French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  As Dodds hurried his square toward the river, the Dahomans on the far side realized they had been outflanked and began to throw artillery shells in his direction, most of which declined to explode. However, when the square approached the Koto, it ran smack into a jungle so impenetrable that Dodds halted it and sent out reconnaissance parties to locate the ford. As the exhausted soldiers brewed up coffee and awaited orders to move, the Dahomans gradually invested his square so that by mid-afternoon he was forced to withdraw to higher ground, where he settled down for the night. “The night is calm, but our spirits are not,” Jacquot wrote. “We are in an impasse whose outcome is unknown to us. An inextinguishable thirst keeps us awake all night, which we spend pacing the camp.”73

  On the 15th, the Dahomans attacked the French bivouac, and were repelled with great losses. But the French camp was short of water, the aid station filled with exhausted soldiers, and the convoys from the rear met increasing resistance. An attempt to take the porters under the guard of a company of Senegalese to the Koto to fetch water collapsed when the Dahomans attacked, creating panic among the porters, who dropped their receptacles and fled back to the safety of the French square. A Legion company had to rush to the aid of the hard-pressed Senegalese and lead them back to camp. On October 16, Dodds pulled back from the river and reestablished his camp on the site of that of the 13th.

  This stage in the campaign was baptized the “Camp of Thirst” by the French. Lips blackened and cracked, tongues became swollen and men fought to drink from small pools of filthy water. Martyn estimated that 20 percent of the Europeans were suffering from dysentery.74 On October 17, Dodds sent to the rear a convoy of 200 wounded guarded by two companies of native troops. The French now numbered only 53 officers, 1,533 men and around 2,000 porters. The outcome of the campaign appeared to be in doubt.

  However, the Dahomans too were suffering desperately. Not only had their losses on the battlefield been substantial, virtually destroying the Amazons as a fighting force, but an epidemic of smallpox had broken out among the survivors. Furthermore, the Yoruba slaves whom the Dahomans impressed to work their palm oil plantations seized the French invasion and the preoccupation of Behanzin's army to revolt. Indeed, one African historian has estimated that the marauding bands of Yorubas did far more damage to the Dahoman war effort than did the French, especially because they destroyed and disrupted the Dahoman food supply and brought Behanzin's army to the very verge of starvation.75

  Furthermore, in carrying out his tactical retreat of October 16, Dodds had merely sought to place himself in a better position to attack. Reinforcements of two Senegalese companies brought the column strength to 69 officers and 2,001 men, which Dodds reorganized into four groups of one Legion company and two native ones each, three of which were supported by two artillery pieces each. (The marine companies had melted away from fatigue.) He also reorganized his support services, which had suffered desperately from the diminished numbers of porters. Many had no doubt fallen out from the same fatigue as had affected the soldiers. Others had deserted, like the thirty porters who scurried away from a water party led by Jacquot on October 21.76 But mistreatment had also taken a toll— Martyn saw one faltering porter skewered by a spahi. However, when he reported this mistreatment to an officer, “all I got from him was a half jocular remark to the effect that the Spahis were queer cattle, and that I had better leave them alone.”77

  On October 23, an emissary from Behanzin arrived before the French camp to ask for peace. Dodds demanded that the Dahomans abandon their defenses on the Koto, which on October 25 they refused to do. On October 26, Dodds formed his men in a square and moved to cross the river, fighting their way through trenches that the investing Dahomans had dug around the French bivouac. However, to avoid the heavily defended main path to Abomey, Dodds took his square into thick brush south of the road and crossed a river. Only on the 27th did the French discover that the river they had crossed was not the Koto, but one of its confluents, the Han River. As Dodds pondered his next move, another emissary from Behanzin arrived and offered to abandon the Koto. Dodds recrossed the Han River, burned Kotopa and then crossed the Koto against only light opposition.

  On November 2, Dodds took up his march again, after rejecting negotiations with several emissaries because, he believed, Behanzin simply sought to gain time to raise reinforcements for his army.78 Beyond the Koto, the forest thinned out and the country took on a more civilized appearance, despite the fact that the villages were deserted. Still, Dodds's desire to keep his forces in a defensible square and to avoid marching along the path where the Dahomans had set up their defensive works made the advance heavy going. A Dahoman defense was broken before the village of Ouakon, but not before Lieutenant Jacquot was wounded. Early on the morning of November 3, the Dahomans mounted a frontal assault upon the French camp that, once again, was bloodily repulsed. Although the fighting died away before noon, they returned on the following morning. The French moved toward Cana, one of the royal cities of Dahomey, which the Dahomans defended with “a tenacity greater, if that is possible, than in the preceding combats. In particular, a band of around 300 soldiers held off all attacks and left the greater part of their numbers dead on the field.”79

  This proved to be the final combat of the campaign. Behanzin opened negotiations with Dodds, who handed him a list of demands that included a war indemnity of fifteen million francs, the establishment of a French protectorate, a French occupation of Abomey, three of his principal counselors handed over as hostages and that Behanzin surrender all of his artillery and two thousand repeating rifles. When, on the 15th, Behanzin returned with only two cannon, a mitrailleuse, one hundred rifles, five thousand francs and two “unknowns” as hostages, the French concluded that the king “only looks to trick us and gain time.” They broke off negotiations and marched on Abomey barely ten miles away.80 However, when the French entered it on November 17, it was little more than a smoldering ruin. Dodds, now a general, ordered Behanzin deposed. The ex-king took refuge in the north of the country and gathered the remnants of his army. Realizing that he could not win a military contest with Dodds, he repeatedly tried to gain French recognition for a Dahoman state in the north. Dodds resolutely refused, appointed a brother of Behanzin as king, and in 1894 covered the north with troops. Along with a few resolute supporters, Behanzin was hounded from village to village, fed and protected by his subjects, until he was run to ground by Dodds, who exiled him first to Martinique, then to Algeria, where he died in 1906.

  On the surface, at least, it appears that the French were remarkably successful, and remarkably lucky. For the modest outlay of 11 officers and 70 soldiers killed, and 25 officers and 411 men wounded, they had seized Dahomey. Although the number of those stricken by sickness multiplied these figures fivefold, the bill was well within the French capacity to pay. Without a doubt, the Legion had proved the most solid unit—by common consent they fought better than the native troops, while their losses to disease and fatigue of about 35 percent of strength were nonetheless lower than those of the marines, who by mid-October had ceased to exist as a fighting force.81 Nevertheless, the inability or unwillingness of the French to develop the individual skills of the soldiers to allow them to adapt better to the conditions of jungle warfare was, as in Tonkin, again apparent— whereas Dodds did for a time abandon his march along the main trail to Abomey, he continued to employ regimented European formations in terrain better suited for more flexible, individual tactics. This had contributed to the confusion and fatigue of his march, as well as to his initial inability to break through on the Koto. But while, as has been seen, some attention was given in Legion training to these individual tactics of fire and movement, in Dahomey they were not applied.

  In one sense, it is difficult to argue with success. But the campaign, while fairly rapid, had hardly been a pushover. By mid-October, the French were suffering terribly. The marines had suffered horribly, while the Legion, although still very much an effective fightin
g force, had been weakened by disease and fatigue. Dodds required early success, for by December the dry season meant that the Ouémé was no longer navigable, while the diminishing number of porters would have made it impossible to sustain even a small force that far from the coast.82 Therefore, the Dahomans should have sought to prolong the campaign, not win it outright. Had they not flung themselves into premature assaults upon French squares but instead enticed the invaders toward Abomey, allowing fatigue and disease to take their toll while concentrating their energies upon supply lines, or in ambushes and night attacks to force the French to spend days marching in fatiguing squares and nights in sleepless alert, then they might have had greater success. After all, in mid-October the French lacked the offensive power to break the Dahoman lines on the Koto, even though they were held by a half-trained, poorly armed and half-starved army that had suffered nothing but devastating defeat since the beginning of the campaign.

  So the French won a fairly quick victory, in part because Dodds organized his campaign well, because his supply lines were short, but above all because his enemy made costly mistakes. This is not to say, however, that the outcome might have been very different had Behanzin made certain strategic adjustments (even had that been possible), for his problems were fairly major ones. Given the fact that the Dahomans traditionally saw war as a sporadic activity consisting of little more than a series of raids that aimed to capture slaves rather than kill opposing troops, they sustained their campaign remarkably well, especially given the overwhelming superiority of French firepower. After the failure of their surprise attack at Dogba, they adopted a defensive strategy, which, as has been seen, caused the French great problems at the Koto River. However, they never abandoned their costly tactical rigidity, nor did they think through the implications of increased firepower, both their own and that of the French. For instance, although some of their troops were armed with modern weapons, they continued to use them as if they were muskets, running forward, firing, and then retiring to reload.

  Behanzin's attempts to negotiate with the French were dismissed as ploys to gain time to recruit more soldiers and to prolong the campaign into the dry season. In fact, they were probably sincere bids to end hostilities and preserve something of Dahoman independence. The misunderstanding more likely arose from a cultural difference between Western and African notions of how a war should end—Behanzin believed that he was merely being asked to pay tribute in the African manner, while the French wanted complete surrender and disarmament. While Behanzin turned over a few weapons as a token of surrender, it was virtually impossible for him to meet Dodds's demands that he hand over all of them because many were in the hands of chiefs who would not give them up, or to pay a large indemnity in cash that he did not possess. It is also likely that he sent two “unknown” hostages rather than three of his closest counselors because they fully expected the hostages to be ritually sacrificed. After all, that is precisely what the Dahomans did with their hostages.83

  The anthropological subtleties of the native cultures that they set out to conquer were of far less interest to French soldiers than were the lessons to be drawn from a campaign, especially one as successful as that of Dahomey. And those lessons were fairly straightforward. First, organize the invading force in the proportions of one-third white troops drawn preferably from the Legion or the marines and two-thirds native troops. Second, avoid wear and tear on the infantry as much as possible. This meant having well-organized logistics. In tropical climates, limit the soldier's load to his rifle and ammunition. This was generally the practice in Tonkin, and one that Dodds used in Dahomey. In areas without roads, advancing columns should use river transportation whenever possible, or depend upon porters and pack animals. Third, against poorly armed and organized native forces, mobility was more important than firepower. Light columns that moved toward a strategic objective as quickly as possible enjoyed the best chance of success.

  These seemed to be perfectly logical conclusions to draw, ones tested to an extent in Tonkin and confirmed in Dahomey. Unfortunately for the Legion, most of these lessons were ignored, or badly applied, three years later when France invaded Madagascar. For this reason, to those looking back in the aftermath of the Madagascar expedition of 1895, Dahomey appeared to offer a textbook example of a successfully, even a brilliantly, conducted operation. Madagascar, by contrast, was a disaster, the blame for which was laid squarely at the feet of a series of bureaucratic decisions taken by men unfamiliar with colonial conditions. Yet these adverse circumstances once again tested the Legion's discipline and stamina, as well as its worth as an element of imperial conquest.

  Chapter 13

  “MARCH OR DIE!” — THE LEGION IN MADAGASCAR

  THE MADAGASCAR EXPEDITION of 1895 was the most disastrous colonial campaign of the Third Republic. Orchestrated by a number of interests, which included a clutch of deputies from the island of La Réunion intent upon annexation and Catholics who had never pardoned the Hova monarchy its 1868 conversion to Protestantism, the expedition got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. This need not have been the case, for two months before October 1894, when the French took advantage of a rebellion against Hova rule over the island to present the Malagasy prime minister with a proposal to establish a French protectorate, an interministerial commission had been hard at work planning a military expedition in anticipation of a Hova refusal. So, when in November 1894 it was made official that Madagascar would be forced to accept a French protectorate at the point of a bayonet, military preparations were already well advanced.

  Alas, this did not guarantee their efficiency. The source of the problems, the critics believed, stemmed from the decision to confide the expedition to the army rather than to the marines, which won the Madagascar contract simply because they had underbid the navy for the honor of attacking the “Red Isle” by thirty million francs.1 Although army units had been present during the conquest of Tonkin, and the Legion continued to serve there, army officers had had little experience in colonial campaigning since Mexico. The French foreign minister at the time of the decision to invade Madagascar, Gabriel Honotaux, later excused the mistakes of the war ministry, whose “organization is not made for that, which does not have the necessary contacts with the colonial world so that from one day to the next it can recruit from all over the globe the means which it needs.”2 Due to lack of experience, the army desperately underestimated the requirements of the Madagascar expedition, which helped to explain their low bid.

  Nevertheless, it would be unfair to argue that the experience of other colonial campaigns was totally ignored by the committee that met in August 1894 to draw up a plan of campaign. Nor was their plan necessarily a bad one. In one month, representatives of the ministries of war, the navy, the colonies and the foreign office manufactured an invasion blueprint that, they believed, would require twelve thousand men to overcome a semi-organized Hova army of forty thousand. The objective of the operation was Antananarivo (Tananarive), the capital of the Hova people who dominated the northern half of the island, situated in Madagascar's mountainous interior. Majunga on Madagascar's west coast was chosen as the port of entry. Not only did it offer a large harbor, but also it stood at the mouth of the Betsiboka River, which, when combined with its tributary the Ikopa, provided a navigable route about 160 miles deep into the Hova heartland. Estimates put the number of porters and mule drivers required to support them for the remaining distance to Tananarive at eighteen thousand to twenty thousand. However, it was reckoned that this number could be reduced to five thousand by using the voiture Lefèbre—two-wheeled metal wagons invented in 1886, which came in kits and weighed about five hundred pounds when assembled.3 A final, and ultimately extremely controversial, decision taken by the committee was to depend essentially upon white troops, many of them from metropolitan units, to furnish two-thirds of the combatants, thereby reversing the proportions of white and native troops used in Dahomey. Worse, many of these white troops would come out of me
tropolitan units, which were neither experienced nor acclimatized to campaign conditions outside of Europe.4

  Knowledgeable marine officers criticized this plan almost immediately. Leaving aside for the moment the heavy dependence upon white troops, something that flew straight in the teeth of conventional colonial military wisdom, their objections were essentially two: The first was that Majunga was simply too far from Tananarive, and possibly on the wrong side of the island. The use of other ports on the east coast of Madagascar as a staging area, in particular the commercial port of Vatomandry through which most of the supplies including weapons arrived for Tananarive, would have cut the distance the invaders marched by two-thirds. A combination of Vatomandry and, say, Tamatave or Andevoranto might also have allowed the French to use separate columns to converge from different directions upon their objectives. The second objection was that the invasion force, which, excluding reinforcements sent later, eventually numbered almost fifteen thousand fighting men and seven thousand porters, was simply too large and too heavy. While the Hova army appeared formidable on paper, there were probably no more than ten thousand of them able to bear arms. A light force of five thousand fresh colonial troops, shorn of the impediments of heavy artillery and wagons included by the committee, and backed by eight thousand mules and porters, could make quick work of the Hovas.5