French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  On the surface, at least, the induction process resembled that of the prewar period, with the difference that the physical examination had been substantially stiffened. Nevertheless, Legion officers complained that the physical examination was carried out by doctors in France “who do not know the Legion and ignore its needs and desires.” As a result, many veteran legionnaires were eliminated while “this filtering allowed doubtful but physically fit elements through, which the regulations concerning annulment of enlistments do not permit us to eliminate.”21 Excessive attention was perhaps paid to the quality of eyesight and especially of teeth, although how rigorously this was enforced is not clear. When the Englishman Brian Stuart appeared for his physical, the sergeant told him he would be rejected as soon as the doctor saw his glasses, but that the sergeant could “square” it for five francs. “I produced the five francs, at the same time wondering whatever kind of doctor could be ‘squared’ with that sum.” In fact, the sergeant “squared” the corporal, who whispered to Stuart the letters as they were pointed to on the eye chart.22 Ferri-Pisani saw a Belgian legionnaire with ten years’ service refused re-enlistment because he was missing a number of teeth: “They blame me,” the old legionnaire complained bitterly. “They pulled my molars themselves at the beginning of my second enlistment before I left for Tonkin. . . .I've made them a present of my ten years!” “Try Versailles,” another counseled. “They are much easier than Paris.”23 A report of the colonel of the 4e étranger in 1933 suggested that a physical examination failed to eliminate unfit recruits who

  rapidly show themselves incapable of enduring the rough life of the bled, missing teeth, used up, psychological misfits, who burden the hospitals and reduce the actual strength, a strength already diminished by the number of men taken away for the benefits of support services.24

  While there is no reason to doubt this assessment, Brian Stuart believed that the Legion might have recuperated more of these men had they adopted a graduated approach to training. Instead, Legion training was, in his view, of the “kill or cure” variety—many push-ups, running up and down sand dunes, “doubling” while carrying a heavier man and the traditional long marches in the intense Algerian heat. This was especially hard on those who had been deprived of regular nutrition at critical times in their childhood, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe during the war when rationing had reached near-starvation levels, or during the Depression when men had eaten only irregularly or insufficiently for months before enlistment.25

  Certain aspects of Legion life remained unchanged, or almost unchanged, from the pre-1914 era. Sidi-bel-Abbès had gained little in charm. What had altered was the ability of fresh legionnaires to savor the few cultural embellishments that did exist. Recruits were given an enlistment bonus followed by an additional sum upon completion of basic training. Englishman Brian Stuart witnessed what was for many their first encounter with cash for some time—one legionnaire, obviously an ex-waiter, slipped the sum deftly into his trouser pocket, saluted and bowed, muttering, “Merci bien, m'sieu” Two Russians “grabbed the money like hungry wolves.” Some men broke into tears, others froze in place as if bereft of movement and had to be helped from the room, while one man rushed through the door clutching his cash close to his breast “as though the Devil was after him.” Few kept it for long. Turned loose on the town feeling very rich indeed and smartly turned out in their new red and blue kepis, the admonition of the sergeant to “Beware of the Old Soldier! Don't drink with him and above all, don't lend him money!” was quickly forgotten. After decades of trying unsuccessfully to keep its soldiers out of the village nègre, the Legion finally bestowed its seal of approval upon three establishments: Le Moulin Rouge, Au Palmier and Le Chat Noir. Stuart found the Moulin Rouge less intimidating, for unlike the other brothels, the completely naked hostesses did not swarm over the customers but remained in the far corner of the room until summoned upon the completion of negotiations between the Madame and the legionnaire.26

  The “old Legion,” or what was left of it, was universally unhappy about the atmosphere of the immediate postwar corps. Georges Manue, who joined in 1921, catalogued the complaints of the veterans, at the top of which was the fact that the bleus held their elders in insufficient esteem, a fact they put down to an unfortunate lapse of standards during the war. In their view, the Legion

  has its tacit laws which it must do its utmost to uphold. These are: the respect for seniority, the concern for the community, sharing, mutual aid, teaching the young ones through rough jokes which they were wrong to forbid. It is only right that the bleu defers to the veteran.

  The new recruits only dreamed of “towns and women,” while the veterans spent their time in the canteen and disdained “civilian life, which is for them something very distant, improbable, like another planet.” An old sergeant told him: “Do like me, never put on a hat. Snuff it in the Legion. Civvy street's not worth a damn. You're never at ease, never free.” But this new breed of legionnaire only bided their time until their enlistments terminated—they wandered aimlessly about their Moroccan garrison towns neglecting to salute superiors. “[The officers] do not react, because the few who are shocked by this laisser-aller feel helpless to correct it.”27 Stuart also experienced the dislike of veterans for new recruits when one legionnaire with twenty years’ service refused to salute him after he was promoted to corporal, which was perhaps just as well, as the veteran had an obscenity tattooed on the palm of his right hand.28

  In view of many, including Rollet, if the atmosphere of the postwar Legion had deteriorated, then the cadres were as much at fault as the recruits. The renewal of the Legion after the war had caused a bonanza of promotion for the newly enlisted. Indeed, it was possible to go from private to sergeant in the early 1920s in one year,29 a rapidity unprecedented in the Legion with the possible exception of the Tonkin and Formosa campaigns of 1885. Young, often inexperienced, the NCOs exercised less authority over their men, relied less upon “informal sanctions” like the beating Flutsch received from his sergeant when he sold his equipment, and rather more upon regulations than had their prewar counterparts. This produced complaints of a “new inflexibility brought to the regulations by a cadre which does not realize what a delicate instrument it has in its hands.”30

  Nor in the view of officers with experience of the pre-1914 Legion were the right men being promoted. Rollet noted that, because few of the foreign recruits spoke French, the requirements of command and administration favored French legionnaires, who “as a result received promotion which was almost unmerited.”31 Military headquarters in Rabat complained in 1924 that corporals and sergeants were selected too often on the basis of university diplomas, theoretical knowledge of regulations or their command of the French language, rather than on their “qualities of character,” and ordered this to stop.32 The absence of experienced NCOs was also a concern for Colonel Boulet-Desbareau of the 1er étranger in that year because of the large number of politicized recruits from Eastern and Central Europe: “A strong discipline has always been required in the Legion,” he wrote.

  Today it is more necessary than ever because of the numerous elements who took refuge there in the post-war period and who must be closely watched (German nationalists or Spartakists, Russian communists, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, etc.)33

  The disappearance of the prewar NCO class was matched by that of the prewar class of officers. After 1918, the army instituted a system called TOE (théâtre des opérations extérieures), which rotated officers from France on two-year tours abroad. This broke up in great part the prewar arrangement where an officer who joined a corps like the Legion tended to remain with it until promotion, extremely slow before 1914, or retirement took him away. Some of these temporary Legion officers, like Jacques Lauzière, found the methods of the old guard of legionnaires decidedly backward and poorly adapted to the new type of Legion recruit, who needed teachers and mentors. Instead, officers lived in the closed circle of the mess, treated l
ike Arab potentates—the “caid”—by their batmen, who fussed after their comfort, content to strike poses and to increase automatically arbitrary punishments inflicted by the NCOs. For their part, old Legion hands condemned the newcomers as having little understanding of the needs of a mercenary corps of foreigners. Rollet believed that “the situation was worse than average for the French army,” and that the Legion was sent ex-POWs, who still harbored bitter resentments against Germans, and men at the end of their careers, “who only dreamed of their liberation.” A three-month course was organized at Sidi-bel-Abbès to initiate new officers into the Legion's mysteries. But Rollet complained that this had actually done more harm than good, for “until now, no one at Bel-Abbès has proven capable of giving to the new [officers] the slightest useful advice about the duties which will fall upon them in Morocco,” and charged that Bel-Abbès was creaming off the best officers.34

  Of course, Rollet, who wished to group the Legion in Morocco, was no friend of the 1er étranger until 1925, when he became its commander.35 However, similar grumbles about the postwar officer corps of the Legion were heard from others of the old guard keen that the Legion reforge its pre-1914 character rather than be seduced by a liberal concept of discipline. Lieutenant Colonel Martin, commander of the 2e étranger, wrote in 1923 that

  There exists at the present moment at the 1er étranger a category of officer that I can only compare to officers of the “National Guard”; They do not move from the Algerian garrisons and let their men go to Morocco or elsewhere without them. On the other hand, the officers and French NCOs only pass through the units in Morocco to the greatest detriment to the moral worth of the soldiers. We will never reconstitute an elite troop in these conditions.36

  Legion veteran Major de Corta wrote in an undated memorandum that lieutenants were sent from Saint-Cyr to command an isolated garrison of thirty legionnaires, a tour of duty something like “fortress arrest.” Too many captains were prewar NCOs, a situation not unique to the Legion,

  without much education, incapable of leading the officers, and above all young officers, ready to be enthused by a dynamic, intelligent and educated leader ... prepared to disdain an aged, unintelligent, and poorly educated man, who cuts his bread on his thumb without elegance. In short, conditions have changed, and I believe that it would render a very bad service to the best school graduates to send them upon their graduation, into the posts currently occupied by the Legion in Morocco, where they would be completely deprived of intelligent and sympathetic direction.37

  French army headquarters in Rabat dispatched a lengthy report in 1924 lamenting the absence of majors with Legion experience, the poor quality of captains and the youth and inexperience of the subalterns.38 In June 1924, Rollet complained bitterly of several of his lieutenants in the 3e étranger. one, “a liar, and lazy, whose incompetence caused the death of 10 legionnaires”; a second, “worn out by alcohol, an unfortunate example to his young comrades and for his subordinates”; and a number of officers “who manifestly cannot bring themselves to accord their confidence to the soldiers a majority of whom are our enemies of yesterday.” He also noted that the detachment of officers in isolated posts had made it difficult to rebuild the solidarity of the prewar Legion officer corps.39 In 1926, Rollet reported that these officers were finding it difficult in isolated Moroccan posts to command legionnaires who preferred to listen to their NCOs.40

  Therefore, if the reports are an accurate reflection of reality, then the postwar Legion appeared to be passing through a period of adjustment. Of course, war weariness and demobilization led to a running down of all armies after 1919. This decline in morale and discipline was perhaps especially acute in the French army in North Africa. When fresh Second Lieutenant André Beaufre reported to the 5th tirailleurs in Algeria in 1923, he discovered that the regiment he had selected with enthusiasm in an impressive graduation ceremony at Saint-Cyr only days before was poorly led and organized. “... The troops were occupied in guard duties and trivial chores, instruction was reduced to a useless routine quite out of touch with what I had been taught at Saint-Cyr,” he wrote. “I tried in vain to introduce a few indispensable reforms (for instance, dividing the company into platoons). But the company commander, who never left his office, said it was hopeless because the sergeant-major was against it.... For a time I lost interest in my job . . .”41

  A situation like that described by Beaufre appeared as dispiriting to a keen young officer as to surviving veterans of the prewar Legion, who retained golden memories of the “old corps” and who nurtured ambitions for the Legion to become the elite professional component of an overwhelmingly conscript army. “The Legion, of all the French army, is now the only troop which is truly and purely a ‘professional unit’, the only one which escapes the crisis (not only ‘periodic’ but ‘continuous’) of the incorporation and training of the [conscript] class,” Major Poirmeur wrote in 1923. “More than the native regiments, more than the colonial [marine] units, it is a separate entity, and must be treated as such.”42

  On the face of it, there seems to have been a contradiction between the ambitions of Legion officers to expand to fill a gap left by the retraction of the old overseas forces after 1918, and their contention that the type of recruit, of NCO, and especially of officer required to people this reconstituted Legion were as rare as hens’ teeth in the postwar world. But while the architects of the postwar Legion were well aware that the process of re-forging the Legion would take some time, they appear to have underestimated the difficulties: “When, in March 1920, I took command of the 2e étranger, it had to be rebuilt from the ground up,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Martin in March 1923. “... Everyone set to work with a will to reconstitute the ‘Old Legion’. I believed that two years would suffice, but alas, we are far from our goal at the present time.”43

  The problems of the postwar Legion were particularly serious given the ambitions harbored by many of an expanded Legion role in imperial defense.44 General Mordacq's 1919 proposal to create a Legion “division” met opposition, and not just in parliament, where French deputies balked at the prospect of an autonomous unit of foreign mercenaries within an army to be composed of short-service conscripts. The major concern of professional soldiers who knew the Legion well, even of those who loved it, was that to organize cavalry and especially artillery units was to court major, potentially even disastrous, problems. The commander of the 19th Army Corps in Algiers, General Niessel, complained in July 1920 that mounting legionnaires would simply facilitate desertion, a warning echoed by General Cottez, who wrote to Lyautey of the “disagreeable complications which would follow the desertions which would inevitably occur” in a Legion cavalry unit.45

  Even Rollet appears to have adopted a remarkably conservative position on the creation of a Legion division. His objections were due in part to a lack of cadres and cash to staff the units already in place, much less to form new ones of other arms. Also, he worried that the creation of units whose cadres were drawn from arms other than the infantry would threaten the cohesion of the corps. The “true Legion,” he argued, was “infantry, in its daily work of conquest, pacification, and colonization.” However, the problem of desertion was also on his mind. The creation of a Legion cavalry regiment in Tunisia, which, in 1920, was agitated by anti-French riots, he argued, would raise the “probability of desertions to Tripolitania.” One also suspects that the creation of a cavalry regiment in Tunisia also complicated Rollet's plans for the creation of a central Legion command in Morocco.

  The hottest opposition was reserved for the idea of transforming legionnaires into artillerymen. Rollet declared this an “error” as “the legionnaire, rather ‘hot headed’, does not have the qualities of an artilleryman.”46 Lyautey went even further in his objections—for the same reason that the British learned not to assign natives to artillery units following the 1857 Indian Mutiny, Lyautey pointed out that desertion with arms of Legion artillerymen could cause serious problems. Citing the 1
908 case when fifty German deserters hijacked a train in the Sud Oranais, he queried the war minister:

  And I ask myself if the famous escapade of this company of Legion recruits who took to the bled with arms and equipment under the command of a German officer in the Oran Division, would have ended so easily had they disposed of a modern tractor pulled battery? I believe therefore in conclusion, that the true, the only normal utilization of the Legion is in the infantry (including mounted infantry). There she is really the queen of colonial battle, the incomparable troop, who never lets down the leader who knows how to command it, employ it, the last reserve which holds when all else fails and whose morale is sheltered from all depressing influences. ... On the other hand we have excellent horsemen and brave artillerymen, and the increase of force which a few legion squadrons or batteries will bring should really not be considered.47

  In other words, the problem of Legion desertion, and of Legion loyalty, caused some of its commanders to doubt its potential for flexibility and organizational adaptability.

  Opponents of the creation of units other than infantry in the Legion did not entirely win their argument. Taking advantage of the defeat of the White Russian armies, whose remnants, many of them Cossacks, began to filter through Constantinople from November 1920, the government ordered a cavalry regiment formed for service in Tunisia—the régiment étranger de cavalerie (REC), which was officially constituted in 1922. It was thought necessary to create a dependable unit of cavalry to replace the Tunisian spahis regiments disbanded after they were contaminated by nationalist agitation.48 Four companies of sappers were also organized, and some Legion infantry battalions were given their own organic artillery batteries.