by Phil Keith
Despite the slaughter and the horrors he witnessed, Bullard was fond of the camaraderie he experienced during his time with the 3rd Marching Regiment. In a very real way, his service in the 3rd granted him another kind of racial harmony, as he had found in Paris after his long sojourn to get to France. He was treated no different in the 3rd than any other man, no matter the race, religion, or nationality of any Foreign Legion member.
The regiment consisted mainly of Belgians, Italians, Greeks, Russians, and, of course, Frenchmen. There were, perhaps, two dozen blacks, mostly American. Jews mixed with Muslims, Catholics with Protestants, atheists with agnostics. The officers came mostly from the Paris police or the Sapeurs-Pompiers (Fire Brigades). The noncommissioned officers, the corporals and the sergeants, were generally men with previous military experience, most of them hard-bitten current or former Legionnaires.
Bullard served with farmers, butchers, firemen, policemen, barbers, bakers, and shopkeepers. He also soldiered with some American idealists who felt the United States should be engaged in the conflict. Kenneth Weeks, an engineer who had graduated from MIT, was one who felt that way. There was a Harvard-educated journalist by the name of Henry W. Farnsworth; Russell Kelley, the son of a very wealthy Wall Street broker; and Edmond C. Genet, a great-great-grandson of “Citizen Genet,” the first French Revolutionary minister to the young United States. All of these idealistic comrades served with Gene and all would be dead, killed in action, by the end of 1917.
* * *
Along the Western Front (as it was then being called) in the spring of 1915 the Germans held an arrowhead-shaped salient protruding from a line linking Reims to Amiens. This salient had been formed in late 1914 and by the following April its existence was a severe threat to communications between Paris and all of northern France. General Joffre, commanding all French forces in that sector, along with British General Douglas Haig, believed the salient to be such an obstacle to their future plans that they determined it must be eliminated. Taking back the salient would also give the allies the advantage of being able to cut crucial German rail routes, thereby striking a paralyzing blow to the Central Powers in the region. That was the grand plan, seen from the perspective of the topographical maps spread across the conference table, where the generals strategized, safely ensconced in their châteaux, far away from the ferocious fire of the battlefield.
Seen from the opposite or “grunt’s eye” view, the plan that Joffre and Haig concocted seemed to be a relief from the murderous madness of the trenches. As always, of course, the men doing the dirty work had to be careful about what they wished for. Bullard and his comrades were abruptly yanked out of their purgatory and ordered to a large rest area behind the lines. They were allowed to sleep in canvas tents for several days, on cots with real sheets, which may not sound like much luxury, but compared to the trenches it seemed like a suite at the Ritz in Paris.
The men of the decimated 3rd Regiment were given hot food, clean uniforms and replacement equipment, including, for Bullard and his crew, a brand-spanking-new Hotchkiss. This munificence could mean only one thing to the war-wise Poilus: they were being “fattened” for yet another major offensive and the slaughter that would likely come with it.
The historians would dub the follies that occurred over the next three weeks as the Second Battle of Artois. For Eugene Bullard and the men of the 3rd Regiment, it would be their worst nightmare yet.
The Artois Ridge stretched across a wide plain and in the center was the village of Souchez. The Germans had the advantage of months to set up machine-gun positions, intersecting fields of fire, artillery positions and supporting trenches. In retrospect, it was madness to try to take that salient without additional support, such as the type that could be gained from tanks and aircraft. Sadly for the 3rd, the tank would not be put into action on the Western Front until 1916 and the airplane was, at that time, being used almost exclusively for reconnaissance—not bombing or strafing.
In the spirit of putting their best feet forward, and perhaps to enhance the chances of immediate success, the Foreign Legion’s toughest veterans, and all the experienced officers, including the colonel commanding the 3rd, went over the top and across the plain in the first wave. The division commander, Colonel Pein, went down immediately, mortally wounded. The commander of the Moroccan Division, Colonel Gaston Cros, fell dead next. Bullard’s regiment stayed behind, at first, as a ready reserve, but the German machine guns slaughtered the best of the Legion in vast swaths, so they, too, were soon tossed into the maelstrom.
The commandants of three of the 3rd’s four battalions were dead in minutes. Captain Boutin, leading Bullard’s company, was nearly cut in half by a burst from a machine gun, and fell across a strand of barbed wire, hanging there like a carcass at the butcher’s shop. The bullets ripped the air all around Bullard, but he kept running forward. He expected to die any second.
The survivors grew fewer and fewer. There were no officers to lead them and precious few sergeants remained to guide them. In small knots and tattered groups the soldiers would surge forward a hundred yards, fall flat to the ground behind their packs, and try to catch a breath, using their knapsacks—and the dead—as shields. In this fashion the Legionnaires methodically moved forward, firing as they went. Somehow, by dusk, they had covered seven miles although they had lost more than half the men who had started the day. Thankfully, the Germans had seen enough and began retreating.
The surviving Legionnaires were jubilant, but not for long. Ironically, they had done too well. Their headlong plunge into the hated salient had outstripped their supply lines. Worse, the replacement battalions that were supposed to be moving up behind the main lines were not ready to step off. The Germans, sensing the hesitation by the French, rallied. Supported by their reserves, they pitched back into battle with the exhausted Frenchmen.
The depleted French regiments gave back nearly half their gains. Only total darkness prevented the counterattack from turning into a rout. Gene and his comrades were furious. They had sacrificed so much only to give a great deal of it back. At roll call that night, fifty-eight men answered up. Bullard’s company had started the day with two hundred fifty.
At some point during the day, a piece of shrapnel had smacked into Gene’s brow. It was a very minor and glancing blow which did little damage, thank goodness, but like most cuts to the head, it bled profusely. Gene hardly noticed during the melee, but later that evening his comrades pointed out that half his tunic was drenched in blood. A bandage was applied and the seepage stopped. Gene was officially and literally bloodied by the war, and his wound would qualify him for the Wound Medal,3 the first of many decorations he would acquire.
The savage back-and-forth combat raged across the Artois Plain and the village of Souchez all through the months of May and June. Neither side gained any appreciable advantage and the slaughter became a brutal war of attrition. During one attack in June, which involved storming what had been designated as Hill 119, the French and German forces met each other face-to-face on the western slope. The hand-to-hand combat was desperate. Bullard swung his overheated rifle like a club, and when it shattered, he used his powerful hands to squeeze necks and gouge at eyes. There were so many men fighting in the German trenches that when some died they remained upright until there was room enough to fall.
All through this terrible time, the Legionnaires battled not only the Boche but sleepless nights, terrible food, constant dirt and filth, trench foot, the stench, and unsanitary conditions beyond the imaginable. Yet they had “fuel.” Despite the madness of yet another futile charge across machine gun–swept fields, the Poilus did it over and over again. Was it patriotism? Certainly, to some degree, it was. Was it fear of shame or punishment for refusing orders? Those, too, had to be factors, but many of the men, those who managed to survive, gave credit to their “tafia.”
Tafia was a type of cheap, distilled rum that had not been aged. It was most
ly made from sugarcane and molasses, but also sometimes from grape skins or raisins. No matter, it was well over 100 proof and so powerful that it temporarily boosted a man’s morale and his insanity quotient to a level that was off the scales. Eugene Bullard described many instances when he and his fellow soldiers were issued a generous tot of tafia before a charge. Once downed, a man became bold, loud, a little crazy and able to perform the kinds of suicidal acts that were to become commonplace.
The Foreign Legion soldiers also had an esprit de corps that is reflected in one of Bullard’s Hemingway-like recollections: “We were just a big family of fifty-four different nationalities, and we kept growing more diverse as the men were shot down. We all loved each other and lived and died for each other as men should.”
In mid-July, the 3rd Marching Regiment was finally pulled off the line for good. It wasn’t much of a regiment anymore; in fact, there were barely enough men for a full company. It is remarkable that it existed at all—in just two days in May, for example, the fight for the Artois Ridge resulted in the French Army losing 175,000 men killed, wounded, or missing.
The 3rd was given a valorous unit award for its service, then disbanded, with the remaining Legionnaires integrated into the famed and much more prestigious 1st (Regular) Regiment. Bullard was proud but saddened by the enormous sacrifices the 3rd had made.
* * *
As his new regiment rested and reequipped, Bullard’s previous life in America came into a renewed and unwanted focus. His father, William Bullard, who was still living in Columbus, Georgia, had somehow discovered where his son was and that he was a Legionnaire. It has never been made clear how the elder Bullard found out what his son was doing and where he was. Perhaps the discovery came via a fight card or a poster that filtered back to Georgia, or it could conceivably have been a clipping from an expat newspaper in London or Paris. In any event, the truth about the nineteen-year-old Gene’s whereabouts had finally been revealed to his family back home.
William sent a handwritten letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing at the US State Department in Washington, DC. In it, he pleaded for his son’s release from the Foreign Legion on account of him being “under age.” William somehow had the mistaken impression that Gene needed to be twenty to enlist. The note was politely answered by a low-level deputy who sent his reply to Columbus, Ohio, where it had to be rerouted to Columbus, Georgia. William was told the State Department would “look into it.”
Undeterred, William sent a second letter, this time typed by a local lawyer he had hired, accompanied by proof of Gene’s birth date and a picture of the young boy. This time, the letter got to the desk of Lansing himself, who passed it on to William Sharp, the American Ambassador in Paris. Since there was no bar to Gene having enlisted in the Foreign Legion at age nineteen, the matter seems to have been dropped at that point.
For Eugene Bullard, already a grizzled veteran of war, there was no going back. There was only the future, as short as that might turn out to be. For his father, there was only the wondering if he would ever hear from his “lucky” seventh child again.
Gene Bullard mentions this incident in his personal autobiography, but what he does not tell us is whether he responded to his father or to the State Department. Our sense of it is that he preferred to leave his past in the past and move on.
* * *
1 The Yankees who joined before him were already far ahead in their training and were assigned to the 2nd Marching Regiment.
2 St. Cyr, established in 1802, is the French equivalent of West Point in the United States or Sandhurst in Great Britain.
3 The Wound Medal is akin to and roughly equivalent to the United States military decoration the Purple Heart.
6
THE BLACK SWALLOW OF DEATH
The ebb and flow of battles and the decimation of units continued for the balance of 1915. On October 9, Eugene Bullard celebrated his twentieth birthday. The Legion Marching Regiments had been so badly cut up that it was decided that reconstituting them made no sense. At this juncture, Bullard and all the other Americans in the Foreign Legion were offered a choice: they could stay with the Legion, within the single Moroccan Division remaining; transfer to the North African units that had been left behind;1 or they could transfer to a regular French line regiment, the 170th Infantry.
Only a handful of the Americans opted for Africa—these men would still have to complete their five-year obligations but at least they would be out of the trenches. About fifty of the Americans opted to stay with the Moroccan Division. Bullard and about three dozen others decided to transfer to the 170th Infantry Regiment, a storied unit of great reputation and numerous heroic deeds. The soldiers of the 170th had fought alongside the Legionnaires in many of the battles of the last year and a half. With a ceremony and a parade, Bullard and his comrades transferred to the 170th in November and traded their Legion khakis for French Army blue.
The Boche knew the 170th well, having fought against them on numerous occasions. The Germans had even given the regiment its nickname: “The Swallows of Death.” In German folklore, the swallow has a significant place in death rituals; thus, the sobriquet. Once Bullard became a member of the 170th, he was instantly dubbed the “Black Swallow of Death,” a little twist on ethnic humor, perhaps, but also recognition for his fearlessness in battle.
Bullard was beginning to amass what would become an impressive array of military awards and decorations. For his service in the 3rd Marching Regiment, he earned a fourragère, which is a distinctive military cord worn on the left shoulder of the uniform tunic. He had the Wound Medal, as previously noted, and the Volunteer Medal. He was promoted to Soldier First Class, a rank just above the very bottom rank of Soldier Second Class, and just under the rank of corporal.
From November 1915 through the following February, the 170th conducted training maneuvers in the area of Somme-Py (today: Somme-Tahure), a region in the Department of the Marne in northeastern France. The ranks were beefed up with replacements and new equipment was distributed. Decent food was available and there was a daily ration of local red wine. For a brief period, Bullard and his brethren could set aside the horrors of war, but they all knew it was only a matter of time until the next call to the front was sounded.
That call arrived on February 20, 1916. The men were told to pack up and move out. The 170th was marched to the local train station and loaded aboard a long string of rail cars. The men were amused that, for once, they weren’t marching to their next destination, but when they heard where they were going, the mood became somber. The train’s ultimate destination was Verdun.
* * *
The Battle of Verdun was almost beyond comprehension in terms of its scope and the casualties it generated. The struggle lasted a grinding eleven months, not ending until December 1916. It was one of the costliest battles in human history, tallying an estimated seventy thousand dead or wounded a month, almost equally divided on both sides.
The Central Powers strategy, as expressed by the chief of the German General Staff, General Erik von Falkenhayn, was to “bleed the French white.” Falkenhayn believed that his troops could outgun, outfight, and outlast the French. The Germans massed thousands of artillery pieces on the heights surrounding Verdun, directly opposite France’s main battlement, a pentagonal-shaped escarpment known as Fort Duaumont. The artillery fired over a million shells at the French in the first ten hours of the battle.
For the French, and their commander, General Philippe Pétain, the issue was not only strategic, but a matter of national pride. As mentioned previously, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 had dealt the overconfident French a crushing defeat. In a few short months, Napoleon III had been captured and the Germans marched into Paris. The French Army could not—would not—allow itself to suffer another humiliation like that at the hands of the Germans. Besides, a defeat at Verdun would practically guarantee an open road for the
Boche to take Paris again, and then gobble up the rest of the country. For the French, this was unimaginable and totally unacceptable, at any price.
As a result, a seemingly unstoppable force met a stubbornly immovable object. The German guns pounded everything. They obliterated the forests surrounding Verdun, they churned the ground into slippery, oozing pools of clay, they killed tens of thousands of French soldiers, and they drove thousands of others stark raving mad.
They didn’t destroy everything, however. What the Germans failed to understand was that even tossing millions of shells at your opponent was like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. The fly was more nimble, so the Poilus survived, many by leaping into shell craters that were still smoking because the likelihood of another shell falling into the exact same spot was low...or, at least, not very likely.
When the German guns stopped firing, the infantry came charging, only to be mowed down by the efficient French 75mm howitzers and thousands of machine guns, like Bullard’s. As soon as a French regiment lost 50 percent of its men, it was withdrawn and a new regiment was sent to take its place, bringing renewed firepower. All in all, the ensuing cycle of death was utter madness.
Into this cauldron of fury marched the valiant 170th Infantry, including a machine-gun company commanded by a well-liked officer and ex-fire battalion chief named Captain René Paleologue. The company’s ranks included its newest corporal, Eugene Bullard, having been promoted again, and his machine-gun crew of two. The unit was posted in the village of Vaux, on the very front lines, and less than two kilometers from the heavily besieged Fort Duaumont. The 170th was replacing the decimated 42nd and the “Swallows” came up with the 174th which was to replace the 44th. It was February 23, 1916.