The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  After the monotonous dun-coloured desert through which they had marched, greenery was a relief for the legionnaires’ eyes, but whatever poetic thoughts the sight of vegetation evoked were soon swept away in preparation for the business which had brought them there. After the artillery had softened up the target, 24th Mounted Company went in on foot. Once among the date palms of the oasis, they picked their way through the bodies, shooting and bayoneting everyone in their path. Lacking any communications, they could not call in the artillery, which had to cease firing or risk wiping them out. The 24th lost fifteen dead including the officer commanding, while enemy losses could not be estimated because the legionnaires had to withdraw with the coming of dusk. From the plantations, lamentations could be heard as families mourned their dead warriors.

  Using the 24th as shock troops in this way cost Gen Vigy a reprimand on the grounds that he should have committed the infantry held in reserve. Gen Bailloud, commanding 19 Corps, also disapproved of the lack of any real battle plan which had placed the legionnaires of the 24th at a disadvantage in the palm groves without artillery support. In his opinion, Vigy had been obsessed with the idea of using a mounted company as elite troops, perhaps carried away by the dead officer commanding 24th Mounted Company pleading we-can-do-it. Whatever the reason, their reward after this mauling was to be held in reserve next day when the ksar of Bou Denib was taken by storm. They did, however, join in the looting after the 500 men and 300 women found there were driven out and held prisoner in open ground outside the walls. Lefèvre records the legionnaires loading their mules with dates, flour, clothes and weapons stolen from the houses.

  Official accounts of battles are so clinical that one forgets the misery of warfare. On this occasion, a small chink in the official jargon of times, units involved and body counts allows a brief glimpse of suffering humanity: a desperate mother pleaded with Sgt Lefèvre to help find her child, from whom she had been separated during the fighting. When he did so, she gave him the only possession left to her: a glass necklace from the Sudan.

  The harka that had drawn the French to Bou Denib disappeared into thin air, but reappeared to attack the ksar in August, by which time it was garrisoned by 24th Mounted Company with another unit of legionnaires in an outlying blockhouse. Successive assaults were broken by the artillery installed on the walls until a large relief column hove into sight, enabling a French attack on the harka by approximately 5,000 men and eighteen guns about dawn on 7 September.

  So great was the slaughter that Lefèvre recorded attacking Moroccans being literally mown down by the artillery, which was then turned on the enormous tented camp of the harka spreading across the Plain of Djorf. Those who could, grabbed whatever belongings had not been destroyed in the bombardment and ran or rode away, each man for himself. Pursuing them, 24th Mounted Company found injured and dead Moroccans everywhere, still encountering what Lefèvre called, ‘human debris at 10km from the battlefield’. The inhabitants of Bou Denib forced to bury the dead did the job in a hurry and not very well. ‘Feet, hands and heads were to be seen everywhere sticking out. The foul stench (of putrefaction) was everywhere.’[229]

  Vigy was not the only general impressed with the potential of the mounted companies, some officers arguing that the entire Legion should be reorganised on their model. Yet the price paid by legionnaires serving in them for earning twice normal pay was high: rest periods were few and men deserted from sheer exhaustion. Such was the turnover of trained men in mounted companies that when Gen Bailloud sought out the 24th in 1910 to congratulate the men who had fought at El-Menabha and Bou Denib, not one was still serving in the company.[230] In July 1910, eighteen legionnaires deserted from 3rd Mounted Company of 1 RE in Algeria. Despite the investigation laying the blame on the stress of constant campaigning, the cause appears to have been the murder of one of their sick comrades by Arabs after he had been denied his turns on muleback by a bullying NCO and could no longer keep up with the company on foot.

  While the French were bludgeoning their way into Morocco across the desert, things were deteriorating rapidly inside the country. Within months of the Algeciras Conference, British and French officials and civilians were being assassinated. When a number of French labourers re-building the port of Casablanca were killed in July 1907, the warship Galilée bombard the city’s native quarter before landing a force of marines to protect foreigners sheltering in the French Consulate from riots aimed at driving out the increasing number of European incomers. This was followed up by an expeditionary force of 3,000 men, including a Legion contingent, which grew in six months to an army of occupation totalling 14,000 men under Gen Albert D’Amade, who imposed martial law for 75km around Casablanca.

  Although some Legion units coming from the desert, where there were no witnesses left alive to tell tales, did introduce bayoneting or shooting of wounded captives and looting of ‘enemy’ property, one would think that the German residents of Morocco would nevertheless prefer to have their personal safety from the Muslim rioters guaranteed by troops controlled by another European power. Yet, the Legion in particular was out of favour with them. In the ten years preceding the First World War, recruiting of Germans dropped by half, from 34% to around 16% of the intake.[231]

  Part of the reason was that Germany’s colonial wars gave young men seeking adventure in exotic places the chance to do so in the Kaiser’s uniforms. Secondly, the increasing professionalism of the German army discouraged traditional NCO bullying that had previously driven conscripts to desertion and suicide. Thirdly, sensational books by ex-legionnaires like Erwin Rosen recounted details of punishments such as le silo, a conical hole dug in the ground, in which a defaulter was confined in his own filth for days and nights on end, unable to lie down or sit, so that when he was taken out, he was unable to stand. According to Rosen, Gen Négrier found fifteen silos occupied during an inspection of the barracks at Saïda and immediately abolished the punishment.[232]

  Since punishment time did not count for pay or towards demobilisation, Rosen stated that a five-year engagement could easily last eight years or longer because of time spent confined to barracks or undergoing other punishment. With legionnaires’ pay calculated at 5 centimes per day for the first three years and 10 centimes for the fourth and fifth years, he reckoned that the total pay for the five years was 127 francs and 75 centimes![233]

  This sort of negative publicity fed the fires of anti-French feeling, creating a number of organisations such as the Völkerrechtsbund zür Bekämfung der Fremdenlegion – or Protection League against the Foreign Legion – that dissuaded young Germans from enlisting in the service of foreign powers, especially France. The shortfall in recruits from east of the Rhine was to some extent made good by French marines and men from regular and colonial regiments with bad disciplinary records joining the Legion as a way of completing the fifteen years’ service necessary to qualify for pension rights. Compounding the problem, foreign legionnaires with a record of good conduct who acquired French nationality after five years’ service frequently opted to join regular regiments with better pay, conditions of service and prospect of promotion.

  Alcohol was always a problem in the Legion, with inspecting Gen Herson, who decorated the flag of 1 RE at bel-Abbès on 27 April 1906, singling out for especial criticism in his report the huge upsurge in the selling of equipment to buy booze and consequent drink-fuelled destruction of equipment and barrack fixtures and fittings.[234] On a similar wavelength is the complaint of Col Désorthès commanding 2 RE that he had signed 1,482 sentences of thirty to sixty days’ imprisonment in 1905, during which year there had also been 334 courts martial in the regiment. All this was in addition to the traditional physical punishments regularly handed out by NCOs and junior officers, such as le tombeau when a defaulter was made to dig his grave and sleep in it, no matter what the weather and la crapaudine, meaning roughly ‘trussed like a turkey’, for which a defaulter had his wrists pinioned behind his back, his ankles shackled and drawn tight
ly up to the wrists, resulting in agonising cramps with no marks of violence shown on the body afterwards.

  Discipline might have been less harsh, had the Legion a sufficient complement of officers and NCOs. A line infantry company had three officers, six sergeants and eleven corporals for a nominal roll of 148 men, but which was often closer to 120. Legion companies usually numbered 200 or more, but had the same number of officers and NCOs without any supernumeraries. The shortage was compounded by the policy of detaching legionnaires to postings spread out in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria and Morocco. Also, the six-month convalescent leave to which cadres were entitled after serving two years east of Suez meant that a battalion often counted only five or six officers, with each company having only one or two sergeants.

  It was easy under these conditions for German expats in Morocco, under the guise of offering hospitality to lonely men far from their homes and families, to entice several hundred discontented legionnaires to travel on a clandestine ‘underground railway’ back to Europe. In August 1908 Gen D’Amade signalled his ambassador in Tangiers regarding a German newspaper report that had come to his attention, which boasted how a German merchant vessel, the Riga, had landed fifteen German deserters from the Legion at Tangiers on 16 August.

  On paper, desertion from the Legion at this time was no worse than from most French army regiments. In 1907, 36% of reservists in mainland France failed to report for training and between 1906 and 1911 the number of courts martial in the regular army doubled, which was unusual in time of peace. In the month preceding the general’s signal, eighteen Germans had deserted from the Legion and the total for that calendar year included twenty-nine other Germans. The route they travelled was revealed in September 1908 by a neat piece of military detective work. A Russian, a Swiss, an Austrian and three German legionnaires in civilian clothing and waving a laisser-passer issued by the German consul in Casablanca attempted to board the mail steamer Cintra while it was moored in the harbour on its regular call.

  A Legion NCO posted on the quayside for the purpose recognised some of the deserters and alerted the French harbour officer on duty, who informed the French consulate. Whether the boatman panicked on being ordered to return to the quay or, as some said, because the deserters were drunk from premature celebration of their escape, the dinghy in which they were being rowed out to the Cintra overturned, spilling them all into the water. Hauled soaking onto the dockside, the whole party now found themselves arrested by the military police waiting there.

  MPs not being known for using kid gloves when apprehending deserters, the ripples on the diplomatic pond spread fast after the German consul and a Moroccan army guard from the consulate were also struck in the resulting fracas. In Berlin, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow summoned the French ambassador to demand the release of the three Germans illegally arrested on non-French territory and an apology and damages for the maltreatment of consulate staff.

  In Berlin Crown Prince Wilhelm, known to his British relatives for some intimate reason as ‘Little Willy’ – and who compensated by a predilection for wearing immensely long ceremonial swords that had to be held out in front of him to avoid tripping up anyone walking behind – immediately started threatening to unleash his favourite Pomeranian grenadiers west of the Rhine to avenge this dastardly insult to German sovereignty. Even more curiously, his father gave an interview to the eccentric Col Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, whose house in England he had rented for the summer. Stuart-Wortly sent it to Berlin for approval, where Bülow was apparently too busy to read it himself and passed it to a subordinate, who thought he was merely to correct the grammar, not edit the content.

  A recipe for disaster, when published in the Daily Telegraph on 28 October[235], the interview with the Kaiser stressed that he personally liked the British, whereas most of his subjects did not. It also included the immortal lines, spoken at a Guildhall dinner in the City: ‘You English are as mad, mad, mad as March hares, and there is nothing in Germany’s recent action with regard to Morocco which runs contrary to the explicit declaration of my love of peace’. On being briefed on this by the Foreign Office, the private response of King Edward VII – who had never much liked his cousin the Kaiser or Little Willy – was succinctly reduced to six words: Trust French Government will remain firm, E.R.[236]

  On 7 November the British and Russian ambassadors in Paris informed the Quai d’Orsay that London and Moscow supported the position taken by Paris vis-à-vis Berlin. This growing tension over a handful of Legion deserters could have been the spark that ignited the First World War, had not von Bülow advised the Kaiser that it would be some years before Germany was ready for war against an alliance of Britain, France and Russia. Instead he found a way out without loss of face when his Austrian counterpart advised going to arbitration at the International Tribunal at The Hague.

  On 24 November the German submission to the Court was that treaty rights conceded by the sultan placed German citizens in Morocco under the exclusive jurisdiction of the German consul in Casablanca, that the arrest was therefore a violation of consular immunity and that the German deserters should be handed over to him. The French position was that Germany had no rights in Morocco over persons not of German nationality and no authority to protect Germans in the service of a foreign power, especially since the incident occurred in an area under military law.

  Meantime, fifty German legionnaires of 2 RE were arrested after commandeering a train at gunpoint between Aïn Sefra and Saïda in the hope of reaching the distant coast and taking ship for Europe. The ringleader was a Bavarian named Pal, who had previously deserted from 1 RE, in which he had served under another name. A charismatic fantasist, he had convinced his companions that he was on a secret mission from Berlin to rescue them. His sentence was twenty years’ hard labour.

  Desertion was a game of chance. Those picked up within six days were simply dealt with as AWOL cases and men who deserted when drunk were often treated leniently. On one occasion a Legion sergeant attacked the NCO of a penal battalion who had forced a deserter to march back without boots.[237] Those returned by native troops, however, had often been maltreated and even dragged behind galloping horses. At the far end of the scale, men who deserted with their weapons and were tracked down by native soldiers were often killed by them because it was easier to bring back a head for the reward than a live man. Those caught by the enemy in the aftermath of a razzia had the worst fate, being used as slaves or slowly tortured to death.

  None of this bothered the judges at The Hague. After deliberating 1 – 19 May 1909, the five learned lawyers handed down a political compromise, rather than a judgement. It censured Germany for ‘a grave and manifest fault’ in aiding non-Germans to desert, and found it had no right to protect the German deserters either. France was diplomatically rebuked for using excessive force and lacking respect for consular staff. The real feeling of the Court, however, is evident from its failure to recommend return of any of the deserting legionnaires to German custody.[238]

  Oil was poured on the troubled Rhine by the French confirming German trading rights in Morocco – probably because, with the country falling apart at the seams, they were not worth much anyway. Paul Revoil, a future governor-general of Algeria, bribed the young sultan with a loan of 7.5 million francs from the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas to finance his dream of modernising the system of land tenure in Morocco. The project failed miserably due to a lack of European-educated surveyors and the general hostility to social change. Abd al-Aziz finally had to pay the price for what his subjects saw as excessive collaboration with the Europeans, being deposed by his brother Moulay Abd al-Hafid. Civil disorder increased until he in turn was forced three years later to beg the French to rescue him while besieged by tribesmen in Fez. The French relief column that raised the siege had a high Legion component.

  With the country in turmoil outside the heavily occupied areas, Berlin despatched the gunboat Panther to Agadir on 1 July 1911, ostensibly to protect German interest
s during a local uprising, but in reality to show the French an iron fist in a very thin glove. Known as ‘the Agadir Incident’, this show of force was yet another of what Winston Churchill called footsteps on the road to Armageddon. That autumn the Cabinet in London was discussing contingency plans for eventual war, but the crisis was de-fused by a Franco-German convention of 4 November, which acknowledged the French protectorate of Morocco in return for strips of territory in the Congo basin being ceded to Germany. Spanish objections were overcome by a Franco-Spanish treaty of 27 November revising the previous Franco-Spanish boundaries in Morocco in favour of Madrid and the creation of the international zone around Tangiers.

  Abd al-Hafid’s rescue by the French came with a price tag. Forced to sign the Treaty of Fez on 30 March 1912, under which he acknowledged the French protectorate in return for the promise of support for his claim to be sultan, he was left with a hollow semblance of authority. Lyautey had been recalled to France in 1910 to command an army corps at Rennes. Returning now as first Resident-General of the Protectorate of Morocco, one of his first acts was to replace Abd al-Hafid by his more malleable younger brother Moulay Jussef, who was required to ‘govern’ his country through a new administration staffed by French officials.

  Country districts were administered by French contrôleurs civils; in important areas such as Fez officers of general rank supervised the administration. In the south a number of Berber chiefs or caïds were allowed to remain semi-independent. The impotence of Moroccans in government is exemplified by Muhammad al-Moqri, who was grand vizier when the protectorate was inaugurated and still held the same post when Morocco recovered its independence forty-four years later. He was then more than 100 years old.