French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  What became known as the Battle of Moualok or Chellala, though a fairly minor skirmish, was to have fairly profound consequences for the Legion. The battle drove home the by-now obvious conclusion that cavalry unsupported by infantry was vulnerable. Apart from the loss of the Chasseurs, the major criticism leveled at the French methods was their overdependence upon native horsemen organized as goums to provide the main cavalry cover. These goumiers were of such volatility that it was simply dangerous to rely upon them for anything except small scouting parties. When challenged by Bou Amama's horsemen, they rushed back toward the convoy with such speed that they helped to disorganize its defense. Furthermore, the inexperienced eyes of European troops were unable to distinguish friend from foe amidst the swirl of native horsemen—the enemy simply mixed in with the goum and in this way were able to reach their objective virtually uncontested. Even after the fighting was finished, and “the Legion had stacked arms and were congratulating themselves by smoking cigarettes, a group of dissidents led by Bou Amama himself walked through the camel convoy,” read a report to the 19th Army Corps. On the day following the battle, two-thirds of the goumiers were sent home.5 However, commanders were henceforth increasingly reluctant to risk their remaining cavalry by flinging them too far afield,6 leaving their columns “sightless” and decreasing their effectiveness still further. Therefore, something clearly had to be done to provide support for the cavalry; otherwise, the French would continue to be condemned to frustration by their more agile opponents.

  The second important result of Moualok and of the subsequent French paralysis in the Sud Oranais was that the man capable of providing the solution to the French problem was actually dispatched to the Sud Oranais—Colonel François-Oscar de Négrier. An 1859 graduate of Saint-Cyr, veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, where he was wounded at the battle of Saint-Privat and escaped from the subsequent German siege of Metz, de Négrier enjoyed the well-deserved reputation of being one of the army's most brilliant officers. He required every ounce of his imagination to solve the problem of immobility that afflicted the French in the Sud Oranais. De Négrier's solution did not spring full blown, but evolved gradually from December 1881. Initially, he divided the hitherto unitary columns marching in a square formation into an articulated force composed of a convoy proper with its own defense, and a “maneuver echelon” or light group composed of the most mobile forces, whose task was to attack the enemy. Companies assigned to the convoy no longer marched in a square formation, very fatiguing in broken country, but by sections on the flanks. “What a radical change!” Legion Captain Armengaud wrote, noting that this made for a more supple march order and caused far less confusion for departures and camping.7

  The problem, of course, was the “maneuver echelon.” Initially it operated close to the column. However, this structure simply offered a better method of convoy defense and still relinquished the initiative to the enemy. The problem was how to free the maneuver echelon as much as possible from the convoy to give it an independent operational task and a greater range of action. Until this was done, the maneuverability of the French would continue to be determined by the speed, or rather lack thereof, of the heavy convoy. The convoy must cease to be the focus of an operation, but serve merely as a mobile base, a sort of milk cow in the desert, to which the maneuver echelon would return periodically to resupply.

  This was easier said than done. It escaped the attention of no one that the real problem was how to provide long-range infantry support for the maneuver echelon. “The problem is not to move faster,” de Négrier wrote. “But to go further for longer. . . . Fire fights are rare here. We fight with volleys of kilometers. You have to march.”8 De Négrier's first experiment with the mounted forces appears to have been a rather timid organization of fifty-four legionnaires chosen from among the best shots, mounted on Arab mules, who followed the goum and a squadron of Chasseurs d'Afrique as they ranged beyond the immediate vicinity of the convoy to provide fire support should they run into trouble.9 But it worked. Covering 120 miles in two days, this small command fell upon a tribe that little expected the hitherto plodding French to appear out of the blue, burning their tents and making off with four thousand sheep. The column moved to collect them like an aircraft carrier sailing toward the target to gather in its flights, auctioned off the sheep and distributed fifteen francs in proceeds to every legionnaire.10

  The experiment caught on, was imitated and expanded by other commanders, especially after an even more successful razzia or raid near the Chott Tigri netted eighteen thousand sheep, six hundred camels, thirty-six horses and a number of tents and rugs in late January 1882. However, disaster befell a Legion mounted section in April 1882 while it served as an escort for a mapping party operating in the Chott Tigri—cut off from the main body, it tried to fight on muleback and was cut off and massacred.11 This defeat for the mounted companies settled the debate between officers who argued that one mule per man increased mobility, and those who believed that such lavishness simply encouraged mounted infantry to behave like cavalry. If half the force of a mounted company were on foot, then the other half would be forced to dismount.12 The mounted companies were set at 215 men, later raised to 230, with a little over half as many mules and horses for the officers. Other units like the tirailleurs and zouaves, and even a few line regiments called in to help quell the revolt, imitated this experiment with mounted formations. However, after the Bou Amama rebellion died out in 1883, they were quietly disbanded in other regiments, leaving the Legion with a mounted company monopoly.13 Lyautey justified retaining the mounted companies in the Legion because the European soldier

  cannot endure excessive fatigue. In a word, one has to handle him carefully. That is why one can only require of him great efforts of marching by putting him in special conditions. . . . The native soldier, used to the country, acclimatized, hardened to heat, having far fewer needs, above all if one reacts against the unfortunate tendency to Europeanize him, is capable of furnishing on foot, in any terrain, a superior effort, as long as his load is light...

  By creating mounted companies in the tirailleurs, “one gave to this unit more than was required.”14

  NIGHT MARCHES WERE always disliked. The only thing more disagreeable than the hours spent on foot when sandals did little to protect the feet from unseen rocks, thorns and tufts of thyme were those spent on muleback. The forced immobility was especially trying in the hours just before dawn, when a cold wind left the legionnaires shivering in a drowsy discomfort. In this critical period, with nerves sharpened by fatigue, the last thing one needed was for a mule to go down in the middle of the track. Martin stopped to help the rider bring his prostrate animal to its feet. But the beast, part of the machine gun section, refused to get up, even though he only carried a pack of 180 pounds, about thirty-five pounds under the burden, minus rider, carried by the other mules. There was no choice but to unload him, stand him up and reload him once again. The company filed by to the left and right and soon disappeared into the darkness. “Dégagez la piste!”—“Clear the track!”—a lieutenant from the light group of Algerian tirailleurs who followed yelled from a distance. “Can't!” Martin shouted, as he pulled furiously at the tangle of straps and equipment that lay under the mule. “I can't move. I've got a mule down, and I can't get him up.” “I don't give a damn!” shouted the officer. “I'm ordering you to . . .” But before the words were out of his mouth, Martin cursed him as another legionnaire struck his horse across the withers, sending the lieutenant galloping involuntarily up the trail, his swearing becoming less audible as he vanished into the blackness. In garrison this would have earned Martin a few days in prison. But once the lieutenant's anger subsided, he probably realized that everyone's nerves were on edge, and did not bother to locate the legionnaire who had insulted him.15

  A THIRD PROBLEM to which the mounted companies offered a solution was the high dropout rate on the march, which had diminished Legion effectiveness in other campaigns. The problem of t
he Legion was not their fighting qualities: “In full force,” General Trumelet-Faber wrote in 1913, “the Legion shows its superiority.” As usual, the problem was to get it to the battlefield in something like full strength. The Legion was solid under fire and, above all, “she furnishes a considerable moral support to native troops.” But the blistering route marches under staggeringly heavy loads were more than many legionnaires could bear, despite a “constant and excessive pride” that drove legionnaires to overreach themselves in the presence of Arab troops.16 Yet before the mounted companies could solve this or any other of the Legion's problems, it had to be properly employed.

  The Legion's retention of the mounted companies after 1883 may well have had more to do with tradition, to which that corps was becoming firmly attached, than with any clear idea of tactical needs. There were attempts to use mounted companies in the Western Sudan in 1892-93 and in Madagascar in 1895. In Madagascar, the attempt to improvise a mounted company got off on the wrong foot: “Nothing more picturesque than this departure,” wrote Lieutenant Langlois.

  The mules, realizing that they are required to make a new effort, are uncooperative. They stop, bray, refuse to advance, while their unfortunate riders, who are not especially enthusiastic about this night ride, swear at them in the most diverse languages. All finally disappeared in a cloud of dust, and the camp returned to calm.

  But not for long, for during the next day riders without mules and mules without riders trickled back, and the idea was abandoned.17

  In North Africa, where the mounted companies had been born, a shift in strategy had brought about a profound change in their status. After the end of the Bou Amama rebellion, the French adopted a defensive posture on the Algerian/Moroccan frontier that consisted of holding a series of posts manned principally by infantry whose purpose was to prevent incursion by raiders out of Morocco. The mounted companies, originally conceived as a force of pursuit and reconnaissance, were assigned principally the task of escorting convoys between these posts. One of these half-companies was ambushed on September 2, 1903, near a place called El Moungar, as it escorted a convoy southward toward the garrison of Taghit. Those who escaped death in the initial fusillade fought on valiantly all day until rescued by a detachment from Taghit, but not before losing thirty-five killed and forty-eight wounded. Although, as usual, the Legion made a virtue of necessity by hailing the defense of El Moungar as a second Camerone,18 the reports laid the blame for the defeat squarely at the feet of the detachment commander, Captain Vauchez, who was said to be insufficiently vigilant, had chosen his ground badly and had placed virtually his entire escort in the avant-garde.19

  The disaster at El Moungar, like that of Moualok, was paradoxically to revive the fortunes of the mounted companies, perhaps because the defeat brought out their critics. Opponents of mounted companies argued that the enormous amounts of water consumed by the mules, the high price they fetched in North Africa, a price that made them an especially attractive target to the Moroccans, and the fact that, once in combat, the mules were actually a great encumbrance limited their flexibility and meant that the costs of the mounted companies exceeded their military value.20 Defenders countered that they were perhaps expensive, but less so than a battalion of infantry, which was the alternative, and a less effective one at that.21 One of the ways to answer these criticisms was to free the mounted companies from their role as convoy escorts and restore their tactical mobility. But the essential precondition for this was change of strategy, a requirement fulfilled by the arrival of Colonel Hubert Lyautey as commander of the Sud Oranais in the autumn of 1903.

  Lyautey had served as chief of staff to Colonel, later General, Joseph Galliéni in Tonkin and Madagascar, where he had helped to apply Galliéni's “tache d'huile,” or “oil spot,” methods of pacification. An ardent imperialist, Lyautey was firmly convinced of the need to absorb Morocco into the French orb, and believed that the “tache d'huile,” hitherto a pacification technique, could also be adapted to one of conquest in the turbulent and ill-defined conditions of eastern Morocco. Lyautey arranged his forces into three categories: The “mobile elements” were composed essentially of goums led by French officers whose task was to pursue raiders into Morocco and to provide reconnaissance and distant security for posts that Lyautey began surreptitiously to create inside the frontiers claimed, but not occupied, by the Sultan. The Legion mounted companies and “lightened tirailleur” units composed the second-echelon “support elements,” while regular Legion and tirailleur units occupied the bases at Aïn Sefra, Béchar and Ras-el-Aïn (Berguent) from which these units scrambled.22 In this way, Lyautey rescued the mounted companies, and perhaps in the process the military reputation of the Legion before World War I.

  Lyautey made great claims for the success of his “system,” which combined these innovative tactics with economic incentives calculated to draw the dissident Moroccans into the markets he set up in his posts. Unfortunately for the French, Lyautey's reforms did not work well, at least not as planned. His goumiers, recruited mainly from the sedentary tribes of Géryville, lacked the mobility and ferocity of the Moroccan raiders, who almost invariably escaped to the Tafilalt in Morocco. Reduced to virtual impotence by lack of intelligence and mobility, virtually the only option open to the French was to carry out reprisal raids upon nomadic douars in Morocco. Lyautey's economic reforms fared no better—the Moroccans saw no contradiction in trading with the French one minute and plundering them the next. What was more, by drawing trade away from traditional interests in Fez and Marrakesh, as well as through his policies of encroachment into the Sultan's territories, the French reaped a whirlwind of rebellion in 1908.23 Ironically, perhaps, this allowed the mounted companies to come into their own, but in ways that were not foreseen by the tactical theories of de Négrier and Lyautey.

  In the spring of 1908, a large harka or war party of Moroccans organized in Eastern Morocco. French forces, divided into three columns, marched out of Algeria to converge on the harka from three different directions before it could strike at Béchar, its intended target. On April 14, 1908, the 24th Mounted Company of the 1er étranger, accompanied by a small contingent of native spahis, settled into the small oasis of Menabha, in the valley of the Guir, about eight miles from the position of the harka. Menabha was pleasant enough by the standards of the Sud Oranais— plenty of water, a few palm trees and an abundance of stones that the legionnaires immediately began arranging into a defensive wall, taking care to avoid the scorpions that invariably lurked beneath, in preparation for the arrival of the column. Around five o'clock in the evening, the legionnaires on foot, tirailleurs, zouaves, a battery of small 80-mm mountain guns and a convoy of eight hundred camels filed into the camp to await the order to attack, which would come as soon as the other columns were in position.

  However, the harka hardly intended to leave the initiative to the French—at ten minutes past five o'clock on the morning of April 16, Legion Sergeant Charles Lefèvre of the mounted company was awakened by shots fired at a distance from the camp. Instinctively he slipped from his tent to join a line of legionnaires who lay prone along one face of the camp square. Almost immediately a heavy fire erupted from the hill overlooking the camp. Fortunately, in the predawn obscurity it was aimed at the line of white tents behind them. Nevertheless, a few legionnaires began to groan as bullets struck them. As the legionnaires lay on the ground staring outward into the darkness, they could hear a loud clamor behind them. But before they had time to react, a line of ghostly white figures began to appear to their front. Soon the camp was overrun with Moroccans. In the pandemonium, Lefèvre rushed back to his tent to rescue his savings account book. He passed through the line of dead, dying and panic-stricken mules to join a redoubt organized by the mounted company behind their feed sacks. The lieutenant ordered him to carry a wounded legionnaire to the aid station, which he did, dodging through a hail of bullets to the ambulance, which itself was in the center of the fighting—a Moroccan who had been shoot
ing the wounded through a tear in the tent had just been killed.

  When Lefèvre joined his section, which was engaged in a lively bayonet drill with the enemy, he could see in the growing light that the face of the square occupied by Algerian troops had been completely broken (to be fair, a section held by forty-seven legionnaires of the 2e étranger had also been submerged and forced to retreat into the camp), admitting a torrent of Moroccans. This situation was salvaged by two initiatives. First, a section of seventy-five legionnaires from the mounted company, supported by the artillery, assaulted the hill overlooking the camp. Although they were subsequently given high marks for excellent fire control and good use of ground, the crest was taken only after ten legionnaires were killed and seventeen wounded, largely because they had been so heavily outnumbered.24 Second, in the camp, the Moroccans allowed their pillaging instincts to get the better of their discipline. This took the pressure off the defenders, who retired to organize a counterattack that succeeded in driving the Moroccans from the camp, but only after the sun was well up. “Our aggressors now flee in front of us, and we kill them at point blank range,” Lefèvre recorded in his diary.

  The chase continues for about two kilometers from the camp. All around one only sees the white burnouses billowing in the wind in a desperate flight. We shoot many of them by adjusting our distances just like on the firing range. The wounded get no quarter. They are mercilessly finished off with a bullet in the head or a bayonet thrust in the chest. In any case, they await death with a fatalism which characterizes them.... Pity is absent from our hearts at this moment.

  They then sat down among the cadavers to have some breakfast.25

  Lefèvre called Menabha a victory, which it undoubtedly was in the narrow sense that Moroccan losses had been estimated at over 100 men. Still, the French had been utterly surprised even though they knew they were in the presence of a superior force. Their failure to secure the high ground above the camp with anything greater than a small post cost them dearly—Lefèvre estimated French losses at 50 dead and 120 wounded. The mounted company alone counted 19 dead, mostly from the assault on the hill outside the camp. And while they had covered themselves with glory— indeed, the column commander announced to the captain commanding the mounted company that “It was your company that saved the situation”26— this was hardly the task for which they had been designed. Besides, the losses in mules had been substantial, while the Moroccans returning to their villages and douars laden with pillage propagated the view that they had actually won a great victory, and this swelled the support for those who preached a holy war against the French.