French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Those in authority were charged with being fair but firm in discipline. But more, “You will know by heart perfectly the history of our Old Legion, and inculcate with love the centenary traditions to your subordinates. You will also tell them of the countries where [the Legion] has fought and the battlefields where it made itself illustrious. You will name for them the main heroes and will comment on their acts.” The objectivity of this history is thrown into serious doubt by the insistence that “Never has the enemy been able to claim that he made the Legion retreat nor resist its bayonets. Never has the Legion abandoned its dead, its wounded, its arms or its matériel to the enemy. Never has a legionnaire surrendered to the enemy.”120

  The third was to step up surveillance of legionnaires. Cooper insisted that a sort of informal secret service existed in the Legion in the early 1920s, and that he was asked to make reports on the sutlers in Morocco, many of whom were Moslems and as such were suspected of informing Moroccan dissidents of operations, of buying weapons from legionnaires, and of encouraging desertion. He was also asked to send in reports periodically on the state of morale in his company to a sergeant operating out of the hospital at Sidi-bel-Abbès.121 Orders were sent out to each regiment in the early 1930s to “exercise surveillance over NCOs and legionnaires in their relations: with their countries of origin; with the civil population and the local communist organizations. Several elements classed as ‘doubtful’ have been under a particular surveillance.”122

  Finally, on February 17, 1937, “The Intelligence Service” of the Foreign Legion was formally organized. Its mission statement insisted that the Legion was a potential refuge for dangerous elements and vulnerable to foreign agents who might try to undermine its morale: “The morale of this troop can vary with the international situation ... the attitude of certain elements and their relations with their countries of origin are worth special surveillance.” It was also given the mission to seek out foreign spies planted in the Legion, or to recruit legionnaires who might spy on the enemy. It was also to centralize all information coming from Legion units and pass it on to the intelligence service of the General Staff. The Legion intelligence service included the Bureau des statistiques de la Légion étrangère (BSLE) at Sidi-bel-Abbès, commanded by a major, with an adjutant who spoke fluent German, and three NCOs, “preferably French, polyglot and offering all guarantees.” Its job was to carry out postal censorship, centralized intelligence including that on foreign armies (presumably obtained from interrogating foreign legionnaires), and provide information on legionnaires soon to be released who might make suitable agents. Beneath the BSLE was the Service d'immatriculation de la Légion (SIL), whose job it was to control recruitment, “to interrogate recruits in an in-depth manner,” with a view of eliminating undesirable elements. It also helped legionnaires reintegrate into civilian life.123

  But while some sort of surveillance was no doubt necessary in a corps vulnerable to desertion and even to treason, the presence of mouchards or “grasses” in the ranks caused problems. “The use of these informers was notorious,” wrote Liddell Hart, “and though it may have been justifiable for security reasons, the system of espionage and denunciation was abused for all kinds of personal reasons.” Some flaunted their power, real or imagined, to denounce other legionnaires, which sometimes earned them beatings.124 Simon Murray, who came from an upper-middle-class background, was told by his company sergeant that his promotion to corporal had been blocked by the BSLE because they could not figure out “who I am and what the hell I am doing here.” 125 So much for Beau Geste!

  The interwar years were decisive ones for the Legion, not the least because it pulled off a triumph of public relations in the process of confirming, once again, the unique mercenary character of the corps. If achievement can be measured against intentions, then Rollet and others who set out in 1919 to recreate the “Old Legion” may be said to have succeeded brilliantly. Although this official campaign of character affirmation was in part a response to what the Legion saw as a deliberate attempt at character assassination orchestrated by Hollywood and popular novelists, in fact the contribution of those elements was essential to the success of the Legion myth. Not only did this myth contribute to regimental cohesion and the fighting potential of the unit. It also served to bring the Legion to the attention of a broad public, to romanticize it and in the process to justify it as an institution that serves a human ideal.

  The myth of the Legion, to which Hollywood and P. C. Wren contributed as well as Rollet, allowed it to survive and prosper. By codifying and dramatizing its sense of personality, the Legion was able to maintain an even keel in the treacherous waters of the interwar years and World War II. The twin functions of exile and rehabilitation made it a “natural” refuge for Nazis after 1945. Its military reputation permitted the French to cheer it on the Champs Elysées, caused Germans and other foreigners to show themselves willing to enlist and die in its service, and even pardoned the rebellion of certain of its members against President Charles de Gaulle in 1961. “Essentially the Legion is a legend, an idea,” wrote Adrian Liddell Hart.

  It exists in the situation of the moment; it responds to a challenge. It is influenced more by what people think it is than what it has been. . . . Its survival is due at least as much to its human mystique as to any military genius.126

  However, the successful re-creation and institutionalization of the “Old Legion” was a weakness as well as a strength. What the myth had achieved was the triumph of an intentionally anachronistic vision, the prolongation of a nineteenth-century image of the Legion as a relatively small band of white men doing battle with people of color on the distant frontiers of the empire. It was in these conditions that the mercenary spirit best survived, when ideologies and competing group loyalties could be submerged into a common sense of being European in an alien world. Yet this corps with its obvious preference for Germans and insistence that it was a tight brotherhood with special psychological needs requiring special qualities of leadership had responded sluggishly to the challenges of integrating foreign volunteers in 1914. And while it had eventually achieved glory on the Western Front, it had also created conditions that threatened its recruitment and continued presence in France by the late summer of 1918.

  In the final analysis, one may wonder if it were wise policy, and one in French interests, to define an esprit de corps for the Legion in terms that were almost defiantly anachronistic in the ideologically polarized world of the 1930s. Was this not to fit the Legion into a straitjacket of the mercenary mentality at the very moment when nations, as well as many of the Legion's recruits, were staking out their positions in even more ideological terms than in 1914? Rollet had certainly re-created the “Old Legion.” But how would this revivified “Old Legion” adapt to the renewed challenges of world war? “When war breaks out between the countries: Germany, France, England, all the others, the Legion has a tough time staying herself, with the volunteers for the duration of the war,” wrote legionnaire Giulio Cesare Silvagni, in terms that recalled the attitudes of veteran legionnaires of 1914. “There are some good ones. That's for sure. But they have not known the bled.”127

  Chapter 21

  “CAUSE FOR HOPE” — THE LEGION IN THE FALL OF FRANCE, 1940

  THE YEAR 1940 MARKED FRANCE'S military nadir. The collapse of an army regarded by many as the best hope for the defense of Western democracy was so stunning that even its German conquerors were caught by surprise. Paradoxically, perhaps, the Legion could look back with some satisfaction upon a year that witnessed the humiliation of the French army, for the foreigners in French service had fought well when ail was collapsing around them. On the one hand, a sound battlefield performance was perhaps to be expected from a corps that took pride in its character as a professional unit in an overwhelmingly conscript force. However, one of the ironies of 1940 was that the Legion that took the field against the Wehrmacht was very much a modified version of the “Old Legion” that had been reconstituted so
meticulously by Legion officers and propagandists from the wreckage of World War I. Many of its members were reluctant legionnaires, while the more traditional Legion formations were upstaged to a degree by the performance of a group of patriotic volunteers and political refugees hastily transformed into legionnaires.

  The decision of the French government to ghettoize foreign volunteers into specially created units brought on many of the problems of adaptation, confusion and misunderstanding that had characterized the incorporation of foreign volunteers in 1914. However, the confrontation between the professional legionnaires and the volunteers for the duration of the war was more acute in 1939–40 than it had been in 1914, for at least two reasons. First, the Legion was more self-consciously “professional” by 1940, while, second, its recruits, most of whom were refugees from the ideological confrontations of the 1930s, were more aggressively political. While many of the volunteers of 1939–40 came forward to serve France as they had in 1914, many also saw enlistment in the French army as a means of continuing the struggle against fascism that they had begun elsewhere. As France was in the front line, it was the natural place to fight a war heavy with ideological and moral content.

  As in 1914, this situation naturally brought about a head-on collision between the ideal of France as the standard-bearer of democracy and international justice behind which all right-thinking men should rally, and the reality that this meant service in a unit whose mercenary and even brutal image had been extended and confirmed in the popular mind in the interwar years. To be fair to France, the tradition of asylum had been placed under serious strain, especially since 1938. An avalanche of refugees from the Spanish Civil War had joined the flow of Jews and others out of Germany, which soon turned to a flood as Hitler intensified policies of political repression at home and marched his regiments into Austria and eventually Czechoslovakia. German police would often transport their Jews and political undesirables to the French frontier and fling them penniless over the border. In a country already suffering from the economic problems of the Depression, these people could not possibly be absorbed into the work force. However, gathered in internment camps such as those organized for the hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees in the south, they cost the French government vast sums of money that it could ill afford. Furthermore, many, especially on the right, saw them as a potential security threat.

  If the decision to place foreign volunteers in the Legion, or at least in separate foreign regiments, was in effect simply the continuation of a policy of nonassimilation that had been followed by the government before the war, it was to have two consequences for the Legion. The first was to introduce politics into Legion life, a process extended by the Gaullist/Vichy split in the Legion in 1940. It became difficult for the Legion to maintain its ideal of a professional force aloof from politics when many of its recruits were passionately political: “Divided between partisans and adversaries of Hitler, the Germans discovered themselves to be antagonistic brothers ready to kill each other,” wrote Charles Favrel of the political debates that broke out in the barracks.

  The Hitlerites said they weren't going to fight, while the “antis” declared themselves volunteers for the front and made pronouncements which would have brought tears to the eyes of President Lebrun [president of the Third Republic]. . . . The Spanish ex-militiamen stirred up the discussions by mixing in fascism and Franco, the Czechs took on the Sudeten Germans, the Poles denounced both the nazis and the reds, Hitler and Stalin, but everyone abused the two or three Italians who had not yet decided which side to be on.1

  The second problem was in many ways a corollary of the first. While it certainly would be going too far to say that the Legion experienced discipline problems or even a crisis of morale in 1939–40, it was nevertheless true that the volunteers for the duration of the war were less amenable to traditional Legion methods of indoctrination, which they believed to be unacceptably anachronistic, regulations and practices fashioned for men of another era and another mind-set. Consequently, as in 1914, the relationship between the Legion and many of its new recruits would be marked by friction and even distrust.

  LEGION TRADITIONALISTS HAD been struggling to maintain the professional equilibrium of their corps even before 1939 brought a deluge of foreign recruits into its ranks. Violent fluctuations in recruitment that began in March 1932, when the government, in the throes of the Depression and desperate to economize, ordered a 25 percent reduction in strength, made it difficult administratively to keep the corps on an even keel. By 1934, enlistments barely topped 1,000, down from a 1931 high of 7,081, and numbers had retracted from over 33,000 men in 1933 to 20,445 men by 1935. With war looming in 1938, Paris reversed its policy and began to encourage enlistments, even to the point of placing advertisements in foreign newspapers, sending money to organizations of Legion veterans abroad, alerting frontier police to be on the lookout for prime recruitment prospects. Yet Franco, Hitler, and to a lesser extent Mussolini proved to be far better recruiting agents than even the French police. By 1939, the number of German political refugees, many of them Jews or left-wing opponents of the Nazis, coming into the Legion was substantial. The end of the Spanish Civil War in that year witnessed the enlistment of 3,052 Spaniards, most of them refugees of the defeated republican armies. In March 1939, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, which produced 801 Czech volunteers, among them Charles Hora. “You must enlist in the Foreign Legion,” the Czech military attaché in Paris told him, “because you will find no work in France. What's more, this will permit you to rejoin later the national Czech forces, when the war breaks out.”2

  The general mobilization of September 1, 1939, which coincided with the German attack upon Poland, inundated Rollet's “Old Legion” with new arrivals. Although a law of April 12,1939, allowed foreigners resident in France for ten years to enlist in French line regiments, either many of the refugees did not qualify or the military administration chose to apply it in an eccentric and often arbitrary fashion. A further decree of December 29, 1939, permitted citizens of neutral countries to enlist in a restricted number of regular French formations,3 another ministerial pronouncement that appears to have been dead on arrival largely because the war ministry undercut in private the pronouncements it made in public. A ministerial note of November 13, 1939, cautioned against the incorporation of “undesirable elements whose loyalties are sometimes suspect” into French regiments, and suggested that these positions should be reserved for foreigners with special skills.4 However, even skills desperately needed by the French army were often not qualification enough to secure a place there. For instance, French intelligence officer Gustave Bertrand was forced to enlist Spanish and Polish cryptographers expert in German codes into the Foreign Legion before he could use them because “civilians were not allowed in the temple” and no other option was available to them within the French army.5

  In 1939, as in 1914, the French again demonstrated their deeply ambivalent attitudes toward the foreigners who volunteered to defend them. “[The foreigners] invaded the recruitment bureaux, eager to join the army and defend France,” wrote Joseph Ratz, a Russian emigré, who volunteered for service in 1939, only to be confronted by functionaries who “wandered among the administrative formalities, legal paragraphs and restrictions imposed upon foreigners.”6 When many Jews of Polish origin who had lived in France for years came forward to serve, they were directed toward the Polish army in exile, only to find that Jews were not welcome there.7 Refugees of more recent date were also victims of confused policies— French police carried out frequent identity checks, and offered men of military age without enlistment papers the choice between enlistment, expulsion or internment. The internment of “undesirable aliens” was permitted from November 2, 1938, and its scope was extended in December 1939. However, many foreigners who attempted to enlist found recruitment bureaus closed to them. In part this resulted from the fact that the French army simply could not cope with the numbers of volunteers, so that refugee organizati
ons established lists of potential recruits as a gesture of good will, as in 1914.8 Others were declared undesirable: On September 8, 1939, the war minister ordered Germans, Austrians and Italians excluded from the French army, as well as Czechs unable to prove their nationality.9 The ban on German and Austrian refugees was lifted in October, when they were allowed to enlist in the Legion. Also in October, the Italian consul at Toulouse complained that Italians living in the South of France were being pressured into the Legion: “It seems that a certain state of mind has caused some mayors or police to pressure several people of Italian origin to make them enlist,” read a September 21,1939, report, which pointed out that the French were upset when mobilization often forced them to close their businesses to the profit of those run by Italians. “Sometimes the population also pushed the transalpines to enlist through fear of harassment or even of violence.”10 Officially, 639 Italians enlisted in the Legion in 1939, many of whom military officials feared were communists.11