by Douglas Boyd
In Paris, one of Haussmann’s new boulevards was named Magenta and a street was re-named Solferino in honour of the victory. MacMahon was ennobled as the duke of Magenta – and Soult’s bastard, the Legion, was beyond any question legitimate at last.
Chapter 12: Myth and madness in Mexico
1862 – 1863
Every historian of the Legion is impressed by the wealth of memoirs written by legionnaires of all ranks. Some are a mixture of fact and fantasy; others tell the unvarnished truth, but from the limited viewpoint of one man, whose eyes saw only what was within his personal horizons, narrowed by suffering or the heat of combat. Yet, all tell of actions that leave the reader marvelling at the courage, self-sacrifice and comradeship with which they fought for French interests against apparently unassailable odds as valiantly as Homer’s heroes.
On 30 April each year, the Legion celebrates the anniversary, not of a victory, but of a defeat. On that day, wherever legionnaires or ex-legionnaires are gathered, in a ritual observed even by the men waiting to die at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, an officer or senior NCO reads aloud in French a story that all the others know by heart. In jerky military prose that has been rendered at some time or other with all the accents in the world, it goes like this:
The French army was besieging Puebla in Mexico. The Legion was ordered to patrol and make secure 20km of roads used by supply convoys. The Commanding Officer Col Jeanningros learned on 28 April 1863 that a large convoy of gold, siege materiel and munitions was heading for Puebla. His adjutant Capt Danjou persuaded him to send a company out ahead of the convoy. The third company was designated for the job but had no officers available to lead the patrol. Capt Danjou took command personally and second-lieutenants Maudet and Vilain, the standard-bearer and paymaster, volunteered to accompany him.
At 0100hrs on 30 April the three officers and sixty-two men of 3rd Company set out. After covering 20km they stopped at Palo Verde at 0700hrs to brew coffee. At this moment, the enemy came into sight and combat was immediately engaged. Capt Danjou ordered a defensive square to be formed, and victoriously (sic) fought off several cavalry charges, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. On drawing level with the inn of Camerone, a large building comprising a courtyard surrounded by a three-metre-high wall, he decided to make a stand there in order to hold up the enemy and delay as long as possible the moment when they could attack the convoy.
While his men were hastily organising the defence of the inn, a Mexican officer called on Capt Danjou to surrender because he was heavily outnumbered. The reply was, ‘We have cartridges and we won’t surrender.’ Then, raising his right hand, Danjou swore to fight to the death and made his men take the same oath. It was then 1000hrs.
Until 1800hrs these sixty men, who had neither eaten nor drunk since the previous day, held off 2,000 Mexicans – 800 cavalry and 1,200 foot-soldiers – despite the extreme heat and thirst. At noon Capt Danjou was killed by a bullet in his chest. At 1400hrs, 2/Lt Vilain was killed by a bullet in the forehead. At this moment the Mexicans succeeded in setting fire to the inn.
Despite the heat and the smoke that added to their suffering, the legionnaires held on, but many had been hit. At 1700hrs, 2/Lt Maudet had only twelve men still able to fight. At this moment the Mexican colonel assembled his men and told them they should be ashamed of themselves for not being able to defeat a handful of brave men. A Spanish-speaking legionnaire simultaneously translated his words for the other legionnaires.
Col Milán then called upon 2/Lt Maudet to surrender, an offer which Maudet rejected with disdain. The Mexicans then made the final assault through breaches they had made in the walls. Soon only five men were left with Maudet: Cpl Maine, legionnaires Catteau, Wensel, Constantin and Léonard. With one cartridge left each, they fixed bayonets and faced the enemy in a corner of the courtyard with their backs to the wall. On a signal, they fired their rifles at point-blank range and bayonet-charged the enemy. 2/Lt Maudet and two legionnaires fell dead.
Maine and his two comrades were about to be massacred when a Mexican officer threw himself in front of them and cried, ‘Surrender!’ They replied, ‘We shall surrender if you promise to care for our wounded and if you permit us to keep our weapons.’ Their bayonets were still dangerous. The officer replied, ‘One can refuse nothing to men such as you.’
Capt Danjou’s sixty men held on as they had sworn they would, fighting off 2,000 enemy for eleven hours. They killed 300 and wounded the same number. By their sacrifice in saving the convoy they carried out the mission that had been entrusted to them.
In addition to Napoléon III deciding that the name of Camerone should be inscribed on the flag of the Foreign Regiment and that the names of Danjou, Vilain and Maudet should be carved in gold on the walls of Les Invalides in Paris, a monument was erected in 1892 on the site of the battle. It bears the inscription:
Here, less than sixty men opposed a whole army.
Its numbers crushed them.
Life, but not courage, left these French soldiers
here on 30 April 1863.
The fatherland erected this monument to their memory.
That is the récit officiel – the official story. The truth is not quite as simple, but first – since more is known about these legendary soldiers than of most legionnaires, it is interesting to note that of the French officers Jean Danjou was 35, Clément Maudet 34 and Jean Vilain 27. These were no dilettante younger sons of rich families, such as might have been found in a line regiment on garrison duty in France.
They were professional soldiers, and Danjou had more than medals to prove it. He wore a carved and articulated wooden hand, painted to resemble a leather glove, strapped to his left forearm in replacement of the one lost when his rifle burst during a mapping expedition in the Kabylia campaign. With no standard system of ‘proving’ barrels, this was a not uncommon accident of the times. He was also a veteran of the Italian intervention and had been awarded the Légion d’Honneur in the Crimea. Maudet and Vilain had served as NCOs before winning their commissions. Maudet, promoted only three months previously, was the most decorated officer in the battalion and therefore the flag-bearer. Acting paymaster Vilain had joined the Legion aged eighteen and had also been awarded the Légion d’Honneur for valour.
The eleven NCOs in the company had an average age of twenty-eight. Although three of the legionnaires were only 18, the forty-six of whom details are available had an average age of twenty-six. That this was on the young side in the 1860s, when it was generally between twenty-eight and thirty-two years old,[143] maybe because the high rate of casualties during the month 3rd Company had spent in the fever belt had carried off the older men first. All of which bears out that the Legion was for the most part made up of veterans, not inexperienced youths ‘avid for some great glory’. The most common previous profession declared on enlistment was – militaire – a soldier in someone else’s army.
That the policy of mixing men of many nationalities was in full force in 1863 is amply borne out by an analysis of the NCOs and men in 3rd Company that day whose nationality is recorded. It breaks down as follows: 18 Germans, 13 Belgians, 11 French who had enlisted as Belgian or Swiss to account for speaking the language, 9 Swiss and one man each from Holland, Denmark, Spain, Austria and Italy, plus another Italian born in Algeria.
Read out on the Legion’s ‘birthday’ each year, the official version of the battle of Camarón – to give the site of the battle its Mexican name – is a model of selfless heroism for other legionnaires to emulate. A civilian can find it difficult to credit that these men who had never met before joining the Legion regarded the oath they had sworn as more important than their own lives. They had no personal interest in the outcome of the battle either way, but were obeying orders for the benefit of a general who cold-bloodedly sent them to an area where many would die of tropical diseases and of an emperor in Paris who cared not a damn for them.
The first question to clear up is: what were French troops doing in Mexico? Not
withstanding its cost of 7,000 lives and 300 million francs[144], Napoléon III’s 1862 intervention is now marked only by a few words in Mexican Spanish like mariachi – meaning originally the musicians who played at a mariage. The full story of Camerone begins two years before Danjou and all those men died – accepting for the moment that they did.
When Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter guarding the entrance to the harbour of Charleston in South Carolina, the echoes reached all the way to Paris. An investment spree that might be labelled the Latin-American Bubble had enticed French and other European investors to buy bonds guaranteed by the Mexican government. President Ignacio Comonfort was replaced by Benito Pablo Juárez in a coup d’état in January 1861. After the civil war that had ravaged the country from 1857 to 1860, the Mexican economy was in such parlous state that Juárez was faced with an empty treasury. As a solution to this problem, he began nationalising and selling off Church property. In July of that year he announced that he was also suspending interest payment on all foreign debts for two years.
British, Spanish and French bond-holders demanded action from their governments. The fast-living illegitimate half-brother of Napoléon III, whom he would ennoble as Duc de Morny in 1862 and whose business interests included both a sugar empire and the fashionable spa and English gambling paradise at Deauville, was lobbying for his friends among them. Fed a tissue of lies by him, Napoléon III came to believe that the people of Mexico wanted to be rescued from Juárez and his Liberals by foreign intervention.
On 31 October 1861 Britain, France and Spain signed an agreement for a joint military expedition to safeguard these investments and protect their citizens in Mexico, many of whom had been killed during the civil war. Juárez agreed they might garrison Vera Cruz on the Gulf coast, plus Córdoba, Orizaba on the road from Vera Cruz to Mexico City and Tehuacan on condition that they did not interfere in ‘the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of the Mexican Republic’.
This was in blatant defiance of the Monroe Doctrine enunciated by American President Monroe in December 1832. The Doctrine not only forbade US involvement in the affairs of the Old World; Article 4 stated quite specifically that any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States. However, with the Confederate and Unionist states locked in bloody civil war, for the moment the European powers felt free to intervene south of the Rio Grande.
In December 1861 the expeditionary force of 7,000 Spaniards, 2,500 French, and 700 British Royal Marines landed and occupied Vera Cruz, from which the conquistadors’ route known as the Camino Real or Royal Road ran through Soledad, Córdoba and Puebla to Mexico City, 300km inland. However, the mooted tripartite debt recovery by force of arms was still-born. After heavy losses from disease and hit-and-run guerrilla attacks, the British and Spanish withdrew what remained of their troops in April 1862, having realised that Napoléon III was using the tripartite intervention as cover for a far more ambitious plan of his own.
This was nothing less than an attempt to thwart Protestant Anglo-Saxon influence in the western hemisphere by creating a French-speaking area in Central and South America. The idea was not quite as crazy as it sounds. As place-names like Baton Rouge, Lafayette and New Orleans still testify in Louisiana – the state named for a French king – the western half of the Mississippi River basin had been French until 1803 when it was purchased by the United States. At less than 3 cents per acre for 828,000 square miles it was the best bargain in US history. So, in a sense, Napoléon III was only trying to replace a colony his country had recently lost. Seen from Paris, the conquest of Mexico followed by placing a puppet king on its throne seemed logical steps in this plan.
The chosen puppet was the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Josef, brother of the Austrian Emperor – France’s enemy of yesteryear. Maximilian was counselled both by Emperor Franz Joseph and British diplomats not to get involved in Napoléon III’s scheme that took no account of either the political complexity of Mexican politics or the vastness of the country. From the northern border of Baja California to the eastern tip of the Yucatán peninsula is roughly the same distance as from Gibraltar to Moscow. However, representatives of the small number of immensely rich and conservative land-owning families in Mexico, thinking him an easily manipulated young man, persuaded the liberal-minded Maximilian that the people had elected him king. The lie was to cost his life and the sanity of his young Belgian wife Carlota.
Maximilian’s main condition for becoming figure-head of the French adventure was that he be given a European army of 10,000 men to place him in power and keep him there, so the build-up of French troops in Mexico continued, with the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique purchasing the latest English propeller-driven steamships to inaugurate a regular service between French ports and Vera Cruz.
A month after the British and Spanish withdrawal, on 5 May came the first warning that the Mexican intervention was not going to be the push-over that Napoléon III and his Austrian protégé had hoped. Whatever the exact agreement with Juárez, it ended when French troops marched inland with the aim of occupying Mexico City. At Puebla the Mexicans not only resisted but defeated the French. Re-grouping, the French commander-in-chief Gen Elie-Frédéric Forey settled down to take the city by siege. Reinforcements poured in across the Atlantic. In September, 28,000 men with 56 cannons disembarked at Vera Cruz for Forey’s siege of Puebla, garrisoned by 22,000 Mexicans.
The 1st Régiment Etranger had actually been dissolved in 1861, with recruitment for the former 2nd RE suspended and legionnaires who had completed one year of their two-year engagements demobbed. This winding-down continued until 22 March 1864, when recruitment recommenced to make good the losses in Mexico. Long before then a number of junior Legion officers directly petitioned Napoléon III for a chance to join in what was dubbed l’affaire Mexicana. Unknown to them, their emperor was already considering leasing the Legion to Maximilian for ten years.
On 9 February 1863 two seven-company battalions of the Legion plus a headquarters and supply company totalling 2,000 men boarded the French naval vessels St. Louis and Wagram after loading their equipment and mules on the transport Finistère and left the ‘great harbour’ of Mers el-Kebir on the Gulf of Oran. The uncomfortable voyage through North Atlantic winter gales to Vera Cruz lasted until 28 March.
Instead of summoning the Legion up to the siege front where its combined experience from the Crimea and Italy would have been most useful, Forey gave it the job of securing the fever-ridden first 70km of the journey from Vera Cruz through the swamps and scrubland of the coastal plain where malaria was rife. So called ‘Jesuits’ powder’ – the powdered bark of the cinchona tree – had first been used to treat the disease in Europe as long ago as 1642. England’s Charles II and Louis XIV’s son had both recovered thanks to it, but it was so expensive that nobody was going to waste it on mercenary soldiers. And since no one connected the mosquito’s bite with the onset of the disease until a British army surgeon in India discovered the link in 1897, the legionnaires at Vera Cruz in 1863 never thought of taking precautions.
In addition, the area in which the Legion was stationed had just about every other affliction of the tropics, including a local variety of yellow fever called vómito negro which caused the sufferer to literally vomit up his own blood until he died after six or eight hours of agonising cramps. The chilling Historique Sommaire of the Legion has many laconic entries like, ‘On 7 October Lt Barrera died of vómito at Córdoba’.[145] An officer who put his experiences down on paper, the impoverished Swiss aristocrat from Fribourg Capt Gabriel Diesbach de Torny reckoned that the losses were far worse, with his company of 124 men reduced to twenty-five within the year.[146] Charles-Jules Zédé claimed that one-third of the Legion died of disease in 1863. His first sight of land on arrival at Vera Cruz was ‘a muddy coast with no vegetation, littered with the hulks of wrecked ships
. On our right, a small islet on which stood the derelict fortress of St Juan de Ulla. On the left, the arid Sacrifice Island, covered with a multitude of crosses marking the graves of sailors who had fallen victim to the unhealthy climate.’[147]
The legionnaires’ first combat took place while they were still getting their bearings in early April. A large Mexican guerrilla band raided a railway work camp under Legion protection. The guerilleros, who alternated between being freedom fighters and simple banditry, had bitten off more than they could chew this time. Before they were driven off with heavy casualties, Lt Ernst Milson von Bolt killed the well-known guerrilla leader Antonio Diaz in hand-to-hand combat, an action for which he received the Légion d'Honneur.
All of which explains why 3rd Company was under-strength and short of officers on 29 April 1863 when a local woman arrived at its base camp on Mount Chiquihuite at siesta time and asked to speak with Col Pierre Jeanningros. Her father being a sergeant in the Mexican National Guard, Col Milán – the aristocratic, Spanish-looking military governor of Vera Cruz state – had come to dine in their home the previous evening. During the meal, the woman had overheard the two men discussing Milán’s plan to ambush at Palo Verde a massive French convoy that had left Vera Cruz on 15 April. It consisted of sixty-four wagons and 150 pack mules carrying guns, ammunition and a pay chest of 14 million pesos in gold and silver coin to pay Forey’s army plus all the local labourers, muleteers and camp followers outside Puebla. Her motive for bringing the information to Jeanningros was to save the life of her husband, a waggoner in the convoy who could well be killed in the ambush.
Jeanningros at once despatched a young Mexican with a message to Soledad for the officer commanding the convoy to halt there until its escort could be reinforced. In case the messenger fell into enemy hands, he decided also to send out 3rd Company as a back-up. However, the only officer of 3rd Company not ill or absent was the young acting paymaster, 2/Lt Vilain.