by Douglas Boyd
The fine-sounding title of the light cavalry corps known as the Chasseurs d’Afrique, created in November 1831 just before the arrival of the Legion, concealed a similar problem that led to two mutinies in its first three years, ending with executions of the ring-leaders and cashiering of officers considered responsible.
The unrest in the soldiery mirrored that in metropolitan France. In cycle after cycle of strikes and bloody repression, even the rag-and-bone men of Paris struck to protest against organised garbage collection. With a national census numbering the population at 32,500,000, a new law enfranchised anyone reaching the tax threshold of 200 francs per annum, thus doubling the electorate. Branding with hot iron, the pillory and cutting off the hand of thieves were abolished on 28 April, but the increasing liberty of the citizen at home had little effect in occupied Algiers. The conditions under which European soldiers served there were appalling, starting with the poor food and Napoleonic uniforms with high black shakos quite unsuitable for the heat of the Maghreb summer. Disease was rife, especially malaria and dysentery, but in France too the cholera epidemic was claiming up to 13,000 lives in one month, with black tea recommended as the only cure.
In the fashionable salons on the banks of the Seine, gossip was not of such depressing subjects, but the astounding revelation of the identity of author George Sand. Madame Aurore Dudevant was a liberated woman who dressed as a man on occasion, had left her husband and openly flaunted the lover whose name she had borrowed to get her first newspaper articles published in Le Figaro. Her first novel Indiana was about . . . a free-thinking woman who abandoned her husband to find true love.
When Napoleon’s only son known as the Young Eagle[94], died outside Vienna in the palace of Schönbrunn on 22 July, the Legion was long gone from its vandalised palace at Mustapha. The organisation of its battalions on notionally ‘national’ lines – which did not stop most of the men in 6th Dutch-Belgian Battalion being German deserters who had entered France over the Belgian frontier – led to inter-battalion fighting so violent that the commanding general in Algiers, Duke René Savory of Rovigo[95], had to break them up into small detachments to avoid ‘one drunken brawl touching off an insurrection’.[96]
With tribes constantly feuding outside the immediate areas of the few towns occupied by the French, when emissaries of the Sheikh of Biskra were killed by hereditary enemies while en route to treat with him, Rovigo ordered the massacre of every man, woman and child in the tribe responsible. Accustomed to European warfare, where such deliberate atrocities were no longer usual, the more thoughtful legionnaires must have asked themselves to what hell they had been consigned.
By the end of a year in North Africa, when it was honoured with the award of its first regimental banner, the Legion numbered 3,168 men, of whom the inspecting general opined on 1 December 1832 that the ninety-four Swiss, mostly from the disbanded Bourbon Guards regiments, were ‘zealous’; the ninety-eight Belgians and Dutch were ‘good soldiers’, as were the nineteen Danes and Swedes and eighty-five Poles. The ten Englishmen had ‘little known’ about them; the 571 Italians were ‘aloof and jealous’, and he considered that the eighty-seven French had only joined for more rapid promotion than they could expect in a regular army unit. The root of the Legion’s problem, he concluded, lay with the high number of German-speakers. These 2,196 men were, in his words, ‘. . . deserters or political refugees, medical students, lawyers or notaries of a worrying imagination. They must continually be watched’.[97]
They were presumably also better at sums than the general. But what was he complaining about? Apart from the Swiss and some of the Poles, most of the others had not chosen a military life. For political reasons they dared not return to their home countries. With France not having enough work for its own people, the Legion was the only employment they could find.
It was all very well for Rovigo to declare that the problem lay with ‘a hundred or so bad characters, deserters from various armies, who require close watching’.[98] He believed that leaders ‘who knew how to lead men could soon create an esprit de corps’,[99] but what officers and NCOs could have produced first-class soldiers from such unsuitable material?
After his December 1833 inspection, Gen Voriol commented that 6th battalion at Annaba had regular uniforms but the others still had not. He castigated the French Legion officers for using ‘insulting and disdainful expressions’, which incited ‘resistance and insubordination’. Regimental pride, he said, was non-existent, drunkenness endemic, the turnover of troops too great, with no one intending to re-enlist once his three years’ service was completed.[100]
Many military units with poor reputations in peacetime first pull together and earn the approval of their critics when under enemy fire. The Legion could never build esprit de corps that way because it was constantly split up into small detachments, confined with other troops in a series of blockhouses built to warn of raiders approaching Algiers. What news from France reached them was of a country riven by widespread strikes threatening to bring down Louis-Philippe’s tottering government. The Assembly was regularly split on many issues including the occupation of Algiers, while the French population in general cared not a jot for this travesty of an Empire that contributed nothing to their wellbeing. Had Algiers been worth having, they concluded, the English would probably have grabbed it in the first place, given their other interests in the Mediterranean.
On 1 April 1832 Col Michel Combe took command of this unhappy regiment. Less than a week passed before he found out the realities of war in Africa. Learning that many legionnaires had already deserted from at least one previous army, the El Ouffia tribe, in whose territory a blockhouse called Maison Carrée had been built, openly welcomed Legion deserters. On 6 April 1832 Sgt Muller of 3rd Battalion informed Maj de Musis that two Bedouin had offered him and a comrade asylum, presumably in return for their weapons. The three men pretended to take up the offer, but played a double game and led a large detachment to the tribe’s camp, nearly losing their lives when the subterfuge was discovered just before the attack went in. In the resultant massacre the Legion killed sixty-eight members of El Ouffia. Two genuine deserters found in the camp also died. The loot, allegedly valued at 10,000 francs, was distributed according to rank in the normal way.[101]
The day after the massacre, a revenge attack was beaten off, but on 3 May near Maison Carrée twenty-seven legionnaires and twenty-five Chasseurs d’Afrique commanded by Maj de Musis were caught in an ambush. The Legion was not issued rifles until 1854 and the muzzle-loading muskets they had in 1832 were accurate at a maximum range of one hundred metres, being viable only when used for disciplined volley firing by men who stood firm, with one rank aiming and firing at the mounted enemy armed with lances and camel-hide shields while the other re-loaded.
This engagement began badly, with Musis abandoning his men and riding off with the cavalry, ostensibly to get reinforcements. Under the command of a young Swiss lieutenant named Cham, the legionnaires fired a single volley and then ran for the cover of a small wood some distance away. It was a fatal error that led to them being ridden down and speared from the saddle. The survivors taken prisoner were offered by their captors the choice of converting to Islam or death. All except one were killed, Cham earning the dubious distinction of becoming the first officer of the Legion to die in combat. The solitary convert to Islam, a Saxon called Wagner, found himself a slave in the enemy camp together with five deserters from the Legion, whose lot was so desperate that they attempted to escape and were killed in the attempt.
Wagner managed to get back to Algiers two weeks after his capture, whereupon Rovigo publicised his story that the Arabs forced deserters to write letters to their comrades saying that they would be rewarded with a horse, money and women, whereas most deserters not killed outright were used as slaves by their captors.[102] Musis’ punishment was to be transferred to a penal infantry battalion, where he died two years later in an Arab ambush. Ironically, the Maison Carrée massacre happen
ed only six weeks after the National Assembly passed a law declaring that no non-French person could serve in the armed forces.
On 9 November 1832 the Legion welcomed a new commander, Lt Col Joseph Bernelle. Two days later Abd el-Kader, who would be a thorn in the French side for years to come, arrived outside the gates of Oran at the head of 3,000 horsemen. Legionnaires of 4th Battalion were on the French left at the resulting battle on the slopes of Djebel Tafaraouini. In March 1833, 6th Battalion participated in the drive against the Ouled Yacub and Ouled Attia tribes near Algiers. In June, 4th and 5th Battalions took the port of Arzew before going on to capture the coastal city of Mostagenem, between Algiers and Oran.
Their losses in combat were insignificant compared with those from disease. Malaria and cholera were enemies more feared than the natives and dehydration from dysentery was the main cause of deaths. The Legion may have suffered more than the regular army units from being deliberately posted to unhealthy places like the penal battalions and units sent to Algeria for punishment, such as 66th Infantry Regiment, which had refused to open fire on striking workers during the November 1831 riots in Lyon. Of forty legionnaires posted to Maison Carrée in 1834 not one was still on his feet four weeks later, let alone in any condition to fight.
During the four years of the Legion’s first posting to Algeria, approximately 3,200 men died from disease or were discharged as unfit for further duty: a casualty rate of one in four. Nor was hospitalisation a desirable option: conditions in the lazaret were so bad that gallows humour defined it as the place where legionnaires went to die. With no nursing or even proper bedding, the sick were so badly fed that they had to sell equipment and clothing to buy food. One dysentery sufferer was sentenced to two months in prison for selling his boots and gaiters in order to purchase the medicines without which he would have died.
Most of the time, the Legion was employed as a cheap labour force. The great tradition of road building, tunnelling and general civil engineering which is one of the proudest aspects of its colonial years obscures the fact that draining malarial marshes with pick and shovel was more dangerous than facing the enemy.
Despairing of bringing their elusive nomadic foes to battle, the French tried diplomacy. On 26 February 1834, Baron Louis Alexis Desmichels, governor of Oran, bought time in the struggle against Abd el-Kader by acknowledging him as the amir or commander of all the tribes of the Oranais region in return for Abd el-Kader’s recognition of French sovereignty. Whilst neither side had any intention of abiding by the terms of the treaty, it was at least a more subtle approach than that of Gen Thomas Bugeaud in Paris. There, on 14 April he ordered the 35th Regiment of line to open fire on a demonstration organised by the Society for the Rights of Man, at the end of which twenty unarmed citizens lay dead.
A supporter of Napoleon during the Hundred Days, Bugeaud had bought his way back into favour under Louis-Philippe by accepting the unpopular role as commandant of the Vauban fortress at Blaye while that extraordinary woman the Duchess of Berry was confined there – as a plaque on her quarters bears witness today. Its portrait of her jailer shows a clean-shaven man with pock-marked cheeks and a strong nose and chin. Prematurely bald with a tonsure of white hair that earned his the soldiers’ nickname of Le Père Bugeaud or ‘Old Bugeaud’, he wears an expression of world-weary disillusionment that belies his brutality, still echoed in Algeria each time an Arab mother warns her naughty son to be good by threatening, ‘or else Bi-jo will get you’.
Mother of a grandson of Charles X known as the Miracle Child because born after the assassination of his father in 1820, the Duchess of Berry illicitly entered France twelve years later disguised as a washerwoman in the hope of claiming the throne for her son. Her short-lived rebellion in the Vendée ended after a few weeks with her arrest in Nantes, leading to her imprisonment at Blaye until she surprised Bugeaud and his political masters in Paris by giving birth to a daughter by an obscure Italian nobleman she had married before setting out for France. The scandal was considered by Louis-Philippe to render her claims to the throne on behalf of the Miracle Child so ridiculous that Bugeaud was ordered to escort her back to Palermo in Sicily, where he bade farewell and confessed to feeling as though a hundred-pound weight had been removed from his heart on being relieved of such a dishonourable duty.
During a debate the following year, a fellow-parliamentarian unwisely used Bugeaud’s nickname, the Jailer, to his face. Immediately challenged to a duel, the offender was lying dead twenty-four hours later with Bugeaud’s first shot lodged in his brains. And yet, the winner of that duel was to become one of the Legion’s best-loved commanders!
In Algeria, Abd el-Kader was playing a waiting game, using the treaty with Desmichels to impose his authority on those tribes reluctant to acknowledge him. Inevitably the truce was broken, this time by the French. On 26 June 1835 at 0500hrs Gen Camille Trézel, hoping to avoid the worst of the midsummer heat, arranged his column of three battalions of infantry and a large supply convoy into a rough square formation screened by four squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique to cross the area of scrub called Muley-Ismaël near the city of Oran, 400km west of Algiers.
A Roman legionary of 3rd Augusta Legion in North Africa marched at the pace of around 30km a day. Trézel required at least the same of his men, despite their much less suitable thick woollen uniforms, knapsacks weighing over thirty-five kilos, each man carrying musket or rifle and bayonet, a pick or shovel, 300 rounds of ammunition[103] and wood for his cooking fire unless it was certain that wood was freely available at that night’s camp.
In this engagement, Maj Ludwig Joseph Conrad’s three companies of the Legion’s Polish 4th Battalion were in the lead. Small, but broad, wearing a red skullcap instead of an officer’s tricorne hat when in action, Conrad was a buccaneering soldier who had earned both decorations and several wounds in thirty years of derring-do since leaving the military academy of St Cyr.
The Italians of the 5th Battalion and two of the cavalry squadrons were on his left flank. While trapped in a narrow ravine, men of 4th Battalion came under fire from Arabs hiding in the undergrowth. Moving forward to engage in line formation, it was driven back. The 2nd Chasseurs d’Afrique then charged the concealed enemy, but when Col Oudinot at their head was shot his panicking bugler blew the retreat by mistake. In the resulting chaos, 5th Battalion moved forward on the left. Together with a battalion of the ill-fated 66th Infantry, they managed to drive the Arabs away from the baggage train. For seven hours a series of skirmishes raged until Trézel managed to disengage, leaving fifty-two dead and with 180 wounded to transport on the undamaged wagons that had been unloaded for use as ambulances.
The day after the nightmare of Muley-Ismaël he regrouped his forces beside the River Sig while attempting unsuccessfully to parley with Abd el-Kader. On the morning of 28 June, the French column set out, heading north for the comparative safety of the port of Arzew. Out of musket range, considerable numbers of mounted Arabs were visibly tracking the column’s progress and biding their time to attack. At 1400hrs – the hottest time of day – they had the occasion that would have delighted any general. The French force was trapped between the edge of the Muley-Ismaël forest on their left and the Macta marshes on their right, both giving cover to their attackers, who fired the tinder-dry rushes to cause smoke and confusion, panicking the horses and harness mules of the baggage train.
The exposed Poles of 5th Battalion were ordered to keep the enemy at bay, but not allow themselves to become separated from the rest of the column. Conrad, however, impetuously disobeyed orders and lead his men in a charge on the concealed enemy. It was a mistake. At the tree-line his men were driven back by a hail of fire, panicking also 66th Infantry Regiment and leaving the left flank of the column wide open. Trying to repair the breach, Conrad ordered the Italians from 4th Battalion to join him behind a hillock which gave them some temporary cover. Finding themselves unprotected, the muleteers cut the traces of the wagons, abandoning the wounded men in the hope
of riding off to safety and adding to the confusion when swiftly bogged down in deep mud.
On riding up from the rearguard, Trézel found what remained of his column in disarray. Personally leading a charge of the two cavalry squadrons that had not fled, he managed to drive off Arabs who were killing the wounded, then deployed his small section of artillery with some Legion infantry and men from the penal Bataillons d’Afrique to cover him leading the rest of the column to safety at Arzew. The cost? Over 300 surviving wounded, sixty-two known dead and 280 missing in action, which almost certainly meant dead after mutilation and/or emasculation.
In the post-mortem, much blame was attached to the Legion under Conrad. Within the Legion itself recriminations bounced back and forward, the Poles accusing the Italians and vice versa. To try and avoid a repetition of this, and possibly also because the irregular arrivals of recruits made it impossible to keep nationally segregated battalions up to strength, Legion commander Bernelle took the radical step of deliberately mixing nationalities. It was at that moment that one could say the Legion as we know it had been born.
It was almost a still-birth. Even before the news of the débâcle in the Macta marches put the Algerian adventure on hold, Louis-Philippe’s government had been debating in Paris what to do with this ill-favoured child of the July Revolution.
Chapter 7: No pay, no bullets, no mercy
Spain, 1835 – 1839
After the death of Spain’s King Fernando VII, civil war broke out between his brother Don Carlos and the legitimate heir, Fernando’s daughter the Infanta Isabella II, whose mother Queen Maria Cristina was acting as regent. Under the Four-Power Pact signed on 28 August 1834 France, England and Portugal promised interventionist forces to assist Isabella’s liberal government – after which, France’s first act was to transfer from Algeria to Spain 439 Spanish legionnaires in the Legion’s 4th Battalion.