French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  This would have offered several advantages: It would have attracted and conserved larger numbers of men for a French army that was heavily outnumbered by its German rival. It would have improved the morale of these volunteers by providing an atmosphere more sympathetic to their ideals and backgrounds. Last, it would have lessened the spread of resentment, which quickly took over in many of the more nationally homogeneous groups of foreign volunteers. Even a cursory reading of Legion history should have warned the war ministry that the grouping of nationalities was bound sooner or later to lead to discipline problems. “The New York papers do not exaggerate when they say this Legion is a fighting crowd,” wrote Russell Kelly, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, in March 1915. “There are just enough of each nationality so that one country fights another.”64

  Why the government waited until the problems of the Legion had reached crisis proportions to disperse the foreigners throughout the army is an interesting one. They were well aware of the poor reputation of the Legion, and if they had forgotten, the volunteers themselves constantly reminded them of this fact. Yet at first the government stuck to the letter of a law that was an expression ultimately of a distrust of foreigners, of a reluctance to assimilate them. How could many of the volunteers have failed to resent being lumped into this category by a country they had volunteered to serve out of love, loyalty and devotion, rather than because it offered an asylum, perhaps a chance for rehabilitation, a profession, or a livelihood?

  This was even more the case as it became obvious that the Legion was unprepared to make any concessions to the ideals and attitudes of the volunteers. Sergeant Max Niclot, serving with the tirailleurs tunisiens in Morocco, witnessed a striking demonstration of the Legion's attitude toward patriotism on August 4,1914, when the order of general mobilization was read out before a mounted company of the 2e étranger—a Frenchman in the ranks who greeted the news with an enthusiastic shout of “Vive la France!” was immediately slapped with thirty days in the cells.65 As has been seen, this was the attitude that African legionnaires brought with them back to France. Even General Joseph Galliéni, military governor of Paris in 1914, appears to have assumed that these fresh volunteers could be motivated in the same way as their African counterparts. “I knew, by the services that the Foreign Legion had rendered in our colonial expeditions, what one could make of these troops, generally animated by vibrant traditions,” he wrote after a visit to 3e régiment de marche, that of Cendrars, at the Reuilly barracks in Paris on September 9, 1914.66 The collision of two ideals, one patriotic and idealistic, the other professional and mercenary, was a recipe for trouble.

  The first Legion unit to see action was the 4e bataillon de marche of the 1er étranger, a three-battalion regiment entirely made up of Italians, including its cadres, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Garibaldi. At three o'clock on the morning of December 26, 1914, the regiment was awakened and each man given a ration of eau de vie. The night was clear but bitterly cold as the men filed stiffly toward the jump-off point before the Bois de Bolante in the Argonne. Flares sent up from the German positions threw macabre shadows, while artillery rumbled ominously in the distance. Soon flashes appeared on the neighboring hills as the bombardment picked up intensity and acrid, throat-scalding smoke drifted over the Italian legionnaires. Packs were thrown off, and the soldiers filed into the advanced trenches, the officers exhorting their men to uphold the honor of Italy, as German shells began to explode around them.

  The French artillery fell silent. A blast of bugles, followed by a collective shout—“Avanti! Avanti! Viva l'Italia! Italia! Italia!”—mingled with “Vive la République! Vive la France!” The legionnaires helped each other out of the trenches and ran toward the German lines. Nature appeared to be self-destructing around them as bark flew in the air and small trees fell as if snapped by an invisible hand. Soon cries of agony went up, and even the bugle call was cut short by a bullet that entered the horn and severed the throat of the bugler. The first men reached the German barbed wire only to find that the artillery had failed to cut it. This stopped the first wave, or what was left of it, as the men tore at the wire. Soon the second and third waves appeared out of the smoke and twisted through the wire and toward the trenches, some of whose occupants could be seen fleeing to the rear. The legionnaires cleaned out those who remained. The German fire seemed to slacken as the seventh wave of legionnaires arrived. The survivors busied themselves preparing for the inevitable counterattack, collected the considerable number of wounded, and returned to retrieve the packs while German shells sprinkled over the position. After an hour, the Italians were ordered back to their starting point.67

  In January 1915, the Italians were thrown into a second attack. On the 5th, two battalions assaulted German lines at Courtes Chausses after eight mines were detonated beneath the German positions. The Garibaldians seized two trench lines and a number of prisoners. The regiment continued to battle on the 7th, 8th and 9th in the Bois de Bolante. But total Italian losses in December and January amounted to 429 men. In March, the unit was dissolved, and the legionnaires enlisted in the Italian army. The first entry of the Legion into the war had been a bloody one, an experience that was to be repeated by the other Legion units.

  Chapter 17

  1915—TRENCH WARFARE AND MUTINY

  UNLIKE THE ITALIANS in the 4e bataillon de marche, who were pitched into a major offensive virtually straight out of training, the introduction of most legionnaires to trench warfare was a more gradual one. Valbonne, a small village about twenty miles from Lyon, eventually became the center of Legion training. Even by the standards of wartime improvisation, everyone agreed that it was a desperately uncomfortable place—rows of huts in an open field that in winter became a quagmire. Magnus found that the barracks of Sidi-bel-Abbès offered first-class accommodation compared to the lice-infested shacks at Valbonne, and the civilian population that ran the small bars and shops at the edge of the camp were even more rapacious, if that were possible, than their counterparts in the Legion's home town.

  Magnus was also of the opinion that Valbonne offered “absolutely no instruction in anything that could be useful to defend one's life at the front.”1 And while Magnus was so soured on the Legion that he cannot be relied upon as a completely unbiased witness, he may not have been too far wrong. Much time was spent in long marches and in target practice, which might have helped except that the rifle, especially the cumbersome standard-issue Lebel, had been superseded in lethality by the artillery and the machine gun. “The Lebel is an excellent rifle but it is worthless in the trenches,” Cendrars wrote in 1915. “Mud, a grain of sand will block the mechanism and it is far too cumbersome. . . . We went out [on patrol] like poor idiots with our one-shot popguns and this ridiculous metallic scabbard for the bayonet which bothers you in all your movements, gets stuck between the legs when one crawls, rings like a sleigh-bell on the smallest pebble and gives you away with each step.”2 Indeed, trench humor held that while the Lebel was utterly useless in the front lines, it was indispensable in the rear areas, where supervision of its care and cleaning provided employment for NCOs with time on their hands.

  Legion training was complicated by the usual language problems. Russell Kelly reported that during a night maneuver to take a fort, “The sergeant in command was a Frenchman with no knowledge of any language except French, so he had great difficulty in explaining the tactic to us.”3 Magnus complained that the language problem was compounded when, out of frustration, many foreign NCOs began to shout at their charges, transforming their already heavily accented French into complete gibberish.4 The difficulties of making oneself understood were complicated by a constant turnover of training personnel,

  so that, as each one has his own ideas as to the proper way to do things, we men, having learnt at the hands of one man how to use our bayonets, for example, would have to unlearn all we had learnt, and do the same thing in a way that better pleased a new arrival, and this ad libitum,

/>   wrote American volunteer Algernon Sartoris. “It was exercise, however.”5 Cendrars complained that this turnover extended to the front lines: “[Officers] passed through the Legion because that counted as combat duty, but they stayed only fifteen days, three weeks, just to lead a trench raid and try to win a citation.”6 This was perhaps because it was French practice to award a croix de guerre to all members of a trench raid that brought back prisoners,7 a prospect alluring enough to tempt some staff officers briefly out of their comfortable chateaus well to the rear.

  Nor were the officers always tactful. American legionnaire Kiffin Rockwell, who later became one of the heroes of the Escadrille Lafayette, was incensed when he saw a French major at Valbonne insult a group of legionnaires who had been seriously wounded at the front and as a result were being invalided out:

  He told them they were not worth a damn, that they disgraced the Legion, and that they only came here for la gamelle. Now, we have heard that from sergeants and such all the time. But for a commandant to tell men who have ruined themselves for life out of love for France and the principles she is fighting for, I think it is going a little too far. . . . Yet I see these things every day. . . . It is such a disgrace to France for such things to happen that I wish something could be done to stop it.8

  As a consequence, legionnaires who went into the trenches, especially in the early days, had little idea what to expect, a condition they shared with soldiers of all armies. In the late autumn of 1914, veteran Legion NCOs ordered their men to sleep with their boots on and tie their rifles to their wrists in the North African manner, and shouted aux armes each time a few bullets zinged overhead, which was frequently.9 However, they quickly discovered that artillery bombardments posed a far greater threat than marauding Arabs, so that digging became essential. Command posts and kitchens also had to be moved far to the rear after German shells unsportingly disturbed more than one staff conference or adjourned preparations for dinner.10 Cendrars's first encounter with the trenches, which typically took place at night, was a memorable, but altogether typical, one:

  We waded in mud up to the ankles, even to the knees, and glutinous clods, which detached themselves from the lips of the trench when we brushed by them, slid disagreeably down our necks. And, as in a nightmare, we were impeded at every step. One man's Lebel got stuck across the passage, the kit bag of another caught on a splinter-proof shield. These shields formed an obstacle every ten yards. They were invisible in the dark and we banged straight into them. The men were falling about, slithering, swearing, colliding with one another, amidst a great clatter of hardware and mess-tins. It was a case of two steps forward and one back.

  The rain fell, the trenches smelled of “chemicals and carrion,” and the lieutenant urged them forward: “Serrez! Serrez!” (Close up!) “... It was delicious to feel our feet melt, sink into the soft, freezing mud, but when you couldn't move you got scared. Men stopped every ten meters to piss. The column was straggling, dislocated.” Suddenly they heard noises on the far side of the shield.

  A galloping, a tremendous thundering of boots coming straight at us. Voices. A crush of bodies. And suddenly appeared a group of men who pushed us out of the way. No, it was not the Boches! “Move over, you idiots,” they shouted, crushing us against the sides of the trench, hitting us with their rifles and tent poles and poking the handles of their entrenching tools in our eyes. “You bastards the relief? We've been waiting for over two hours for you. We're off. Make yourself at home.”

  Home proved to be

  a chewed-up terrain full of mine-holes and shell-craters, collapsing dugouts, crumbling parapets, disemboweled and scattered sandbags, tangled links of barbed wire, and the shallow beginnings of slimy nauseating trenches. Where were we? There was a terrible stink of shit. . . . “Lie down”, I told my men. . . . “You're a nice chap, corporal. But this place is full of shit!” “It brings good luck! Get some sleep.”11

  The senses struggled to adjust to the eerie confusion of flares, the high whine of artillery shells passing overhead and the muffled thud of explosions in the communications trenches to the rear. Somewhere down the line a cry of “Aux armes! Aux tranchées!” went up, followed by the crackling of a fusillade. A few bullets sang overhead, or thumped into the damp earth of the trench. The newcomers threw themselves down. Some began firing into the blackness, blindly, holding their rifles over their heads. The example was contagious—soon the entire trench was blazing away, wildly, into the air, to the front, the rear (after all, who knew where the Germans were?). The officers and NCOs struggled to regain control of their troops. “Keep your heads down! Don't shoot! Quit firing, damn it!” The shooting slowly died out as the tensions were released, and the new legionnaires realized that their lives were not in immediate danger. Groups of sentries were posted in small trenches to the front. The rest of the night was spent trying to stay awake, and to stay warm. Somewhere in the blackness, a machine gun clanked and sputtered, and the low thunder of artillery rolled as if a storm was brewing over the horizon.

  Life in the trenches hardly lived up to the romantic image of battle that most legionnaires brought with them. But it was not too bad, once one got used to the random explosion of shells and learned to avoid the dips in the parapet where the appearance of a cloth kepi was bound to attract the bullet of an alert German sniper. In many respects, daylight was the most trying time, when the men descended into the black dugouts, jostling and arguing as they settled on the damp straw. Some smoked a cigarette, others ate a piece of bread left over from the evening meal. Most simply huddled elbow to elbow, heads swathed in Balaklava helmets and legs wrapped in blankets, staring at the walls, casually scratching those spots where the vermin were beginning to make their presence felt, “like an animal in a burrow,” wrote Seeger.12 (Later, they would have to get used to sleeping in gas masks.)

  The logs and wattle matting that made up the dugout roof gave off a strong and pleasant odor of wood, almost like Christmas, until a shell shrieked close and exploded, bouncing pieces of stone and shrapnel off the cover above, like a quick splattering of raindrops on a housetop, and filling the hole with the acrid odor of cordite. Gradually the talking subsided, and the men fell asleep, completely oblivious to the shelling outside and to the drone of aircraft above. However, as soon as darkness returned, the troglodytes reemerged and began to crawl over the churned and shattered landscape that sequestered two invisible armies in its folds and crevices. Men set off to fetch the evening soup through communications trenches that often had been obliterated by enemy shelling, while others repaired the wire or slithered out to patrol no man's land. Those on guard stared into the blackness, trying to distinguish movement amidst a chaos of dark forms and indistinct shapes.

  The first meeting between these new legionnaires and the Germans was a salutary one. Quite apart from a poverty of shells and bullets, which often kept the French lines silent while the German ones were crackling with fireworks, Cendrars discovered that “in the little cowboy and indian war which we carried on in the midst of the factory war,” the Germans also had the upper hand. “The German patrols had a lot of bite, being better equipped than ours”—parabellums, grenades, electric torches, rubber truncheons, and flares, all of which were highly prized by the French when they could capture them.13 Seeger agreed that in trench warfare, “the Germans are marvelous.”14 Marvelous, indeed. Kiffin Rockwell confessed that the first encounter between the Germans and a small American contingent of legionnaires did not reflect great credit upon the latter. Guarding a small avant poste situated in the ruins of a chateau with Alan Seeger in early January 1915, Rockwell heard something sputter at his feet:

  We each said: “What's that?” I reached down and picked it up, when [Seeger] said: “Good God! It's a hand grenade!” I threw it away and we both jumped to attention, asking each other what to do, and finally decided for Seeger to go to the petit poste for the corporal, while I watched. Just as he and the corporal came running up, the corporal called, “Ga
rde à vous, Rockwell,” and another grenade fell at my feet. I jumped over the ladder toward the corporal and as I reached his side the bomb exploded. We both called out “Aux armes!” We had no more than done this, when the door gave in and a raiding party entered the side of the opening.

  Rockwell and the corporal bolted for safety, but German bullets brought down the corporal. The Germans stripped the corporal of his rifle and equipment, and then knocked off the top of his skull with the butts of their rifles. “The affair was rather a disgrace for all of us,” Kiffin Rockwell confessed. Nor were the Germans prepared to let them forget it. “About two hours after all this happened, there came from the German trenches the most diabolical yell of derision I ever heard. It was mocking Weidemann's last words, his call ‘Aux armes!‘ and it froze my blood to hear it.”15 Seeger also remembered the German taunts: “from far up on the hillside, a diabolical cry came down, more like an animal's than a man's, a bloodcurdling yell of mockery and exultation.”16

  Yet despite these early confrontations—indeed, in part because of them—legionnaires began to modify their patrol tactics. It was a demonstration that these new legionnaires, like their prewar counterparts in North Africa, were learning how to impose their outlooks on their commanders. Seeger confessed in April 1915 that the patrols into no man's land tried to avoid “useless collisions” with the Germans that only provoked reprisals. One patrol left a POW menu on the German wire as an invitation to desert, only to return on a later night to discover in the same spot a basket of sandwiches, two bottles of Munich beer, cigarettes and chocolate with letters in excellent French to their “Dear Comrades” in the opposing trenches thanking them for their invitation but explaining that they had plenty to eat. Seeger concluded that violence between the two sides had greatly subsided and that he had