The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  On 16 January, legionnaires manning the walls observed Chinese coolies starting to dig trenches on all sides. By 20 January these had all linked up to cut Thuyen Quang off from the rest of the world. In the night of 26-27 January, the Black Flags fired the village 400 metres away from the fortress as a diversion and simultaneously attacked the fortress, only to be driven back with heavy casualties.

  The enemy commander Liu Yung-fu[176] thereupon set his sappers to push their trenches closer and closer to the walls of the fort in the face of harassing fire from the cannons inside. They were also tunnelling under the obstacles Bobillot had placed around the blockhouse on the rise. Since staying there would have meant being blown up by a subterranean mine, the detachment was withdrawn under covering fire in the evening of 30 January and Bobillot’s blockhouse destroyed by cannon fire.

  Starting next morning, Liu Yung-fu had the perfect site on the mound from which to conduct day-long sniping of the main camp for the rest of the siege. This forced the French to keep their heads down in trenches and underground shelters, despite which precautions their casualties rose steadily, other ranks being communally buried with only a few officers given the dignity of a biscuit-box coffin. Having only twenty-nine shovels between them, the defenders had a choice of digging shelter for the living or graves for the dead, but the Chinese had plenty of digging tools and could be heard moving tons of earth each night as they tunnelled towards the perimeter wall. Lanterns were hung over it after dusk to discourage surprise attacks after the enemy saps came so near the walls that some legionnaires with an extraordinary sense of humour lassoed a black banner with a noose on a bamboo pole and hoisted it over the walls as a trophy.

  On 3 February, a courageous Tonkinese ‘coolie-tram’ – as the local informants were called – volunteered to slip through the lines in peasant clothes. On the river bank, he made a crude flotation device of bamboo twigs, under which he floated past the Black Flag watchers while breathing through a tube with his head under water. No one held out much hope of him getting through. On 7 February Capt Diaz of the Tonkinese light infantry was hit in the forehead and killed. The other officers toasting his empty chair in the mess the following evening had to dive under the table when the first Chinese shell blew a hole in the roof of the pagoda above their heads. Their shock on realising that the enemy had managed to bring in artillery despite the mountainous nature of the area should have given Col Piroth food for thought at Dien Bien Phu.

  Worse was shortly to come. On 11 February Legionnaire Vaury drove a pickaxe into a suspicious patch of earth well inside the walls, to find staring up at him a Chinese tunneller who shot him in the arm before retreating back underground. That very day at the French post of Viet Tri the coolie-tram delivered Dominé’s message: ‘Today I must inform you that, although our will to resist remains the same, our strength and health will soon be at an end. I think it most important that a column as strong as possible be sent to raise the siege of Thuyen Quang.’[177]

  On the evening of the following day the Chinese breached the southwest wall with a black-powder mine but a rapid response by the defenders wiped out the first thirty or forty Black Flags through the gap and discouraged the rest from following them. Minutes later a second mine blew another breach. In the confused fighting the Legion suffered eleven casualties, which motivated them to make a sortie next morning and destroy the saps nearest the walls, while the breaches were repaired with bamboo buttressed by baskets of earth. In supervising work of this kind on 18 February Bobillot was shot in the neck, dying a lingering death in the sick bay four weeks later. By then, the Chinese had added heavy mortars to their armoury, so that any defender exposing himself for the needs of nature in daylight risked sniper bullets, cannonry and mortar shells.

  At 0545hrs on 22 February the Black Flags set up the din of bugles and yelling that presaged a mass assault. The Legion immediately evacuated those stretches of the wall known to be mined – just before enormous explosions blew three more breaches in the walls totalling more than sixty metres in length. Through them, in a confusion of smoke, fumes and dust, a horde of Chinese beating gongs and screaming ran right onto a defensive mine planted in their path by Bobillot before he was shot. Driving back the survivors, the legionnaires patched up the gap with more bamboo and baskets of earth. The cost of the day to the Legion was Capt Moulinay and four men dead, with another officer, three NCOs and thirty-seven legionnaires wounded.

  And so it went on: sleepless nights and days filled with sniping, mines, breaches, assaults with grenades and fizzing satchels of black powder hurled over the walls, ending in hand-to-hand mutual murder with knife and bayonet. When one huge explosion blew several legionnaires’ bodies clean over the wall into the enemy trenches, in keeping with the Legion tradition of not leaving its dead behind Legionnaire Hinderschmidt hurled himself through the breach and retrieved several bodies to prevent their mutilation, carrying them back through a hail of fire in both directions until he too was hit in the throat.

  ‘For nearly thirty minutes the fighting continued hand-to-hand in the breaches, the combatants separated only by the improvised bamboo palisades.’[178] Dominé’s disciplined official account of one of the shorter attacks gives little idea of the horror – or perhaps by now the men were so numb with exhaustion and over-dosed with adrenalin from the weeks of fighting for their lives that it had come to seem normal to them. Spirits lifted briefly when good news from the outside world reached Thuyen Quang on 25 February, brought by the faithful coolie-tram.

  Maj Dominé pinned up on a door for all to read the following notice: ‘The French national flag was hoisted on 13 February at noon on the citadel of Lang Son. The Officer Commanding also informs the garrison that . . . the entire 1st Brigade is marching up the Son Gam River to relieve Thuyen Quang.’ There were by then approximately 200 men still able to bear arms in the fort, but only 180 working rifles between them, spread thinly along the 1,200-metre perimeter, 10% of which was mere bamboo palisade – and the situation was getting worse daily.

  What was the point of all the suffering and the casualties? Did the Chinese need to tie up so many men and munitions taking a fort they could simply have walked around by following jungle trails, if their intention was to attack Hanoi from the northwest? It seems that Liu Yung-fu was playing a deeper game than he has been given credit for. Most urgently, as far as the defenders were concerned, where was the relief for which they yearned night and day?

  Chapter 17: As good as it gets

  Vietnam 1885 - 1892

  The appointment of a more aggressive Minister of War in Paris was all the encouragement C-in-C Vietnam Gen Brière de l’Isle needed to launch an ambitious push right along the Mandarin Road to Lang Son, the last garrison before the Chinese frontier, and there bar the route to further incursions. Included in his small army of twelve battalions of European and local forces that set out from the Red River delta on 3 February 1885 was Négrier – now a brigadier-general – with 1,800 legionnaires drawn from the two battalions freshly arrived from Formosa and an Algerian penal battalion, plus some artillery.

  Once in the hills and jungle they were repeatedly held up by minor fortresses guarding the road. This campaign was hardly a shining example of sophisticated European tactics: assaulting a Chinese position frontally, one of Négrier’s companies lost all its officers and a third of its men, when a simple flanking manoeuvre was subsequently found sufficient to panic the Chinese holding these positions into rapid withdrawal before their retreat was cut off. The weather was against the French and their Tonkinese troops; rain turned the so-called road into a river of mud, through which men and mules floundered for nine days until they drew in sight of Bac Viay, the last outpost before Lang Son, which was taken by an artillery barrage and an assault that cost 200 casualties.

  The way now lay open to their objective, a square walled city of some 400 metres on each side. To their surprise, the Chinese defenders melted away, allowing the French to march in. On 16 February,
Brière de l’Isle handed over command to Négrier and marched back with a relief column commanded by Col Giovanelli to lift the siege of Thuyen Quang by a march of some 160km, much of it over mountain, swamp and jungle.

  This was the moment Liu Yung-fu had planned for: the men dying in Thuyen Quang were the bait to draw a larger force into his trap. Attacked en route at Hoa Moc by the Black Flags, Giovanelli’s column sustained casualties totalling approximately 500 men and twenty-seven officers, more than had been lost in the garrison they were coming to succour. The exact numbers are disputed, partly because so many men died of wounds before reaching any kind of medical treatment, and many succumbed to exhaustion from disease and the forced march.

  Colonial domination was achieved by small numbers of European-led troops with modern arms maintaining what was effectively a rule of fear over millions of ‘lesser peoples’. Liu Yung-Fu’s double triumph showed that the gwailo foreign devils were not invincible. Having achieved his psychological purpose, his troops faded away into the jungle on 3 March, leaving only a small rearguard that held out to the last man against Legion bayonet charges.

  Significantly, at Thuyen Quang, the same thing happened simultaneously after two and a half months of siege, with one company of Black Flags left behind as a blocking party. It was while the garrison was clearing this position to the last man with bullet and bayonet that Legionnaire Thiebald Streibler threw himself in front of Capt Borelli, as Legionnaire Catteau had done in attempting to save the life of Lt Maudet at Camarón. Streibler died instantly, riddled with bullets, but Borelli was saved from certain death.

  When the relief party hove in sight of Thuyen Quang, they were confronted with a scene of arid desolation. Every tree, every stick of bamboo, had been cut for use in the 8km of trenches and parapets that zigzagged across the tortured earth, littered with rotting corpses, abandoned weapons and siege equipment. In the ruins of the fort fewer than 200 filthy, bearded ghosts drew themselves up on parade with Dominé at their head. Brière de l’Isle made the sort of speech generals make on such occasions. What did the twenty survivors crippled for life make of him telling them that they could hold their heads high to the end of their days when telling people they had been at Thuyen Quang?

  Their sacrifice and that of their comrades who died there and at Hoa Moc is honoured in the Legion’s marching song Le Boudin, which is chanted rather than sung at each meal in the mess. One verse goes,

  ‘In Tonkin, the immortal Legion

  honoured our flag.

  Heroes of Camerone and model brothers

  sleep in peace in your graves.’

  To honour the men who had died under his command at Thuyen Quang, especially Thiebald Streibler for saving his life, Capt Borelli wrote a poem twenty-seven verses long, entitled simply To my men who are dead and in especial memory of Tirbald Steoberg (sic), who gave me his life on 3 March 1885 at the siege of Thuyen Quang. Many critics have castigated Legion officers for spending their men’s lives recklessly and neglecting their welfare, but the nineteenth-century upper classes from which officers were drawn were accustomed to use their servants harshly, whether in uniform or out. Even this short extract of Borelli’s poem gives the lie to allegations that none of them cared.

  O my fellow-warriors, this is your

  officer of yesterday, come to talk with you –

  of what, I cannot tell for sure.

  But I salute my dead and say, thank you.

  Mercenaries, are you? You had to eat.

  Deserters? Well, you’re not on trial now.

  So you’re foreigners? Was the great

  Saxon marshal French, anyhow?

  They say you’re without honour or faith,

  but what more could they have asked?

  Did you not fulfil unto death

  the sworn duty with which you were tasked?

  No guardsmen of pope or royal,

  no regiment in gold, scarlet and blue

  were ever as smart as you in uniforms all soiled

  or marched as prouder men than you.[179]

  It is interesting that Borelli still felt it necessary, fifty years after Soult had formed the Legion, to rebut the accusations of the squabbling politicians back in Paris that legionnaires were riff-raff, turncoats, men without honour. Personally bringing back to the Legion chapel of the Quartier Viénot in Sidi-bel-Abbès two of the captured Black Flags, the grieving captain stipulated that they did not belong to France, and should the Legion ever be withdrawn to Europe, the flags must be burned first – as they duly were.

  After the departure of Brière de l’Isle from Lang Son, things were quiet on the frontier for a while, although men at the outpost of Dong Dang, separated from border by a plain of rice paddies, noted a strengthening of fortifications on the other side, behind which Chinese reinforcements flooded in until it was estimated an army of 40,000 men had built up.

  On 22 March, the garrison at Dong Dang repulsed the first attack. History is unclear about what happened next. There were rumours at the time that Négrier had been urged by the pro-colonial Premier Jules Ferry to achieve a swift victory that would give him additional bargaining power at the negotiations with China in Paris. Négrier’s bellicose temperament had earned him the Vietnamese nickname of ‘Mau-Len’ or Mr Quickly, so it is equally likely that he decided to bloody the Chinese nose once and for all in the belief that Beijing needed teaching a lesson, to put a stop to further incursions.

  At the subsequent official enquiry, he contented himself with saying, ‘Cavalry patrols and reconnaissance by officers reported from 15 March onwards a sustained build-up of Chinese forces. The Chinese tactics had recently consisted of constructing a fortified camp as close to (our lines) as possible and then moving against our lines of communication. The necessity to keep the enemy at a distance from the lines of communication made obligatory the occupation of Dong Dang. Given the small forces under our command, a passive defence obliging the defence of numerous posts was out of the question. It seemed preferable to combine all available forces in one massive push. The general decided immediately after the successful defence of Dong Dang (on 22 March) to take advantage of the enemy’s demoralisation to attack (the nearest Chinese fort of) Bang-Bo with all his forces.’[180] The terse military language obscures the political implications of cross-border warfare.

  Immediately after crossing the frontier, the first wave of the French attack stalled on the steep slopes across the rice paddies from Dong Dang. With two French battalions and one of Tonkinese light infantry unable to advance, the Legion moved through them and drove the enemy back, enabling the main force to file through the pass called the Gates of China into Guangxi Province. When a second line of fortifications was also taken, a third was visible beyond it, and another beyond that. The Chinese had had three thousand years to construct their defences in depth.

  After a large enemy force had tried to out-flank the French on the right, and been driven back by artillery, the Legion and other troops settled in for the night feeling optimistic after this early success. When the dawn mists cleared mid-morning on 24 March, they began the routine reduction of one enemy post after another. At mid-afternoon a massed Chinese counter-attack came in, which was their first indication that the enemy soldiers would fight far more tenaciously for their own country than when on foreign soil.

  An estimated 25,000 – 30,000 well-led enemy troops rapidly fought their way to within arm’s length of the French positions. Legionnaire Maury recalled later, ‘Our ammunition was exhausted. I had only two bullets left and thought I should never escape alive from such a fight. Of ninety men, only twenty-seven were left.’[181] Another survivor, Legionnaire Bôn-Mat confessed later, ‘Under fire from the front and both flanks, we took high casualties. The wounded and those too exhausted to keep up were abandoned, never to be seen again.’[182]

  The reason why a third survivor wrote, ‘My one aim at the time was to get clear. I had no wish to fall, wounded or not, into the hands of my pursuers,’[1
83] was apparent next morning. The disciplined Chinese having refrained from crossing the frontier, French scouting parties were sent back on the lookout for the missing and wounded. They were allowed to pass because the Chinese watching them from the heights wanted them to see what had happened to those they caught. In Bôn-Mat’s own words, ‘We brought back a dozen, but far more were found executed and horribly mutilated.’[184]

  The regimental diary dryly records 2nd Battalion losing one captain and nine other ranks that day, with fifty-two wounded and two missing, but the total losses must have been high for Négrier to abandon Dong Dang and fall back on the positions around Lang Son, where the Legion gained a timely reinforcement with the arrival of 1,700 men from the rear.

  At 0700hrs on 28 March, the Chinese launched wave after wave against the French positions, but were held off until dusk, when they retreated in impressively good order. The most controversial casualty of the day was Négrier, who took a chest wound around 1530hrs that obliged him to hand over command to Lt Col Paul Gustave Herbinger. Herbinger’s until then brilliant army career was about to be blighted for ever.

  Having been Professor of Military Tactics at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, he stunned his first orders meeting by informing the assembled officers that his professional appreciation of the situation was that Lang Son was untenable, given the forces massed against them and the problems of re-supply, with many units already having run out of ammunition in combat. Having anticipated a Négrier-like order to hold at all costs, the officers were furious to learn that the fortress was to be abandoned that very night. One major of the Bataillons d’Afrique demanded the right to defend Lang Son single-handed, but Herbinger was adamant. Everything that could not be transported to the rear was to be destroyed.