaires snagged a Chinese flag using a cord with a noose tied to the end of a bamboo pole.

  On February 8, as the officers dined, a shell burst on the roof of their mess, scattering debris over the plates, the infallible announcement that the Chinese had received artillery.41 While at first the firing was badly regulated, gradually the enemy gunners became more expert and their shells began to slam into the pagoda that Marc Edmond Dominé, the garrison commander, used as a command post, and hit the shacks that housed the troops, causing casualties. In the early hours of February 12, the Chinese blew a mine beneath the French defenses and a Forlorn Hope—The party sent to seize and hold the breach—rushed forward. A rapid French response killed between thirty and forty of the advance party, which convinced the assault columns waiting in the saps to postpone their attack. Hardly minutes passed when a second mine blew. A Chinese appeared to plant a flag in the breach, only to be shot down by the legionnaires who, brought forward by cries of “aux armes!,” rushed to the defenses. Three subsequent assaults were repulsed, but at a cost of five legionnaires killed and six wounded. The next day, a sortie by the garrison drove the Chinese out of their most advanced saps and allowed the legionnaires to destroy some of the approaching earthworks. But the relief provided by this small success quickly evaporated when it became apparent that the Chinese had added heavy mortars to their siege batteries.

  At six o'clock on the morning of February 22, the Chinese sent up a din of trumpets and shouts from their trenches. Anticipating an explosion, Captain Catelin of the Legion began to pull his men back from the positions he knew to be mined. Seconds later, the first of three mines was exploded by the Chinese, the second of which killed a Legion captain and the last of which collapsed almost sixty yards of wall. Groups of defenders kept up a hot fire while their comrades worked feverishly for four hours to repair the damage caused by the mines. They succeeded, but at the end of the day the Legion counted one officer and four legionnaires dead, and one officer, three NCOs and thirty-seven legionnaires wounded.

  On the following day, another Chinese assault was repulsed. On the 25th, the deadly Chinese tactic was repeated—a mine blew, followed by an assault that obliged a number of legionnaires to keep the assailants at bay while their comrades worked to repair the damage. Four more legionnaires perished and another twelve were wounded. At eleven thirty in the evening of February 27, more mines exploded, followed by an assault on three different points of the defenses. The Chinese swarmed on the breaches, waving their black flags and hurling grenades and satchels of powder. “For nearly 30 minutes, the fighting continued hand-to-hand on the breaches, the combatants separated only by the bamboo palisades which crowned the defenses,” Dominé wrote in his diary.42 By dawn, repeated attacks had been driven off, but the Legion had lost another three dead, including an officer, and nine wounded.

  The garrison's situation was desperate. Only 180 rifles were in working order to defend a perimeter 1,200 yards long, 120 yards of which had been destroyed by mines. On March 1, the garrison heard firing to the south and suspected that it was a relief force. But Domine's troops were too exhausted to mount a breakout. When Chinese firing redoubled on March 2, many must have feared that they might be overwhelmed before the relief could arrive.

  In fact, the Chinese firing had masked their withdrawal. On March 3, the garrison woke up to discover that the Chinese had decamped in the night. 43 The reason soon became clear—that very afternoon, the relief column, which had left Lang Son on February 16, stumbled up the track along the Clear River after fighting a desperate action at Hoa Moc against a blocking force that cost more killed than had perished in the entire siege—indeed, Hoa Moc was the most murderous battle fought by the French in Tonkin since their 1883 invasion. For many in the relief force, the sight of Tuyen Quang was a sobering one: “All the approaches [to Tuyen Quang] —churned, blasted, lamentable—were covered with corpses and the carrion rotted in the air,” Huguet complained. “The pestilential emanations of all of these putrid corpses turned your stomach ...”44 “What a spectacle! What desolation! What ruin!” exclaimed Boisset when he emerged from the citadel to walk over a battlefield littered with abandoned weapons and tools of the siege, and furrowed with almost six miles of trenches. “Our liberators cannot believe their eyes.”45 So impressive was the defense of Tuyen Quang that the government ordered the publication of Domine's journal in the Journal officiel, while a separate edition was printed and distributed to garrison libraries throughout France and the colonies. But France's, and the Legion's, trials in Indochina had only begun.

  Chapter 11

  “A SECOND FATHERLAND”

  “MORE THAN ALGERIA, Madagascar or the [Western] Sudan, Indochina is for [legionnaires] a second fatherland,” wrote Captain, and ex-legionnaire, Louis Carpeaux. “Its strange calm infiltrates in their blood with the malaria itself, and they can no longer rid themselves of the nostalgic visions of sun splashed rice paddies.”1 “Believe me, there are few people who, digging into their memory, will come up with better souvenirs,” wrote L. Huguet, a marine officer who served with the Legion during the conquest of Tonkin in 1883–85.

  For me, these moments are unforgettable, these magnificent November nights on the Clear River, in an incomparable landscape!... The soft light of the moon would reflect off the beautiful fanpalm leaves. The continuous murmur of insects in the sleepy atmosphere in which a transparent vapor seemed suspended. A hundred feet away, the dark shadow of a massif of bamboos would be lighted by the gleam of a small fire against which would be silhouetted, in var
ious poses, the men on guard. Further away, at the top of a mirador, the linh [soldier] stands immobile. At its base, the European sentinel marching backwards and forwards probing with his eyes the surrounding hills.... A small boy surreptitiously slipped beneath the blanket of a soldier after devouring his rice cake, while a little way off a group of coolies were talking, while passing around the same rustic pipe.2

  Yet these nostalgic images of Indochina could hardly mask the fact that it was a desperately unhealthy place, where, when there was not a cholera epidemic, “dysentery is queen and malaria king.”3 “Few of us came back to that barracks again,” Frederic Martyn wrote of his draft of legionnaires sent from Sidi-bel-Abbès to Tonkin in 1889. “Probably more than half ‘settled down’ for ever in the jungles, swamps, and burial grounds of Indo-China, while many more became so broken in health that they were discharged as being unfit for further service without returning to the Legion's headquarters.”4 Legion Sergeant Ernest Bolis, who went to Tonkin in the 1890s, soon found that of the original 116 men of his company, only 17 remained, the rest having died or been invalided home.5 Death was so common among the large military garrison of Son Tay that one visitor charged in 1889 that “every year all the corpses are exhumed and thrown into a communal grave, the crosses and inscriptions disappear. One must not enlarge the cemetery.”6 Between 1887 and 1909, only 271 legionnaires died in combat in Indochina, while fully 2,705 perished from disease.7

  Despite the lethality of the place, there was no shortage of legionnaires eager to volunteer for the Far East. “Most of our leisure was spent discussing avidly our chances of being sent to the Orient,” John Le Poer remembered. “Life, we believed, could not be as monotonous in Tonkin— there were frequent battles there, and, more, there was the powerful attraction of being able to pillage surreptitiously, after battles or skirmishes.”8 The promise of combat was no doubt a great draw, as was the simple desire to move on, to “see some country”—“I am tired of soldiering here [Algeria],” Le Poer's friend told him. “Why should I not see the world?”9 “The prospect of living in the bush in Tonkin, of confronting danger, filled me with joy,” wrote legionnaire Jean Pfirmann of his 1888 selection.10

  But above all, the quality of life was perceived to be better. Even anti-Legion writer Leon Randin found the legionnaires in Tonkin more mellow than in Algeria, less intemperate, less racist, less inclined “to play the hardened veteran.” Discipline, too, he believed to be more relaxed, the NCOs less brutal, and the officers “suddenly adopt the unusual attitudes of older brothers.”11 In 1903, General Bertrand, commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade in Algeria, noted that legionnaires sought service in Tonkin because one year there counted double for pension purposes. They also qualified for the “colonial pay” regularly given to marines abroad but denied to legionnaires in Algeria, because it was considered part of metropolitan France. The worst punishment that could be inflicted upon a legionnaire in Algeria, he believed, was to remove him from the list for Tonkin.12 In 1909, General Hubert Lyautey reported that Legion garrisons must be retained in Indochina because the possibility of service there was the great enlistment draw,13 which was certainly true in the case of legionnaire Joseph Ehrhart, who reenlisted for five years just to get to Tonkin. When he heard of his selection, “I couldn't sit still... I was mad with joy, I did a cartwheel, I walked on my hands, I no longer knew where I was!”14

  For legionnaires, men for whom life was largely devoid of comforts, Indochina was not only exotic, it also came as close to la dolce vita as most of them would ever get. The newly arrived Ehrhart, billeted in the marine barracks at Hanoi, was amazed when a group of marines walked into their dormitory followed by a posse of “boys” who gathered up their dirty clothing and cleaned their rifles. He later discovered that, as might be expected, the Legion's rules were somewhat stricter, but nevertheless a far cry from the life-style of North Africa—as Annamese (as the Vietnamese were then called) were not allowed in the rooms and never given weapons, legionnaires had to carry their dirty uniforms to the ground floor to be washed, and clean their own rifles. “Boys” also served them in the refectory, and even washed the uniforms of those in the punishment cells.15

  Without a doubt, the greatest benefit of life beyond Suez was the relative abundance in Indochina of women—the congaï, literally “young girl” in Vietnamese, whose presence made even the most remote Legion garrisons so much more livable than in Algeria. It was hardly love at first sight, however. European soldiers were initially put off by women who constantly chewed (and spit) betel nuts and painted their teeth black. But they could often be induced to give up one, or both, of these habits. Not surprisingly, the prettiest girls fell to the officers.16 “There wasn't much to do [in Indochina],” Ernst Junger was told by an old legionnaire in 1913. “We spent a lot of time stretched out on our beds daydreaming. When the heat of the day was passed, we would go to the Annamese village, have our clothes washed, and everyone had his Annamese mistress.”17 There was even a commerce in these girls, with a departing soldier able to resell his congaï to a new arrival—sometimes at a profit!

  The widespread practice of keeping Vietnamese mistresses was not without its dangers, however. Some feared that the girls served as enemy spies and agents.18 But this appears seldom to have been the case. As will be seen, Viet Minh attempts to use congaï as agents between 1946 and 1954 foundered on the twin rocks of the loyalty of those women willing to sleep with French soldiers, and the “bourgeois morality” of those who were not. The problem of the congaï was not that they were likely to conspire against France, but rather the more obvious one that their very presence served as a conspiracy against military discipline. Joseph Ehrhart discovered that in Tonkin, “Despite the colonial pay, I was not rich, and I did not want to follow the practice of certain legionnaires who sold their wine ration at each meal to keep their congai, usually one who cared nothing for them.” He eventually succumbed, however, and the combination of his tendency to linger beyond evening muster with his “co,” and the jealousy of a corporal eager to send him to the cells so that he could advance his own courtship, eventually led to Ehrhart's unsuccessful attempt at desertion, which almost earned him an extended stay in a discipline company.19 However, the congaï could also prove immensely loyal, even vital, to the French war effort—Bôn-Mat's squad would virtually have starved on the parsimonious rations of the intendance during the grueling Lang Son campaign of 1885 had not his enterprising congaï made heroic efforts to obtain extra food for them.20

  The availability of women was not the unique attraction of Indochina. There was yet another—opium. Of course, it must be remembered that in the nineteenth century opium was thought to provide certain medicinal benefits. Also, efforts to prevent its use among Europeans in Indochina were complicated by the fact that the refinement and sale of opium eventually became a government monopoly, from which the French colonizers derived fully one-third of their tax receipts in Indochina by the time of World War I.21 The extent of its use is difficult to determine. It is possible that, like the use of drugs in the United States and Europe in our own day, smoking opium began as an novel amusement among the upper echelons of Europeans abroad and gradually spread downward. The first to introduce opium into the forces may well have been naval and staff officers, those most in touch with civilian colonial society in which it was fairly frequent to organize an opium corner in the sitting room.

  There is no evidence that opium displaced the traditional penchant for alcohol in the Legion, although legionnaires had to abandon wine and absinthe, too expensive in the Orient, in favor of rice wine, the noxious, highly intoxicating choum-choum, which sold for thirty-five centimes a liter. But Junger was told that smoking opium was common in the Legion: “There was not much surveillance,” an old legionnaire recounted. “In our post, almost everyone smoked, despite formal orders to the contrary. It was the custom of the country.”22 In Tonkin, Silbermann was at first impressed by the friendliness of the locals, until he realized th
at they wanted him to bring soldiers to their opium dens to smoke at two sous (forty centimes, about eight cents or sixpence) a pipe.23 And at least one man in Bôn-Mat's squad in 1884 quickly discovered a taste for “pulling on the bamboo,” which eventually led to his being passed over for promotion.24 A visit to an opium den was one of the first items on Ehrhart's agenda upon reaching Hanoi.25 In 1891, the Catholic Church in Indochina condemned the abuse of opium and decreed that only repentant addicts could receive the sacraments. In 1907, the French government, worried by the spread of opium dens from Indochina to port cities in France, forbade any government official from smoking, while in 1912 Paris newspapers began a press campaign “against the progress of opium addiction among officers of the navy and colonial troops.” However, while addiction was officially frowned upon, “Sunday smoking” continued to be tolerated until World War II.26

  As a consequence of the plethora of volunteers, the Legion could afford to be fairly selective about whom they sent to Indochina, at least after the initial conquest of Tonkin in 1883-85. Competition to be included in the draft was keen. When in 1889 Frederic Martyn saw that the call for volunteers excluded those with less than nine months’ service and any punishments, “I hardly thought it worth while to ask for my name to be put down on the list in the face of this restriction.”27 But he was taken nonetheless. Ernest Bolis was rejected as too young—the more mature soldiers were thought better to resist the rigors of the climate—but he successfully appealed to his superiors to be included.28 In 1906, legionnaire Lucien Jacqueline was left behind because his teeth were bad.29