French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The denial of these “other pleasures” was also a consequence of low pay. In North Africa no woman with a reasonable hope of marriage or even aspirations, however remote, of social respectability would be seen dead with men so degraded as legionnaires. “A question asked of a woman by a legionnaire never received a reply, whatever the question was,” Flutsch recorded. “The woman took on an offended air as if she asked herself what in her attitude or in her dress could have encouraged this man to ask that question, even if it was simply the time of day.”128 Therefore, outside of Indochina and in the days before the BMC [Bordel Militaire Controle], young and virile men found few outlets for their sexual energies. Flutsch was advised to masturbate “when it itches too much.... It isn't with your daily pay, which you need just to pay for your soap, that you are going to treat yourself to a harem.” There was a rather robust Toulousaine well past her prime at Géryville willing to copulate for a legionnaire's modest pay.129 However, Merolli claimed that prostitutes attracted only a few “old hands not too careful about their health.”130 Even the establishment of the BMC in the interwar years was a dubious perk that in no way substituted for higher pay. Any resemblance between a visit to the plump and overage North African women who inhabited the BMC and sexual gratification was purely coincidental. On payday especially, the emphasis was definitely placed on volume rather than customer satisfaction: “Come on, you! Your turn! Give duro [money]! Hurry! Not here to waste time!” Those who turned to the girls of the casbahs ran “terrible dangers,” Martin believed. “All or almost all were rotten to the bottom of their carcasses. And then in Islam, jealousy is not a literary concept. A knife in the back cuts short grand debates of conscience.” Still, he admitted that when legionnaires returned from a column, they tended not to be too fussy.131

  Flutsch believed that enlistment in the Legion was the surest way to avoid an amorous adventure.132 This was not quite true. One of the consequences of the absence of women was homosexuality. This was not a major problem in the Legion, but it did contribute to the lower moral tone about which there were many complaints. Some confirmed homosexuals came into the Legion from the penal units after 1900, and these could be vicious. Flutsch was warned to watch out for them in the depot at Saïda,133 where they were generally known as “musicians.”134 Béric believed that homosexuality was most common in the remote posts of the Sud Oranais where “inaction and boredom stimulate the force of desire; promiscuity facilitates approaches; ambient immorality excuses it.” The young soldiers—“les girons” or pretty boys—were the usual victims. Most legionnaires, he believed, who indulged in homosexual practices were pushed to it by force of circumstance. But it created a bad atmosphere, broke up friendships and “gave birth to sentiments of distrust and disgust” that could lead to desertion and even suicide.”135 Premschwitz claimed that homosexual couples were common and that a Legion corporal in southern Algeria committed suicide “because his darling cheated on him.”136

  In short, higher pay would have gone a long way toward improving the discipline and the moral health of the Legion, and by extension its combat performance. It might also have improved its image, for Rosen believed that it was the legionnaires themselves who, exaggerating the difficulties of service in their letters home, were in part responsible for the poor opinion of the Legion in the public mind.137 But there was little chance that Legion pay would be raised by a parsimonious government that probably calculated—correctly—that it would increase expenses while making no difference to recruitment. The colonialists, the very people who should have represented Legion interests in this matter, were no doubt sensitive to complaints of the cost of empire and the diversion of defense funds away from the metropolitan army. They had also put their parliamentary and journalistic influence behind the marines, which, as has been seen, actually benefited from the poor conditions of service in the Legion. Clément-Grandcourt added that a raise in pay would make for bad public relations, because the enemies of the Legion would claim that they were bought men,138 a rather perverse argument as at the very least a decent wage would disarm those like Rosen who complained that the Legion was a speculation in human misery.

  In the end, the verdict on the Legion before World War I must be one that combines admiration, horror and ambivalence in almost equal measure. Admiration because of those salvaged by the Legion, for its unique asylum, for the sense of dignity and purpose it gave to the lives of outcasts and exiles, men who believed that “I never slept with lady luck.”139 Generally speaking, its discipline was strict but fair and more easily understood than some of the impersonal forces that appeared to control their lives on the outside. Legion life sometimes made extraordinary physical demands on its soldiers, but then European working-class life was no bed of roses either before World War I. Flutsch found that his comrades had “the spontaneity of children” and “a certain rectitude which guides them. Here, there are no intrigues like everywhere else. If they never drank wine, they would always be very good company.”140

  But it is difficult to know if drink was a cause or simply a symptom of a deeper institutional malaise that showed the Legion's dark side. Asylum and rehabilitation there were, perhaps, for those who had the strength of character and the desire and capability to better themselves. For those lacking these basic qualities—which, unfortunately, was most of them—the Legion too often presented a smorgasbord of temptation, an atmosphere detrimental to the very rehabilitation it claimed to offer, which was not offset by the moral leadership of officers and NCOs in sufficient numbers and quality. Even officers who knew and admired the Legion—and here was the horror—admitted that it shattered as many lives as it saved, perhaps more. At its worst, the Legion might become a maw that too often mangled good intentions and condemned potentially excellent soldiers to years in discipline sections through neglect or because they were not paid enough money to afford simple human pleasures. And there were enough legionnaires who were, in Frederic Martyn's view, “queer in the upper story”141 to make the Legion at times even a dangerous place to be, especially for those less well able to defend themselves. Even Flutsch, who, of all authors, gives the most sensitive appreciation of the Legion before 1914, had to admit that he led something of a charmed life, without which he might easily have come to harm.

  For these reasons, the ambivalence follows quite naturally. For those who best knew them, legionnaires possessed an almost schizophrenic personality—aggressive yet sentimental, intemperate yet generous and sociable, men deeply wounded by life, in constant need of comfort and companionship, but who at the same time “ignore fear and know how to die, because they scorn life.”142 Flutsch argued that each regarded his softness as a character defect and did his best to hide it: “Each one wore a mask of indifference or of hardness which veiled an acute sensitivity, something to be hidden at all cost,” he wrote of his comrades. “In their view, only the less virile could be moved by suffering or a fall from grace, be touched by remorse or regret.”143

  Yet this was the hand the Legion had been dealt. In the absence of reforms that might have improved the quality of recruitment and discipline, the Legion still had one arrow in its operational quiver—the mounted companies.

  Chapter 15

  THE MOUNTED COMPANIES

  THE MOUNTED COMPANIES provided a solution to some of the Legion's problems, the most obvious being those caused by the uneven quality of Legion recruitment. Aristide Merolli believed that the soldiers of the mounted companies were “l'élite de la Légion... a very severe choice, a true selection... vigor, endurance, good conduct are rigorously required.”1 Legionnaire Jean Martin had certainly found the mounted companies difficult to penetrate in 1931. Kept back at Sidi-bel-Abbès to train recruits, his repeated requests to be transferred to a mounted company had been refused. He could escape from the training unit only by threatening to commit a punishable offense. But life in a field company at Colomb-Béchar in the Sud Oranais, though better than square-bashing at Bel-Abbès, hardly fulfilled his dr
eams of touring the bleak frontier regions between Algeria and Morocco on muleback. Instead, the monotonous routine of the worksite was broken only by evenings spent drinking small glasses of stiff Algerian rose “Chez La Mère Rachel” or in one of the town's other bars, until one day he learned that the latest reinforcement for the mounted companies was a few men light. He hurried to the company office and cajoled the corporal into placing his name on the waiting list. Within what seemed only hours, he was bouncing about in the back of a lorry traveling east to Bou-Denib, the Moroccan post that guarded the arid eastern foothills of the High Atlas.

  The first day out had been a test. The mounted section, composed of a lieutenant, two sergeants, four corporals (of which Martin was one) and fifty-five legionnaires, had covered over fifty miles, changing places every hour on their twenty-nine mules. The second day had been a relatively short hike of thirty miles, almost a day off by the mounted company standards, but the lingering fatigue of the first day had made it an ordeal for Martin. The third day had been bearable, but it took almost three hours to find the well among the shifting sand dunes. “You've seen nothing yet,” the veteran Corporal Leroux explained. “Wait till you see tomorrow's march ... 24 hours without water.... Night march over the hammada.”

  As the single file of men and mules climbed the steep paths worn by goats, Martin could only think of the high, arid plateau, the redoubtable Hammada of the Guir, that he was about to cross. “When you've crossed the hammada,” it was said, “you can call yourself a veteran of the mounted company.” By the time the group emerged onto the summit, the sun was a blood-red trace on the horizon whose light was reflected in the crescent moon that glowed out of a blackening sky. But even in this failing light that briefly warmed the earth to the color of faint pink, the hammada appeared bald, brooding and inhospitable as it stretched limitless as a desiccated sea to the horizon. The march slowed to avoid damaging the hoofs of the mules on the large ink-black stones. The men on foot, their rifles strapped across their backs, moved to the sides of the column to avoid the dust kicked up by the animals and carried by a wind that now rose cold out of the dark plain. Those on muleback swayed in a fitful slumber, virtually immured among the sacks of oats, cooking pots and tents arranged across the backs of their mules. Every hour a whistle followed by the command “changez-montezl” caused a brief halt as a new rider mounting from the right extended his hand to be pulled into the Arab saddle by his partner from the mule's opposite side.

  At midnight, the “grande halte” was called. Each man contributed some of his water to make coffee, which soon brewed over small fires that had constantly to be blown into flame. The mules were unsaddled only after an hour to avoid chills and allowed to remain unsaddled for an hour before the march resumed. Soon the sun rose into a sky bleached of color, which rapidly became so heavy with heat that it seemed to hang menacingly over the heads of the silent soldiers. Those on foot moved forward with stiff, wooden steps that betrayed increasing fatigue. At every command of “changez-montez!” they drew long draughts from their canteens, if, that is, they were not already empty. A mule faltered and had to be unsaddled and left behind. Before the day was out, four others were abandoned in the same way. The weariness felt by the legionnaires was more than physical. The hammada cast a spell of profound melancholy. It offered no concessions to the senses, nothing upon which the eye could rest—no wisp of gray vegetation, no fold of ground—nothing but a lugubrious plain over which stones lay sprinkled like peppercorns on an enamel plate. Martin moved forward with difficulty, his mind obsessed with a vision of a glass of cold beer, which was at least as real as the lakes that appeared on the horizon only to vanish when approached.

  Near midday a veteran spied the small pyramid that marked the point of descent. As they reached the edge of the plateau and stared down over a landscape that, though brown and uninviting by European standards, appeared positively idyllic to these legionnaires, every eye searched out the small spot of greenery that marked the wells of Berbatine. Alas, the only water there proved to be a small puddle of green liquid upon which floated the bodies of dead rats—it was so repulsive that even the few horses in the section, less resistant to thirst than the mules, refused to drink. The lieutenant called a two-hour halt. The last water reserve was poured into the cooking pots. Martin was so exhausted that he collapsed onto the ground. Meridja was still over twenty miles away. He did not know if he could make it, especially after dining on salted “monkey meat” and sweet coffee. But, dismounted like everyone else, he plodded through the valley of the Wadi Guir, sinking up to his ankles in sand with each step, his throat on fire. He now regretted pouring the remaining drops from his canteen—the last of the parsimonious allocation of two liters of water per man per day—between the lips of his mule. He had been half-moved by pity for the poor beast, whose face was almost as contorted from suffering as his own, and half-motivated by a desire to play the hardened veteran.

  By sundown, the group mercifully had moved out of the sand onto firm ground—at least they could mount up again. “After we cross that hill, it is only one more hour to the post,” someone said. One more hour! Martin felt he could not last one more minute—the straps of his Arab sandals cut into his feet, and his throat was so parched that words, even sounds, no longer came from it. The stumbling of the mule was sheer torture. Martin took a cartridge out of his belt and fiercely, almost uncontrollably, stabbed his mule in the back of the head with the pointed end. The stumbling drove him mad. He was no longer capable of pity. A martyr himself, he sought to martyr the poor beast who shared his agony.

  Finally a flare shot skyward, arched back toward the earth and exhausted itself. At the foot of a gara—a low, flat-topped hill—that marked the end of the valley, Martin could just discern the square silhouette of Meridja. He was feverish, his back and neck stiff, and he felt as if he carried a cannonball upon his shoulders. Nevertheless, Martin rejected an offer from another corporal to oversee the watering of the mules. He could not speak; he could hardly stand. Yet he could not report to the infirmary, for that would eliminate him for sure. “Come on! Let's have a drink!” One of the veterans was looking at him. “You're OK. You're just tired. It'll pass. You held your own pretty well for a greenhorn.” “Don't stuff yourself with quinine.” A second veteran was talking to him. “Take some aspirin, drink some hot wine and go to bed. Sweat it out, get a good night's sleep and tomorrow you'll feel better.” They did not have to say more. Martin knew that he had made it, that he now belonged to the “tribe.”2

  * * *

  THE SECOND SET of problems that the mounted companies helped to solve was the tactical one posed by fighting in North Africa. “For a long time now, experience has taught us that the principal factor in the success of our colonial wars is the rapidity of movement,” wrote Captain Hélo.3 But although the problems may have been obvious, the solution was often less so, especially in the bleak frontier regions between Algeria and Morocco where Arab horsemen moved like quicksilver, evading almost all attempts of the more ponderous French to entrap them. Rapid marches by the infantry were exhausting and often even counterproductive. The cavalry had two choices—either utilize their mobility to the full by moving beyond infantry support and thereby inviting destruction, or play it safe by staying close to home and relinquishing the initiative to the enemy. Earlier attempts to organize mounted infantry in Algeria to bridge the tactical gap between infantry and cavalry had foundered basically on a lack of sustained interest. For this reason, the conquest of Algeria had been transformed essentially into a war of attrition where the native Algerians had been hammered and starved into submission.

  However, in the Sud Oranais this tactic was less effective. In the first place, the population of Arabs and Berbers was largely nomadic and offered targets that usually moved too fast for the French to hit them. Second, if pressed, they need only drop back into the quasi-security offered by Morocco. Pursuing French columns, even if they chose to violate Moroccan territory, were us
ually fractured by the most effective of all enemy arms—the sand seas of dunes, waterless valleys and featureless hammadas of the Sud Oranais. The shortcomings of French forces hit home hard in 1881 with the Bou Amama revolt. French columns sent to apprehend the holy man struck into thin air—most of the time. On May 19, 1881, a column that included a battalion of the Legion discovered dismounted Arabs holding a pass five hundred meters wide between two rocky hills. The infantry, including the Legion, rushed forward to attack it, leaving the convoy guarded by three squadrons of Chasseurs d'Afrique. The ruse of counting for success upon the impetuosity of the French worked to perfection. The Arab horsemen then swarmed upon the convoy, killing most of the Chasseurs and pillaging with commendable thoroughness. By the time the infantry could fight their way back, the convoy was a wreck, seventy-two French soldiers were dead, twelve were missing and fifteen were wounded.4