French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  In its first action, charging in the face of machine gun fire, across trenches and barbed wire, it had been virtually annihilated. Recruited up to strength again, it had gone on thus through the entire war, depleting almost to nothing over and over again—a sort of sacrificial corps, ever at the worst place.53

  Some estimates put Legion casualties during the war as high as 31,000 of the 44,150 men who served in the Legion, a catastrophic 70 percent casualty rate.54

  There is no doubt that the Legion, especially as part of the Moroccan Division, was given some difficult missions during the war. However, when placed in the context of the entire war, it appears that to call it a “sacrificial corps” would be going too far. It missed the early battles of August-November 1914 that were so costly to the French. And while the Legion suffered heavily in Artois and Champagne in 1915, so did the entire French army, taking over 102,500 casualties in the May 9-June 18 offensives, and more than 143,500 in those of September 25–30 in Champagne.55 And while the attack on Belloy-en-Santerre in 1916 has sometimes been described as a suicide mission, the number of officers and legionnaires actually killed or missing on July 4 and 5, 1916, was less than 9 percent of strength.56 Furthermore, this was the only significant action of the RMLE in a year when the French and German armies were battering themselves to pulp at Verdun and the British army was slogging forward at significant cost on the Somme. In 1917, a year of heavy fighting for the British, the Legion was only twice seriously engaged, the second time at Verdun where French casualties were comparatively light. 1918 was a tough year for the Legion, but so was it for everybody else. Therefore, in terms of the missions assigned to it, to call the Legion a “sacrificial corps” is certainly an exaggeration.

  Nor does the number of Legion casualties appear to justify this accusation. Charges that 35,000 legionnaires died in the war appear to be wildly out of line. The Legion estimates its dead on the Western Front at 4,116 officers and men,57 and its overall casualties there at around 11,000.58 Another 1,200 died in other theaters, particularly in the Dardanelles. Of course, the numbers might be substantially increased if one includes volunteers who subsequently transferred out of the Legion and who became casualties while fighting in other units or perhaps men who, while officially registered in the Legion, never actually served there. The Historique of the RMLE claims that Legion losses were actually fewer than those of many line regiments, that the effectives of the RMLE were only renewed three times while some French regiments “renewed their effectives eight or ten times.” This relatively low casualty rate is attributed to “the exceptional quality of the cadres.”59 It is not really clear how much this argument is worth. In the first place, many of the “renewals” of line regiments were probably the result of transfers, an option denied to most legionnaires after the autumn of 1915. Second, while the Legion did eventually build up what appear to be excellent cadres, it was certainly not the case for the most part through the Artois offensives of 1915. Third, while it would certainly be unfair to claim that the Legion had an easy war, it saw only restricted, if briefly violent, action for three years of the war—1914, 1916 and 1917.

  Legion histories usually concentrate on the successes of the RMLE on the Western Front, and there can be no doubt that these were quite spectacular. This success was undoubtedly one of the accomplishments of Legion Lieutenant Colonel Cot, who was able to preside over the restoration of the morale and professional character of the regiment after the unhappy experiment with the “volunteers for the duration.” The Legion also contributed contingents to the Dardanelles and subsequently the Macedonian campaigns and helped to maintain France's North African empire. However, in a sense it was the triumph of the professional, elite character of the Legion that also pointed up its limitations, the first of which was its failure to integrate the initial wave of patriotic and idealistic volunteers who rallied to France in 1914–15. Of course, this failure was not entirely of Legion making—the great expansion had forced it to accept cadres who were simply substandard, and it was poorly equipped to handle these men. However, the “volunteers for the duration” appear on the whole to have received little better treatment from veteran legionnaires, who made it quite clear that men of their background and ideals had no place there. In other words, they had to adapt to the Legion—the Legion made no effort to adapt to them.

  In terms of their battlefield success, it can be argued that the Legion made the correct decision by fighting to retain its prewar personality, by insisting upon its elite, professional, even colonial character in the midst of the war between nations in arms. However, paradoxically, by increasing its efficiency, it limited its utility. The Legion deliberately denied itself, or squandered, important sources of recruitment in the war's opening months. And while some of those recruitment sources would have dried up in any case as more nations joined the war and reclaimed their nationals, the departure might neither have been so brusque nor so traumatic had a greater effort been made to reconcile these volunteers to the Legion and project an elite, but less cutthroat, image. In this way, the Legion imposed limits on its growth. And because it elected to remain small, it placed limits on its overall utility.

  Most legionnaires, for one reason or another, simply could not be assigned to the Western Front. And while one could argue, as did Lyautey, that the Legion provided a useful function in holding and even extending conquests in Morocco, it is difficult to see how the fighting there contributed in any significant way to the victory over the Central Powers. In the end, the Legion in North Africa, which was most of the Legion, served as a sort of holding pen for hostile foreign nationals, which at least denied their services to the enemy even if this was only a small gain for France. The final months of the war also demonstrated the recruitment difficulties faced by this international force in a world war, even though it had elected to remain small. Rollet continued to conjure up recruits, the majority probably among Frenchmen. Nevertheless, it must have come as a great relief to Rollet, who feared that the Legion would not survive the war, to be able to return to North Africa and the old business of colonial soldiering. But even there, life for the Legion would never be the same.

  Chapter 19

  NEW LEGION, “OLD LEGION”

  THE LEGION AFTER the close of World War I suffered an acute identity crisis. This is hardly surprising, for it was a crisis shared with most of Europe. The war's enormous bloodletting, followed by the political chaos and economic dislocation of the interwar years, translated into a breakdown of faith in many of the values that had guided the prewar world. It was the dissolution of these moral certainties that left much of European society rudderless in an age complicated by fresh, uncompromising political ideologies and economic uncertainties, which historians blame for the “political squalor” of the interwar years—a confusion and lack of resolve in the chancelleries of Europe that eventually allowed Hitler to tip the world into a second global conflict.

  Such a profound shock in Europe's equilibrium was bound to have repercussions for the Legion. Once the dust of the European conflict had settled, it became clear that what was already being called the “Old Legion” had perished in the trenches of Northern France. While the prestige of the Legion at the close of World War I was immense, so immense in fact that the Spanish government sent lieutenant Colonel José Millan Astray to Sidi-bel-Abbès in 1919 to prepare for the creation of the Tercio extranjero in the Spanish army the following year and in 1922 the president of the French Republic, Alexandre Millerand, paid a special visit to Legion headquarters, the cost of the war had been great. “The losses of the ‘Old Legion’ during the war are not compensated for by the glory of the RMLE!” Paul Rollet wrote soon after the war's end.1 For Rollet, the Legion had to be rebuilt from the ground up, for everywhere he saw problems. If the “Old Legion” had disappeared, he believed, then it fell to its surviving alumni to “recreate” it, as part of a process designed to give the Legion stability and secure its future.

  This was especially c
ritical because the Legion would shoulder a far greater role in colonial defense than had fallen to it before 1914. As early as June 1919, General Jean Mordacq, who had served in the prewar Legion and had risen to the post of chef de cabinet for Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, began to lay plans to rebuild and restructure the Legion. “I had great plans and I believed that the time had come, no longer to have foreign regiments, but foreign divisions, including troops of the three arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery—and even engineers),” he wrote.2 In November 1919, the resident general of Morocco, Hubert Lyautey, called for thirty thousand white troops in Morocco, most of whom were to be provided by an expanded Legion whose recruitment should be carried out “with method and tenacity.”3 In 1920, decrees organized cavalry and artillery regiments in the Legion. And although that on the artillery was never completely applied, it did mark the end of the Legion as an exclusively infantry formation.

  The postwar Legion was expanded, restructured and assigned new homes. Sidi-bel-Abbès remained the headquarters for the 1er étranger, which became essentially an administrative center and basic training camp, over the protests of Paul Rollet, who wanted to abandon Algeria altogether and group the Legion in Morocco—in retrospect an ironic proposal coming from a man who later was to transform “Bel-Abbès” into the Legion's shrine and holy city. However, the bulk of the Legion shifted to Morocco. In most respects, this made sense. Not only did the remaining pockets of “dissidence” in the Atlas remain to be dealt with, a task completed only in 1933.4 But also the turbulence in the Spanish zone posed a continued threat to the French protectorate, and in 1925 the Rif War would spill over into the French zone. However, the political advantages offered the Legion in Morocco were probably as attractive as the strategic ones were logical. A protectorate ruled with great flair—and great independence—by Lyautey, Morocco presented the Legion a unique opportunity to gain greater autonomy (and better pay!).

  The 2e étranger left Saïda for its new garrison at Meknès. The RMLE became the 3e étranger under Rollet quartered at Fez from January 1921, while in December 1920 the 4e étranger was created at Meknès before it eventually settled in Marrakesh in southern Morocco. In 1922, the régiment étranger de cavalerie (REC) was organized with its headquarters at Sousse in Tunisia. By 1929, the Legion counted eighteen battalions of infantry, six cavalry squadrons, five mounted companies, and four companies of sappers. In 1930, the three Legion battalions in Indochina, nominally part of the 1er étranger, were elevated to the status of the 5e étranger, while in 1939 three battalions from the 1er étranger and one battalion from the 2e étranger were fused to form the 6e étranger for service in Syria. A 2e régiment étranger de cavalerie was created in 1939, while artillery batteries were progressively organized in the 1930s.

  While the Legion would eventually swell to include over thirty-three thousand men by 1933, the process was a gradual one. Initially, the creation of new units consisted in the main of a reordering of an unwieldy prewar administrative structure of detached companies and battalions. One of the problems of the Legion was that until the Depression brought in an enormous influx of recruits, the new units were chronically understaffed.5 More serious in Rollet's view, however, was the disappearance of most of the veterans after 1919: “The post-war Legion, with too few veterans, is difficult to get into shape,” he wrote.6 Colonel Boulet-Desbareau, commanding the 1er étranger, agreed in December 1920 that the absence of NCOs was a problem, especially as 72 percent of the recruits “come from nationalities who have made war against us.” Yet, he reported, “discipline is perfect. In the opinion of the veteran officers of the Legion, it is better than before. There are far fewer drunks.”7 The “Moroccans,” however, saw it differently. Rollet complained bitterly to Lyautey, in what were obviously shots fired in his war to group the Legion in Morocco, that Sidi-bel-Abbès was creaming off the best recruits for the depot and dispatching to the Legion in Morocco too many discipline cases amnestied at the end of the war and “orientals” from Asia Minor who made bad soldiers. All the recruits were badly trained, while he had been given neither corporals nor musicians.8 Lyautey agreed on December 27, 1920, that, while he was a great partisan of using the Legion to save French lives, the postwar Legion was not the equal of its predecessor, in great part because its troops were “physically depressed or insufficiently developed.”9

  The opinion was unanimous that the atmosphere in the postwar Legion had altered for the worse. The regimental diarist of the 2e étranger recorded in 1921 that the legionnaires, 52 percent of whom were Germans,

  do not seem to have come to the Legion in search of new adventures. The struggle which has overturned Europe since 1914 has sufficiently satisfied the seekers of strong emotions, and the desire to live peacefully while waiting for better times seems to be the main motivating force for numerous enlistments. The legionnaires of this epoch are different from those before the war. They seem more malleable, less drunken, but also more thin-skinned. Their mentality for the moment seems to be that of “transplants,” while before the war we had the “uprooted.” Apart from the food, they are largely indifferent to their surroundings. The rather large number of letters that they write and receive show that they have not broken with their old countries. That is why we receive frequent requests to annul enlistments coming from parents of young legionnaires less than twenty years old.10

  Jacques Lauzière, a French officer assigned to the Legion in the immediate postwar period, expected to rub shoulders with the bronzed lascars described by pre-1914 writers like Grisot, Roger de Beauvoir and Georges d'Esparbès. Instead he was set to command a collection of “adolescents... with hardly any fuzz on their chin,” psychologically unstable, a quarter of whom admitted to being less than twenty years old, and 64 percent of whom were under twenty-five. 73 percent claimed to have exercised a manual trade, 7 percent to have been farmers and 13 percent “intellectuals,” artists or employed in offices. The few old veterans occupied the sedentary jobs in the unit, or spent their time drinking and attempting to sabotage the leadership of the many new officers with no prior Legion experience who, in their view, were applying inappropriate leadership techniques designed for French conscripts, not true legionnaires.11 Indeed, so serious was the recruitment situation that one Legion battalion commander even went so far as to suggest in 1923 that the Legion's sacred five-year enlistment be reduced to three years to draw in “the hesitant, whom the prospect of five years hold back.”12

  The Englishman A. R. Cooper, who had enlisted in the Legion in 1914 and fought in the Dardanelles before transferring to the British army for the remainder of the war, found the atmosphere of the Legion greatly altered upon his reenlistment in 1919. “I soon began to realize that I had made a terrible mistake in coming back,” he wrote. “That conditions were not the same as they had been during the war, and that I had been too young to realize what life in the Legion meant.” Cooper blamed the change in atmosphere principally upon the influx of Russians, refugees from the White Russian armies defeated in the Civil War, who were “bad soldiers, insubordinate, not good fighters, lacking esprit de corps”13 The Russian recruits may have been poor soldiers,14 but they were credited with one cultural innovation in the postwar Legion—the game of “coucou” Apparently imported from Czarist army messes, coucou was a variation upon Russian roulette with the odds of survival greatly reduced. The rules required one legionnaire chosen by lot to step outside while his comrades arranged themselves around the walls of a completely darkened room. The single legionnaire then reentered the room and said “coucou,” while, one imagines, simultaneously taking violent evasive action as his comrades took this as a cue to fire their revolvers in his general direction.15

  The change of atmosphere noted in the post-1918 Legion cannot be blamed entirely upon the Russians, however, who did not begin to appear in significant numbers until 1921, and were only a dominant nationality in the REC, where by 1925 they made up 82 percent of strength. In 1921, for instance, only 12 percent
of the legionnaires were Russians.16 However, Cooper's perspective was not a solitary one. Even Rollet advanced what was on the face of it the curious complaint that the problem with the postwar Foreign Legion was that it contained too many foreigners: “The proportion of French is extremely insufficient,” he wrote. “In the 3e étranger, 9 per cent at present,” against a prewar rate that he placed as high as 50 percent.17 Why an officer of the “old Legion” should lament the absence of large numbers of French is puzzling at first, because by common consent Frenchmen made the worst legionnaires before 1914.18 However, as will be seen, after 1920 Rollet might be forgiven for waxing nostalgic about men who seldom deserted and whose loyalty was never in question. Colonel Marty, commander of the 2e étranger in 1924, agreed that Frenchmen made the least good legionnaires, but “these French form by the qualities of race, by the obligatory attachment to ‘their army’, a counterweight to foreign influences which the preponderance can in certain cases bring about grave consequences (affair Pahl).”19 In fact, throughout the interwar years, the Legion continued to favor Frenchmen in promotion, an indication that loyalty was a primary concern. For instance, in 1934, while only 16 percent of legionnaires claimed French nationality, fully 35 percent of corporals and NCOs were French. The Germans, who accounted for 44.5 percent of all legionnaires in that year, provided only 21 percent of corporals and NCOs. By 1939, the percentage of German corporals and NCOs equaled their strength in the corps—21 percent. But 30 percent of French legionnaires had claimed 41 percent of corporals and NCO slots.20