French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  After a winter respite, French and Spanish forces coordinated offensives into the central Rif in April and May 1926. On May 27, Abdel-Krim surrendered to the French and, to the bitter indignation and fury of the Spaniards, was exiled to a comfortable estate on the island of Réunion with an annual pension of one hundred thousand francs. In 1947, the French government decided to transfer Krim and forty-two members of his entourage to an even more elegant and opulent exile on the French Riviera. On May 31, when the ship carrying him to France called briefly at Port Said, Krim, in an act worthy of a legionnaire, slipped his surveillance and was granted asylum in Egypt, where he died in 1963.

  The Rif campaign helped to encourage a Druse rebellion in Syria in the summer of 1925. The Druse, a religious sect that broke away from Islam in the eleventh century, had seen their powerful political position in the Levant under The Ottoman Empire erode in favor of the Christian Maronites once the French took control at the end of World War I. The Syrian fighting kicked off with a similar catastrophe for French arms there when a three-thousand-man column composed of Malagasy and Syrian troops was devastated by a Druse attack, requiring the dispatch of a Legion battalion there. Bennett Doty, a native of Demopolis, Alabama, and sometime student at Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia, endured an uncomfortable and tedious voyage from Sidi-bel-Abbès to Syria with legionnaires who were constantly drunk and fighting among themselves, to the point that they turned what was meant to be a formal dockside sendoff in Tunis into a drunken fiasco.

  On September 10, 1925, Doty's unit, the 8th Battalion of the 1er étranger, together with a squadron from the REC, occupied a dilapidated collection of flat-roofed houses organized around a mosque called Musseifré. The cavalry occupied the village, while the infantry constructed six small fortified camps around the perimeter of the town. Six days of building walls and clearing the inevitable landing strip on a limited ration of stinking water had most legionnaires in a foul mood. On the 15th, a reconnaissance sent out by the garrison met strong resistance from a Druse force and had one sergeant killed. Nevertheless, when the heliograph signaled strong forces advancing on Musseifré on the evening of the 16th, many were disinclined to believe it. However, at around three o'clock on the morning of September 17, shots were fired and the French sent up flares that revealed a swarm of men advancing upon the camp.

  At first light, it became apparent that many of the attackers had slipped between the posts into the town, where they had captured many of the REC's horses and attempted to ride out between the infantry posts. It proved good sport for the legionnaires, who first shot down the horses and then killed the riders as they sprinted toward safety. After a lull, another attack poured down the hill toward the posts. Legionnaires, firing from loopholes they had scraped out of the walls, shot into the howling crowd of Druse. “Time and time again the fringe of the charge died within a few feet of the walls,” wrote Doty. “I fired till my rifle was hot and steamed in my hands. Then I threw grenades. Then I fired again.”104 Several of the machine guns jammed, while a grenade badly thrown by a legionnaire in one company silenced a defensive position. This allowed more Druse to infiltrate past the posts into the village, where they began to snipe at the legionnaires from the housetops.

  To Doty, the legionnaires whom he had found quarrelsome and boorish company in peacetime were magnificent under fire, stripped to the waist, cigarettes dangling from their lips, kepis pushed back on their heads, firing their rifles until the attackers reached the wisps of barbed wire strung out before the wall and then pitching grenades into the screaming hordes: “I could hardly believe the change,” he wrote. “It was not only that they were brave, fighting with utmost heroism. But they were patient and enduring, full of devotion and self-sacrifice, helpful to everyone, and obeying every order, not only without a murmur but with a sort of self-immolating alacrity.” His lieutenant walked from man to man, automatic pistol in hand, pointing toward targets and, when the legionnaires hit them, would pat them on the shoulder and congratulate them on their marksmanship.105

  By the end of the afternoon, the lack of munitions obliged the outposts to slow their rate of fire. The legionnaires began to count the minutes when, by their calculation, relief must arrive. Although the ground was covered with Druse corpses, the attackers still approached, but cautiously, in short rushes from boulder to boulder. By the end of the afternoon, the last cartridges were distributed. “A word went around the wall, passed from man to man,” wrote Doty. “ ‘Keep a last cartridge for yourself.’ ” The legionnaires waited for the last charge, which, miraculously, did not materialize. Then the sound of bugles, “as if from the insides of a closed victrola,” could be heard in the distance. The Druse became agitated, and a hail of shells began to slam into the camp, followed by a charge of Algerian tirailleurs in extended order, who swept into the village. The legionnaires fired the remainder of their ammunition into the fugitives who fled the town. “We opened the gates of our redoubt,” concluded Doty, “and strolled out with hands in our pockets.”106

  Musseifré and the siege of Rachaya, which followed on November 19, 1925, when a squadron of the REC made a similar defensive stand against a Druse attack, were certainly heroic actions in the best of the Legion tradition. However, in the end, their success depended upon the enemy attacking entrenched legionnaires. In mobile warfare, the Legion was often less effective, often treated essentially as a backup force. This had been the case in the Sud Oranais before 1914, where even the mounted companies had been developed, in theory at least, as support units for goums. While the Legion certainly saw action in the interwar years, it was not always the unit of choice for commanders.

  On December 20, 1933, one of the best-known Legion officers of the interwar years, Zinovi Pechkoff, wrote to Rollet that he had transferred from Morocco to Syria because “during this entire campaign my battalion was never engaged and neither my officers, nor my NCOs, nor my men, nor me, ever had a chance [to demonstrate] the qualities of the battalion in combat.” While he considered this a personal affront, it also seemed to reflect upon the combat performance of the entire Legion: “I realized that, having been warned against me, my superiors accorded no confidence in my battalion—a situation as unjust as unjustified.”107 A report from the 3e étranger in that year noted that everyone “was a little disappointed to see during these operations that the Legion was given what was in effect only a secondary role, while in the offensives, the Moroccan or Algerian tirailleurs were always in the first echelon,” an observation that seems to confirm Beaufre's account of his experiences in the Rif. The legionnaires “would have preferred taking a more active part in the baroud,” although it acknowledged that its attrition rate on the campaign was one-fifth of the effectives, many of them discipline problems who sought sanctuary in the hospital rather than face a punishment.108 As late as October 1933, the military governor of Paris, General Henri Gouraud, wrote to Rollet,

  you know that in the fighting this year in Morocco, in the Meknès region, a battalion of the Legion was surprised and lost one or two machine guns or automatic rifles. The officers from Morocco told me that this was not the first time this has happened, and none of them conclude that the Legion at present is worth the old Legion. I protested, but I would be happy to have your opinion.109

  Rollet's reply is not recorded.

  The verdict on Legion performance was not uniformly uncomplimentary—Iieutenant Colonel de Tscharner of the 4e étranger praised his NCOs in 1933 for their high esprit de corps and for their conduct under fire, which was “often brilliant, always perfect.”110 However, a 1934 report stated that Legion performance in Morocco was below par, and put it down to the fact that away from the front Legion units were broken up and distributed among various garrison duties. “It is impossible to get the units back in trim, training is neglected. When operations recommence, the units have lost their maneuverability. This is certainly the cause of the exaggerated losses suffered in certain combats.”111 Therefore, the much-prai
sed “oeuvre pacifique de la Légion,” which included the construction of the “Legionnaire's Tunnel” in Morocco and other public works projects to which the Legion pointed with pride, actually contributed to a diminution of the corps’ combat performance, and gave rise to the ironic observation among legionnaires that their unit was merely a uniformed public works company.

  The morale and combat performance of the Legion in the interwar years appear to have been uneven. While the Legion overcame the serious crisis of the immediate postwar years, it continued to be plagued by problems of recruitment and the formation of adequate cadres. Lyautey had written in 1924 that the Legion must have officers

  who have the love of the Legion in their blood, to electrify and enflame the lower cadres . . . those who have the sacred fire and who alone will be the administrators, men of action, leaders of the band and psychologists. Let us place at the head of the regiments and the battalions men of this steel and who shine out, and the Legion will be reborn.112

  They had achieved this to a certain extent, especially in the higher commands. But the system of TOE continued to send into the Legion men poorly prepared to lead units of foreign professionals. “The tool has no bite,” Rollet noted in the early 1920s. “Necessary to reshape and reforge this ‘tool.’ ”113 He and the alumni of the “Old Legion” had succeeded in this task to a large degree. But the Legion machine often proved ponderous and inflexible, able to adapt to the demands of mobile warfare only with difficulty.

  The point to make is not that the Legion was an inefficient fighting unit in the interwar years, that legionnaires lacked bravery or even an esprit de corps. Rather, what becomes clear is that, even in the estimation of many of its leaders, the postwar Legion was going through a period of adjustment, of which recouping its military reputation was only one aspect. Its place in the firmament of French regiments, which had seemed settled before 1914, had been called into question. “The Legion, of all the French army, is at the present time the only troop which is purely professional,” the commander of the 2e étranger had noted in 1923.114 This was both a source of professional pride as well as a potential source of weakness. Hostility from left-leaning governments toward the French army in general in this high renaissance of the “nation-in-arms” was to be expected. However, this hostility extended to the war ministry, which saw the Legion's independent inspectorate abolished after Rollet's retirement in 1935. “This hostility [to the Legion] is obvious in the smallest things as in the most important,” one of Rollet's correspondents complained. “It is distressing.”115

  If all of this were not bad enough, the anti-Legion campaign, which came out of Germany before the war, and which had made such an impression upon Rollet, now spread through sensational novels and films to all countries, including allied ones like America and Great Britain. It threatened even to taint France. The best way to strengthen discipline and morale, as well as to counter an unfavorable Legion image, was to strengthen “traditions,” and to create a public relations network to defend its interests without. Those tasks fell to Paul Rollet.

  Chapter 20

  THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

  IN 1932, A SLIGHTLY nervous Second Lieutenant Marcel Blanc climbed from the train at the Sidi-bel-Abbès station to begin his statutory three months’ Legion apprenticeship. As he walked toward the barracks in the company of the half-dozen lieutenants who had been dispatched to greet him, he quickly formed the impression that this was a town fighting for its Frenchness. At first view, the Boulevard de la République, which led to the public gardens, appeared to be merely an exotic, palm-bordered artery of any small French provincial city. This walk took the young officer past the municipal theater, the law courts, the town hall and the obligatory monument aux morts, modest memorials to civic pride built to the baroque specifications of official Third Republic architecture or, in the case of the new law courts, in an austere classical style perhaps more in keeping with the artistic tastes of the many inhabitants of Spanish origin. The slap of wine bottles upon the zinc-covered bars and exuberant Mediterranean greetings echoed out of the darkened, cavernous cafes that lined the streets near the Place Carnot. Inside, the inhabitants played dominoes, discussed the fortunes of the local football club, which had defeated Philippeville for the North African championship a decade earlier, or discussed the recent disaster at Turenne between Tlemcen and Marnia in which 57 legionnaires had died and another 220 had been injured when their troop train plunged into a ravine.

  But the European activity and architecture of the city center disguised, Potemkin-like, a reality altogether African. The Avenue de la Fontaine Romaine was perhaps an attempt to conjure up a classical, pre-Arab past in the way of justifying the French-led European reconquista of the Maghreb. But the uniformed tourist was invariably disappointed to discover that the avenue led to no Roman fountain at all—in fact, the only structure that predated the French foundation of 1847 was the small kouba, or tomb, of the eighteenth-century Moslem holy man who gave his name to the town. The true cosmopolitan character of Bel-Abbès was revealed on the market day, when native Algerians, members of the town's large Jewish community and Bel-Abbèsiens of European extraction, many of them speaking Spanish, jostled and bargained with the keepers of the temporary stalls set up beneath canvas awnings on the Rue de Montagnac.

  Those disappointed that a town whose name was linked with the exotic image of the French Foreign Legion offered the banal appearance of any subprefecture in France had only to venture north of the grid of streets that formed the European heart of Sidi-bel-Abbès to the section known officially as the “faubourg Bugeaud,” but popularly as the “village nègre” There, between the barracks of the gendarmerie nationale and the Wadi Mekerra, the streets smelled of kebabs and dung, Arabs hustled donkeys laden with impossible loads between the low-roofed houses, and the bleating of terrified sheep in the abattoir mingled with the raucous quarrels of prostitutes.

  At the point in his march where the Rue Prudon, named for the captain of engineers who laid out the town plan, intersected the boulevard de la République, the young officer realized that he was on the Avenue de la Caserne (later Boulevard du Général Rollet), and therefore close to the object of his pilgrimage. An iron gate set in the low wall of an elongated one-story structure revealed a typical European barracks square, so typical, in fact, that the buildings could as easily have been in Paris or Bar-le-Duc as in this Arab heartland. However, in 1932 this square had an added feature seldom seen in French garrisons—a central tree-lined alleyway known as the voie sacrée or “sacred way,” which led from the gate to a large monument. There was also evidence of much building—a new swimming pool and officers’ mess, to be followed by a cinema, a sergeants’ mess and other structures fashioned from the reddish stones of the four town gates, whose destruction had been ordained by the town council in 1927 to make the town center more accessible to motor traffic.

  Colonel Nicolas, commander of the 1er étranger, came out from behind his desk, a hint of a smile brightening his emaciated face, perhaps the first signs of the illness that would kill him two years later. Nicolas had already made his name, together with Rollet and Maire, as one of the Legion's “musketeers.” Blanc thanked the colonel for his Legion assignment, a favor arranged by Blanc's father, a distant cousin of Nicolas, and expressed his eagerness to get to Morocco before the country was completely pacified. Nicolas quickly set him straight: “Well, lad, like everyone else, here you start at the bottom,” he said.

  Then you'll go where I send you, and we'll see soon enough.... Your work will consist above all of paying attention to what is going on, to impregnate yourself with the state of mind which reigns in the Legion, an essentially human, sensitive and therefore interesting world, exhilarating for an officer. You will also read everything you find in the library on Lyautey.

  Blanc was then treated to a short lecture on the national peculiarities of legionnaires and of their unique psychology before he was dismissed. The young officer's initiat
ion into the Legion's mysteries had begun.1

  By 1932, the image of the Legion as a band of romantic outcasts was already well enough established to place Sidi-bel-Abbès on the tourist itinerary before World War I, where German and British travelers came “to contemplate these famous mercenaries about whom so many fantastic stories and legends have been written.”2 As the Legion's place in the public imagination grew in the interwar years, the mysteries that shrouded its collective character deepened. And as it became increasingly the focus of popular attention, so the process of character definition became a very self-conscious one in the Legion. The Legion's myths, heretofore an informal and half-formed collection of regimental lore and vague public perception, were collected, expanded, ritualized and given official status, while its “traditions” were not only codified and standardized, but in some instances actually invented. For this to happen required two preconditions. The first was a leader to coordinate and orchestrate what was essentially an inchoate, spontaneous movement within the Legion to reaffirm and strengthen its distinct identity. This was the role of Paul Rollet, the man often called the “Father of the Legion” because his personality so dominated the corps in the interwar years. But Rollet was more than a “father” to his corps—he was the architect of the Legion's postwar revival, at once its commanding general and its impresario.