by Douglas Boyd
One of the last victims of the Franco-Prussian war was Achille Bazaine, sentenced on 10 December 1873 by a military court to be deprived of his rank and honours and be executed by firing squad for gross dereliction of duty in surrendering Metz. Marshal MacMahon, then president of the Third Republic, commuted the sentence to twenty years’ imprisonment, making it obvious that Bazaine was a scapegoat to salve national honour.
Thanks to the enterprise of his young Mexican wife, Bazaine escaped on 9 August 1874 by shinning 150 metres down a smuggled rope from his cell in the supposedly escape-proof prison-fortress on the cliffs of the island of Ste-Marguerite off Cannes. At the bottom of the cliff, his wife waited in a skiff to ferry her 63-year-old, but presumably still very athletic, husband to a private yacht waiting off-shore. This took them to asylum in Spain, where at least she spoke the language. The other woman in Bazaine’s life, Lady Luck had finally abandoned him. Unpardoned, he died in Madrid on 28 September 1888 after spending his last years there in illness and poverty.
It was a sad end for a man who had served the successive governments of France all his life. His retreat inside the walls of Metz had not only tied down 200,000 Prussians to give Paris a breathing space which would have made possible its relief, had the politicians stopped squabbling long enough. He had also kept his army intact and ready for re-deployment against either the Prussian invaders or the Communard rebels, had the siege of Metz been lifted.
Those who had most to thank him for were the 140,000 soldiers in Metz, who would have starved to death if he had not agreed to surrender to the Prussians when he did. However much money Madame Bazaine may have obtained from her Mexican relatives to use as bribes, she could not have organised his escape from a military prison on her own. It would be nice to think that some of those officers and men who had walked alive out of the hell of Metz had a hand in ensuring that the disgraced commander to whom they owed their lives at least died in liberty, and not in a prison cell.
Chapter 16: Tweaking the dragon’s tail
Algeria 1871 – 1882; Vietnam and Formosa 1883 - 1885
In July 1871 the French government decided that the battalions in France – 1st, 2nd and 5th with the regiment de marche, plus 6th Battalion forming up at Dunkirk and the detached company serving with the Army of the Loire – should be amalgamated with 3rd and 4th battalions in Algeria to make a total of four battalions in all. More often than most armies, the Legion has had to find a way round the diktats of its politicians. Public hostility towards Germany resulting in a ban on enlistment of Germans until 1880 meant little in practice since Germans continued to enlist by pretending to be Swiss-German or Alsatian.
With her continental army limited by Bismarck’s curbs in the Treaty of Frankfurt, France decided that, since she could not expand in Europe, she would do what other European powers were doing at the time and grab her share of what came to be called the Third World. From 1882 onwards the expansion of French Algeria involved units of the Legion stationed there in a sustained programme of subduing the tribes deeper and deeper into the Sahara. France already controlled parts of West Africa, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and Tahiti, which Gauguin would paint so compellingly. The following year she pushed the boundaries of her Indochinese possessions northwards into Tonkin or North Vietnam. Although the Church repeatedly brought pressure on French Catholic politicians to ‘civilise the natives’ by sending out missionaries, the prime motive – as with all nineteenth-century empires – was commercial: to acquire supplies of cheap raw materials from colonies obliged to buy in return relatively expensive manufactured goods.
Eugène Etienne, the long-serving Colonial Party député for Oran, put it succinctly, ‘The only criterion to apply to any colonial enterprise is the balance of advantage and profit to be made for the mother country.’[168] In the eighteen years following the defeat of 1871, nineteen administrations succeeded one another in Paris without affecting the pace of colonial expansion. The resultant calls on the Legion tripled its size before the century was out, but initially the four battalions in Algeria were used mainly as cheap labour, digging ditches, hacking tunnels through mountains and draining swamps in an extraordinary programme of civil engineering that still benefits inhabitants of formerly French North Africa today.
All this changed when another charismatic commander arrived on the scene. Col François Oscar de Négrier, nephew of a Napoleonic general who had served in Africa, was a graduate of St Cyr who had distinguished himself by killing a classmate there in a duel. Typical of this dapper, short-tempered officer’s concept of soldiering was his reaction to being hospitalised in besieged Metz during the Franco-Prussian war with leg wounds that should have kept him out of the saddle for some weeks. Discharging himself from the hospital, he had his horse saddled, was helped to mount it and then galloped through the lines, shooting dead two Uhlans who had the temerity to demand his papers. Reporting for further duty with the Northern Army, he was wounded twice more before the end of the war with Germany.
Having already served in Africa 1864 – 66, Négrier had his own ideas of how to get the Legion to down shovels and shoulder rifles. Given the vast distances to be covered and the necessity to surprise an enemy who knew the country intimately, he turned his hundred best marchers into semi-mounted infantry by requisitioning fifty mules from local Arabs on 8 December 1881. After loading their full packs, food, water and spare ammunition on a mule, two very fit legionnaires carrying only small packs and rifles could cover up to 60km in a ten-hour day, which was the maximum that could be forced out of a laden mule also doubling as the men’s mount, one at a time to give their weary feet a rest.
Such a killing pace could not be kept up for long without exhausting man and mule, but done in short spurts it gained the vital element of surprise against an enemy who took it for granted that a French column would travel with a large and slow-moving supply train. An early success chalked up to this new modus operandi came when Négrier’s semi-mounted infantry surprised the tribe of Sidi Slimane near the Moroccan border and forced them to abandon their tents, possessions and 4,000 sheep that were auctioned after return to base, providing each man with a bonus of 15 francs.
However, the last laugh this time was on the Legion. Slimane’s master Bou-Amama determined to take revenge. On 28 April 1882 a survey party like the one on which Danjou had lost his hand was mapping the rugged territory around the Chott Tigri, a salt lake in the west of Algeria. The surveyors commanded by Capt de Castries were protected by two rifle companies and one of the new semi-mounted units under Lt Massone, making a total of around 300 officers and men, who marched right into a trap set by Bou-Amama. From declivities in the landscape a troop of 900 Arab horsemen and 1,600 tribesmen on foot swooped upon them without warning. The numbers of attackers – always exaggerated when they win – are to be taken with a pinch of the Chott’s own salt, but it was certainly a large and dangerous party.
The drill for mounted infantry was to dismount immediately on contact, with designated men tethering the mules so they could not run off with the vital water and ammunition they carried, as had happened at Camarón. Meanwhile, their comrades formed a defensive square with the mules in the centre and returned the enemy fire. Even dragoons – who attacked in the saddle – had always dismounted in defence. However, in the heat of the moment and lacking practice in their new role, the legionnaires tried to counter-attack on mule-back against the mounted tribesmen.
It was a fatal error. For seven hours the legionnaires fought the tribesmen off in three separate square formations, unable to re-group and consolidate their position. By the time they had realised the error of that day’s tactics, both officers and all the NCOs were dead. They were the lucky ones. Those captured by the Arabs were tortured to death within sight of their comrades out of rifle range so that no one could end their suffering with a well-aimed coup de grâce.
By the time Bou-Amama broke contact and headed west into the safety of Moroccan territory, the Legion had suffered
25% casualties: three officers and twenty-eight men were wounded, with forty-nine men dead in addition to the two officers of the mounted company. The survivors were limping back to the little fort of Gelloul, from which they had set out, when they met the relief column headed by Négrier, who was definitely not of the type of general to stay in base when there was some action in the offing.
Some officers argued that the mounted companies should have one mule per man; others maintained that this would merely encourage them to attempt cavalry manoeuvres with fatal results. The second argument won and the size of the companies was set at 215 – 230 men with half as many mules, plus horses for the officers. Despite some initial setbacks, the overall success of Négrier’s up-and-at-’em policy in Algeria earned him promotion to brigadier and a posting to Vietnam in September 1883.
Ten years earlier an unscrupulous French arms dealer called Jean Dupuis had hired a private army to capture the northern city of Hanoi so that he could monopolise the highly lucrative salt trade with the landlocked Chinese province of Yunnan by using a steamboat to tow laden junks up the Red River. An inglorious collusion of Catholic missionaries, crooks and French naval officers then pushed northwards from the Mekong delta 1,200km to the south, forcing a treaty on the mandarins of Hué in Central Vietnam, which in 1874 recognised the status quo and conceded to France certain rights in Hanoi and its seaport Haiphong. For the Vietnamese it was a choice of two evils: they were hoping that the French would drive out their Chinese occupiers, who regarded the north of the country as a buffer zone to protect their southwestern border.
On 8 November 1883, 1st Battalion disembarked at Haiphong to join Négrier, together with two battalions of Algerian tirailleurs. It was then he delivered his famous speech: ‘You have become soldiers in order to die, and I am sending you where people die.’ A six-hour journey between the sand-bars of the Cua Cam estuary in small boats after transhipping from their seagoing transports landed them at a bleak barracks in a fetid mosquito-infested swamp whose only neighbours were the customs house, an arsenal and a few other western buildings. None of the 600 legionnaires coming ashore that day with their commander Maj Marc-Edmond Dominé can have had any idea they were fighting a war in which their successors would still be dying for France seventy-one years later.
Travelling up-river by steamer to Hanoi – the Red River was a good 800 metres wide there – they passed through a plain where men and women under conical hats worked the vivid green rice fields that stretched as far as the eye could see with water buffaloes. The palm trees and villages whose thatched roofs peeped above the surrounding bamboo looked like paradise, compared with the aridity they had known in North Africa.
These peasants were not the enemy. The Legion’s initial opponents were the ‘Pavillon Noirs’ or Black Flag mercenaries, conveniently deniable irregulars used by Beijing, who were named for the banners of that colour which they carried into battle. Two millennia after Sun Tzu had written The Art of War, their tactics were often primitive, for the most part ‘human wave’ attacks that cost enormous casualties, but their fort at Son Tay – only 60km from Hanoi – was a model of what could be done with local materials. With typical European arrogance, the round-eye newcomers created a mythical renegade military architect called ‘Sir Collins’ – possibly based on an arms dealer like Dupuis who had instructed his indigenous clients in the use of modern firearms – after deciding that only a European like themselves could have designed so sophisticated a fort.[169] Constructed by coolie labour of earth, bamboo and local bricks, the fortress was a complex of water-filled moats, dry ditches, palisades and ubiquitous punjee sticks to pierce the boot of an unwary attacker.
After Adm Amédée Courbet’s gunboats steamed up the Red River to bombard the citadel on 16 December 1883, Legion sappers among his 5,000 troops wormed a hazardous way through the defences. ‘Capt Mehl of the Foreign Legion fell with a mortal wound just as his men … got onto the parapet. A legionnaire by name of Mammaert was the first to enter the fortress.’[170] The reduction of Son Tay after a fifteen-hour battle provoked a protest from Beijing’s ambassador in Paris.
Négrier had a second Legion battalion arrive in February 1884. Meanwhile, Beijing had reinforced its garrison at Bac Ninh with 15,000 Tonkinese under Chinese officers and NCOs, blocking the so-called Mandarin Road into China only 40km from Hanoi. On 12 March 1884 the two Legion battalions drove the garrison out. The giant Belgian Cpl Mammaert was again in the forefront of the fight, planting the French flag on the ramparts. An unpleasant surprise for his comrades, who were armed with the 1874 single-shot Gras rifle, came on discovering in the abandoned arsenal a substantial armoury of cutting-edge firearms including Martini-Henrys, Remingtons, Spencers and Winchester repeaters. They consoled themselves with the belief that no Chinese could shoot straight or stand fast when confronted with the point of a white man’s bayonet.
Wanting to get back into the act from which it was being displaced by land forces, the French navy now carried the undeclared war with the Celestial Empire to Formosa – a diversion that was, even for nineteenth century imperialists, ill-considered arrogance. Admiral Courbet began with a naval bombardment of the port and arsenal of the mainland city of Fu-zhou, which elicited a formal declaration of war from Beijing. Sailing across to Taiwan – then known by the Portuguese name of Formosa[171] – he landed his force of 1,800 marines, a penal battalion and 3rd and 4th Legion battalions near the north coast port of Chi-Lung. What he hoped to achieve is unknown since the only exploited resource of Taiwan was then a coalfield producing low-grade fuel.
Tan-Shui, 30km to the west, was the other port serving the capital Taipei. Attempting to capture it and interdict use of the estuary leading to Taipei, the French were repulsed and driven back with heavy losses to Chi-lung. The monsoon broke, turning the small port, dominated by high ground re-occupied by the enemy, into a swamp where malaria and cholera carried off their daily quota. As deaths reduced their numbers the defenders were so thinly spread that Chinese crept through the lines into the town at night, digging up corpses and cutting off heads to carry back as trophies for cash rewards.[172]
The garrison of legionnaires, marines and penal battalion soldiers was reduced to 600 men squatting in a wasteland of burned-out go-downs and hovels. Their appearance was euphemistically described by 19-year-old British legionnaire Lionel Hart, who arrived there in January 1885 among Courbet’s reinforcements, as ‘pale and very tired’.[173] By the end of the month, the injection of new blood enabled the heights above Chi-lung to be re-taken, but when a second column set out for Tan-Shui it was repulsed again, forcing even gung-ho Adm Courbet to acknowledge that the campaign was consuming lives for no point. The survivors were taken off and shipped to Vietnam.
[SEE MAP H: ‘Tonkin / North Vietnam 1883 – 92’ below.]
The previous summer, on 4 July France had presented to the United States surely the biggest birthday present ever: the Statue of Liberty. Around the same time, 20,000 regular Chinese soldiers and Black Flag irregulars had marched south from Yunnan Province into Vietnam and based themselves in and around the fortress of Thuyen Quang, on the Son Gam river[174] 165km northwest of Hanoi. Built of local brick with a perimeter wall of 1,200 meters, it stood in a clearing surrounded by thick jungle. In the centre of the fort was a hillock crowned by a small pagoda that served as the officers’ mess.
In open defiance of instructions from Paris to confine operations to the Red River delta around Hanoi and Haiphong, in mid-November 1884 Lt Col Charles Duchesne headed up-river with 700 legionnaires and marines supported by three gunboats, to winkle out the Black Flags. After fighting their way through one ambush, they succeeded in driving out the Chinese and installed their own garrison at Thuyen Quang. Commanding it was Maj Dominé with Legion captains Borelli and Moulinay each commanding a company. The combined strength was 319 men, plus 160 of the locally recruited but French-officered 8th Company of 1st Tonkinese light infantry under Capt Diaz. ‘Odds and sods’ included thirty-tw
o gunners to serve the four – some say six – field artillery pieces that had been brought along as deck cargo, plus a small detachment of sappers.
Dominé was a classic nineteenth-century career soldier, who rose to colonel’s rank after being wounded in Algeria and again fighting the Prussians in France. Forbidding the surgeon to amputate his arm on the second occasion, when his right elbow was shattered, he had opted to die rather than be unfit for further service, but survived against the odds with a stiff arm.
There were in all just over 600 men to hold the fort against the 20,000 or more Black Flags known to be in the vicinity. The only help on call was occasional fire-support from the 13-man crew of the gunboat La Mitrailleuse, commanded by Ensign Senes, that steamed at intervals up the nearby river. In the war of nerves following Duchesne’s departure on 23 November with the other two gunboats, superstitious legionnaires found something uncanny in the fact that, like Danjou, Dominé had only one good arm.
Another Camarone legend was about to be born. Early in December 1884 a routine patrol from the fort briefly engaged a small force of armed men that melted away into the thick jungle. Sensing that this had been a probe for a much larger force, Maj Dominé ordered the infilled dry ditch protecting the outer perimeter wall to be dug out. Eight Legion sappers under Sgt Bobillot were sent to build a blockhouse on a rise 350 metres outside the perimeter, which had a clear view over the walls of the fort, and prevent the Chinese siting any heavy weapons there.
The sapper sergeant, a former journalist, used his imagination to excavate a partly subterranean command post, protected with ditches and mines. The work was still incomplete when several hundred Chinese regulars marched around the outpost without opening fire in an unnerving show of strength on 31 December. On New Year’s Day the first human wave assault left the besieged legionnaires looking at 150 enemy dead and wounded lying around the camp, many victims of the cannon on La Mitrailleuse. With no Henri Dunant here to protect the wounded by appealing to Christian charity, they were routinely finished off in retaliation for the Chinese practice of displaying the severed heads of their prisoners or sending baskets of them back with insulting messages.[175]