The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  While administratively Lyautey showed a tolerance and respect for local customs that impressed all races with his personal dignity and his competence, when campaigning he was ruthless. The pacification proceeded by fits and starts, with the forces pushing in from Algeria finally meeting those pushing east from the Atlantic coast at Taza only three months before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. It was a link-up more symbolic than real: Morocco was far from being subdued, for the nineteen tribes of the Rif continued to fight against both the Spanish in the north of their territory and the French in the south for many years to come.

  A major asset of colonies was the reservoir of manpower they represented. When war loomed in 1914 the Legion was hard put to fulfil its quota. In 1913 Gen Antoine Drude, commanding Oran military district, had complained that 2 RE in Saïda was 500 men under strength and 1 RE in bel-Abbès 1,000 men short.[239] Ordered to send the equivalent of forty battalions to France, Lyautey fulfilled his quota with Zouaves, Spahis, the penal Bataillons d’Afrique and some newly raised Moroccan units. The only European troops left to him were two battalions of German and Austrian legionnaires, who had exercised their right not to be sent to fight against their countrymen. On their unlikely shoulders for the next four years rested the burden of maintaining French rule in Morocco.

  Chapter 22: Chaos and Confusion

  France, 1914

  In November 1913 the hot topic on the terraces of smart boulevard cafes in Paris had been Marcel Proust’s inability to find a publisher for his novel Swann’s Way.[240] At Nouvelle Revue Française, editor André Gide would not touch it with a barge-pole. After the publishing houses Mercure de France and Fasquelle had also turned it down, Bernard Grasset did agree to publish Proust’s novel, but with so little expectation of success that the author had to meet all the production costs out of his own pocket.

  The population of the capital was still deep in denial during the first months of 1914. Although the state visit in April of Britain’s King George V and his German queen, Princess Mary of Teck, was a show of solidarity for Berlin’s benefit, everyone pretended officially that it was in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Entente. Across the Rhine, the pace of German preparations for a massive offensive on land and sea was such that the question occupying the French general staff was not whether there would be war, but when and on what pretext Germany would launch the offensive so long planned by the great warlord Count Alfred von Schlieffen. The answer came when terrorist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort Sophie von Hohenberg on 28 June in Sarajevo.

  In Paris, the first move of the general staff was sartorial. On 2 July the trousers of French soldiers, traditionally made of red cloth to conceal bloodstains on the battlefield, were changed to a grey-blue marginally less visible. On 15 July the long-resisted law introducing income tax was finally passed, and everyone knew why the government needed the money. In the last days of the month the army began requisitioning the wheat harvest. Before many weeks, it would be requisitioning also bridles, harness, reins and saddles, fodder – and horses of all breeds and sizes by the hundred thousand for remounts and to haul artillery and supplies to the front, where the few motor vehicles would become bogged down off-road.

  On 1 August the country moved onto a war footing with the proclamation of a general mobilisation order, greeted by Swiss author Blaise Cendrars[241] and a group of fellow intellectuals in Paris calling on ‘every man worthy of the name’ who loved France to become actively involved in ‘the most formidable conflagration in history’.[242] Equally enthusiastic for the French cause, titled Russian émigrés and Italian artisans living in Paris banded together with their fellows to try and find some military unit in which to enlist.

  Members of the British colony received a formally worded circular entitled Object: The Formation of a British Volunteer Corps, to offer its services to the French War Minister. Addressed to all men with military experience, it ended with the exhortation: God save the King! Vive la France! British volunteers spent a few days drilling in the Magic City amusement park, while émigré Russians hired a cinema with a flat floor for the purpose, clearing the seats away to make themselves a drill hall. The Americans learned to march in the gardens of the Palais Royal after their mettle was aroused by the Committee of the Friends of France evoked the shared revolutionary past of France and the US. That appeal ended, Vive la France immortelle! Vive la colonie americaine![243] Jewish immigrants issued a multilingual call to arms:

  Even if we are not yet French by right, we are French in our hearts and souls and our most sacred duty is to place ourselves at the disposal of this great and noble nation in order to take part in its defence. Foreign Jews, do your duty and Vive la France![244]

  On 3 August Germany formally declared war and made its point by the first air raid on civilian targets. The town of Lunéville suffered three bombs dropped by hand from the nacelle of a dirigible airship. War in the air had begun spectacularly, but this was to be the railway war par excellence: 4,278 trains were commandeered to move reservists from all over France to the front. In Britain eighty trains a day ran men and supplies to Southampton docks for Gen Sir John French’s initial expeditionary force of one cavalry and six infantry divisions.

  The mobilisation order signed by President Poincaré did not directly affect the Legion, but since no foreigner was legally permitted to serve in the French army, it was to the Legion’s recruiting offices that foreign volunteers were directed. A year earlier the total strength of 1 RE and 2 RE had been around 10,521 men. In the first eight months of the war 32,296 foreign volunteers flocked to the colours of France[245], many of them euphorically casting themselves as St George tilting at the barbaric German dragon to save the virgin of French literature, art and civilisation. Before the war ended with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, another 11,000 volunteers would join the Legion. Of these, a total of 31,000 were wounded, dead or missing in action by the time the last shot was fired.

  Not all the men included in the statistics were true volunteers because many legionnaires from belligerent countries whose contract expired during the war chose re-enlistment in preference to internment as enemy aliens. In 1 RE, 70% of NCOs in 2nd Mounted Company were German. They and others risked a firing squad if taken prisoner by compatriots on the western front. For this reason many German- and Austrian-born legionnaires volunteering changed their names officially to French ones. Others opted to remain with the garrison forces in North Africa and Indo-China or to serve in theatres of war where they would not be confronting compatriots across No Man’s Land. In the reverse direction, colonial troops from Vietnam, from North Africa and Senegal took ship for Europe, Algeria alone providing at its peak 170,000 men – who arrived in France in organised military units with their own officers and were often thrown into the worst sectors of the line without any preparation. In contrast, the flood of foreigners volunteering their services inside France produced chaos and confusion, had more been needed. The urgent requirement was for tough and disciplined veterans, not enthusiastic amateurs who would be more liability than asset.

  On 8 August the Journal Officiel finally announced that foreign civilians in France might enlist for the duration of hostilities, but only in the Foreign Legion. Not all of them stayed. Those whose homelands became allies of France, transferred to serve with their compatriots. Thus British legionnaires later transferred to the BEF, Italians served under their own flag when Rome declared for the Allies and Americans left to become ‘doughboys’ with all the advantage of combat experience after the US entered the war in 1917.

  In his autobiographical La Main Coupée, Blaise Cendrars wrongly averred that,

  It had taken a whole month of talks with the Minister of War before he . . . would accept into the recruiting offices this army of foreign volunteers.[246]

  Cendrars signed up on 3 September, by which time the German guns were audible throughout Paris, but he was not among the first volunteers. Two
weeks earlier, on 25 August after enlisting at the Hôtel des Invalides across the Champs de Mars from the Eiffel Tower, the Harvard poet Alan Seeger led fifty fellow-Americans through the streets waving the stars and stripes, cheered by crowds all the way to the Gare St-Lazare, where they entrained for Toulouse with no idea of the hell they had signed up for. Just before he was killed two years later, Seeger wrote in his diary, speaking for so many of the eager volunteers in August 1914: It was for the glory alone that I engaged.[247]

  On 12 August 1 RE and 2 RE each had one bataillon de marche in Morocco and formed four further half-battalions for service in Europe, excluding legionnaires from future enemy nations, who were to stay in Africa. On 28 August the men from 1 RE entrained at bel-Abbès and headed north once in France, absorbing Italian and other volunteers at the recruiting depot in Avignon on the way. There, Swiss recruit Jean Reybaz recorded his horror at the way in which the veteran legionnaires stole everything from the middle-class volunteers.[248]

  The men from 2 RE followed a different route after leaving Saïda, stopping in Toulouse to absorb into the 2nd/2nd those US and other volunteers who had been training at the Quartier Pérignon. American Henry Farnsworth considered the Legion NCOs’ military competence mighty comforting after all the pointless marching up and down he had put in under drill sergeants from the Paris fire brigade. If the reaction of the hardened NCOs of 2 RE to these soft civilians they had rapidly to convert into soldiers can be imagined, many volunteers were equally horrified to find themselves sleeping in dormitories with men who habitually stole comrades’ equipment rather than clean their own, and occasionally sold it for drink. The politically conscious East European refugees were also aghast to find that their NCOs gave not a damn for politics and did not care for whom or against whom they were fighting.[249]

  The friction when lesser-educated long-service professionals and better-educated short-service amateurs are thrown together in uniform – as during the US draft for Vietnam and the years of National Service in Britain – was far more acute in 1914 when the class/education gap was so wide. Seeger wrote, ‘Discontent has more than the usual to feed upon, where a majority of men who engaged voluntarily were thrown into a regiment made up almost entirely of the dregs of society, refugees from justice and roughs, commanded by NCOs who treated us all without distinction in the same manner they were habituated to treat their unruly brood in Africa’.[250]

  The Legion was more than ever ‘run by its sergeants’ because many serving Legion officers seeking promotion had transferred to line regiments during the summer of 1914 in the erroneous belief that the government would respect the prohibition on serving in France embodied in the Legion’s original constitution. The shortfall was made up by outsiders who came to serve with Legion units, but stayed only long enough to gain a citation and maybe the Croix de Guerre, awarded to all members of a trench raid that brought back prisoners for interrogation. Their swift arrival and departure did nothing to build up the essential trust between officers and men. One of the reservist sergeants of 2nd/1st, whose most important duty was distributing the mail, was Edouard Daladier the future French Prime Minister.

  The French general staff has rightly been much criticised for wasting lives to no purpose, as have British generals like Haig, who took over command from Gen French on 17 December 1915. The idée fixe in Paris on the outbreak of war was to throw everything into an all-out attempt to regain the so-called lost départements of Alsace and Lorraine, seized by Prussia after the war of 1870-71. This obsession blinded the French General Staff to the main thrust of the German armies under Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s plan, modified by his successor Helmuth von Moltke.

  Schlieffen had planned to cope with a war on two fronts – against France and Russia bound by treaty to support each other – by leaving only a holding force on the eastern front where the enemy needed six weeks to mobilise its huge but ill-equipped army[251] and use this crucial time-lag to knock out France by holding the southern part of the western front with eight divisions while concentrating fifty-four divisions on the right flank of the German advance,[252] where it would avoid the extensive French frontier fortifications by rolling through neutral Belgium, bypassing the fortresses at Liège and Namur – which were sited to protect the approach to Brussels, and not Paris – before entering France near Lille. The Plan was then to divide forces, one half wheeling southwards to sweep around Paris while the other swept eastwards to sever the French line of retreat from the frontier. With the French armies in the north encircled and Paris surrounded, France would be forced into a humiliating surrender. Only after a lighting victory in France did Schlieffen intend to ship the major part of his armies eastwards rapidly by rail to deal with the Russian bear, slowly awakening from his winter sleep.

  But Schlieffen retired in 1905. His successor Gen Helmuth von Moltke the Younger – nephew of the victor of 1871 – was too cautious to put so many eggs in the flanking basket and thus threw away the chance of rapid victory while the French were too obsessed with Alsace and Lorraine to stop him. The result was an early success as his troops pushed through ‘poor little Belgium’ where Austrian Skoda 305mm howitzers and Krupp’s 420mm Big Bertha cannons – the largest and most powerful artillery pieces ever produced until then – fired delayed-action shells that exploded inside the fortresses after penetrating their reinforced-concrete walls.

  Moltke nearly made it to Paris before being held, but final victory eluded him because, although his artillery easily outranged the French 75mm guns, one cannot occupy terrain with guns, and his watering-down of Schlieffen’s plan meant that he had too few troops available at the sharp end to encircle the capital or cut off the French retreat. So, when he had to wheel east while still to the north of Paris, Gen Galliéni as military commandant of the city heaved a sigh of relief, knowing that Moltke must lack the men and resources to encircle the city as his uncle had done in 1871.

  By then, President Poincaré and the government were safely removed to Bordeaux, about as far from the advancing Germans as they could get. In the French army’s final desperate stand before Paris that now ensued, sleep was hard to come by as the guns thundered just over the horizon and whatever troops could be thrown together were trucked to the front an hour or so away in commandeered taxis and open-top omnibuses. The Battle of the Frontiers, as this stage of the war came to be known, was the largest armed conflict history had seen, with more than 2 million men involved. From 14 August to the start of the first battle of the Marne on 6 September, it cost France one in ten of her officers and 300,000 other ranks. In the fighting on the Marne during the next twelve days the much decorated Moroccan Division alone lost forty-six of its 103 officers and 4,300 of their 5,000 men.

  On 18 October, the 2nd/1st and 2nd/2nd Régiments de Marche (conventionally referred to for convenience as ‘RM’) marched out of their camp at Mailly in Champagne to relieve the Senegalese light infantry who had been holding the line at Verzy, a scant 4km distant. Immediately, with one of those strokes of the admin. pen that bewilder simple soldiers, they were split up, with 2nd/2nd despatched to the Aisne front and 2nd/1st sent a few kilometres north to the front at Prunay, where the forward trench was within 700 metres of the enemy. It was in this ‘relatively quiet’ sector of the front that they and two other RM would remain, brigaded with 4th RM of Algerian tirailleurs until April 1915.

  [SEE MAP J: ‘The Legion in France 1914 – 18’ below.]

  ‘Relatively quiet’ covered minor adjustments of the line that cost lives and included not only the hazards to which the veterans had been accustomed in North Africa, but also the impossibility of ever getting warm and dry in the cold and mud of the trenches, plus new terrors like the Minenwerfer mortars that hurled unwieldy bombs short distances and the risk of being literally under-mined and blown sky-high without warning. Among the wounded was Maxim Gorky’s adopted son Legionnaire Zinovi Pechkoff, who gained the Médaille Militaire for losing an arm, but went on to be a captain and command a batta
lion in Morocco and Algeria until 1939 after inventing an original method of mounting his horse by seizing the reins between his teeth and using his single arm to vault into the saddle. Everyone was worn down by the impossibility of a normal sleep-rhythm. With the cookhouses situated three hours’ march to the rear, there was no way of re-heating whatever food did arrive.

  Almost 5,000 Italians enrolled in 4th/1st RM of the Legion[253] commanded by Lt Col Ricciotti Garibaldi, son of the Italian revolutionary leader. First dubbed ‘the Italian Legion’, it became known as the Garibaldi Legion because it still numbered among its officers four members of the illustrious Italian family after Capt Bruno Garibaldi died in its first action in Champagne.

  On 26 December 1914 at 0300hrs those who had managed to sleep in the sub-zero temperature were awakened. After an issue of eau-de-vie they moved up into the front line about 500 metres from the enemy. The barrage supposedly cutting the German wire directly ahead of them was so deafening that few men could hear the shouted orders and the buglers playing The Charge. Despite this, the Italian sappers, who had been cutting passages through the French wire in the night, arrived at the German entanglements to find them still intact. Hacking away with their wire-cutters, they were mown down by machine guns from the German lines and the eventual way through the wire was provided by the weight of dead men pulling it down for their comrades to scramble over.

  The objective only partially attained, they crouched in the German trenches or a few metres short of them among the bodies of comrades and those defenders who had been too slow to run for the rear. Then the German artillery began firing, pre-ranged on the captured trenches. After an hour of steady if unspectacular losses, the Italians were ordered to retreat back to the start line, in the course of which they endured more casualties.