The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  Legionnaire Jean Martin recorded the confusion that resulted. Ordered to dye their bleached képis, the men produced a rainbow of hues, with the machine gunners flaunting caps of a pale mauve despite orders to the contrary and punishments.[293] The colour competition was not resolved until Bastille Day 1939, when for the first time the Legion contingent in the 14 July parade marched down the Champs Elysées in immaculate white képis. Today, the engagé volontaire receives his white képi at the end of his six-month basic training in a quasi-religious ceremony, followed by a collective booze-up.

  Another traditional piece of Legion uniform that saw the light of day again under Rollet was the blue sash wound around the waist. Although men get attached to distinguishing items of uniform, nobody much cared for the waist sash, for to drop one’s pants necessitated undoing all two metres’ length of it and finding either a comrade to hold one end or a door to jam it in, in order to spin round three times to wind it tight again afterwards. Which is why the legionnaires being shipped to the war in Europe in 1939 jettisoned their sashes overboard as soon as they were out of sight of land, only to have some Colonel Blimp in the stores find a new supply that caught up with them while training for the Narvik intervention – for which they were particularly inappropriate. Three years later in the heat of the Libyan Desert they were again ordered to wear them – over British army short-sleeved shirts and baggy shorts!

  But those are details. Rollet unveiled his new product in all its glory on the Legion’s centenary in 1931. He could have chosen the Legion’s real birthday, commemorating Louis-Philippe’s decree in 1831; instead, he chose the battle of Camarón, seizing on it, rather than the story of one of the Legion’s many victories because it epitomised the legionnaire’s duty of unflinching obedience unto death. There had been some improvised Fêtes de Camerone celebrated in 1913 and 1914, but on 30 April 1931 Rollet outshone them all by producing a spectacular parade for visiting dignitaries and twenty-seven delegations of former legionnaires – les anciens de la Légion.

  Every cult needs a shrine. Had Camarón been on French territory, Rollet would have built it there. Sidi bel-Abbès was the next best place. For a Bible, he commissioned the respected military historian Jean Brunon to research and compile a hagiographical history of the Legion, called appropriately Le Livre d’Or, or Golden Book, in which bel-Abbès is referred to as ‘the mother house’ – as though the Legion were a latter-day Order of the Templars.[294]

  Leading that first Camerone Day parade in bel-Abbès was a corps of bearded pioneers to ‘open the road’ in the Hohenlohe slow march of eighty-eight paces to the minute. The pioneers wearing cowhide aprons and carrying at the slope huge tree-felling axes instead of rifles are now traditional at the head of Legion parades. The beards were originally, under the Second Empire, to make a sapper immediately identifiable among clean-shaven comrades in the confusion of battle. Rollet revived them for theatrical effect.

  The climax of the celebration in 1931 was the ceremonial consecration of the Monument aux Morts, a huge terrestrial bronze globe cast by Legion engineers with Camarón indicated by a gold star and all the countries where the Legion has fought outlined in gold. At each corner of the square marble base, for whose construction Maj Maire was responsible, stands a life-size bronze statue of a legionnaire with rifle reversed in mourning for his dead comrades. One of them is recognisably the immortal Loum-Loum. The monument cost the equivalent of £8,000 – a considerable amount at the time – and was paid for on the basis of one day’s pay each by 30,000 legionnaires and officers, whose names are enshrined in the base.

  Marching songs, except ribald ones, are not as important in the British forces as in most European armies. The Legion has many, of which the one chanted at every meal time is ‘Black Pudding’. Le Boudin is as near a national anthem as the Legion gets. Rollet elevated it to the status of classical music, with a band of 180 musicians to play it at his parade, repeated every week thereafter as la revue des categories and held, not inside the Quartier Viénot barracks at bel-Abbès but in the Sacred Way leading from the barracks into the centre of town.

  All his new Legion lacked was a code of honour. The old Legion had many times abandoned men who could not keep up with the hard pace of a column marching in the dry heat of the Sahara or in the dripping jungles of Madagascar. In the Vietnamese intervention too, those who could not keep up were not just abandoned to the Chinese or local bandits, but given a coup de grâce to save them from an agonising death. As late as the war in the Rif, legionnaires attested to having left dying men behind because they were already burdened with carrying the wounded with a chance of survival.[295]

  There is something sacrificial in the idea of living men risking their own lives in order to recover a dead comrade’s body, as required by the Code of Honour invented in the 1980s, since when it has been chanted on parade as a mystic pledge to the unseen faceless god whose device is the flaming grenade with the slogan Legio patria nostra. Some legionnaires do not even understand all the words for the first months of their training, but then how many Christians or Muslims or Buddhists really believe the words of the prayers they utter as an affirmation of belonging to a congregation or a community? In the same way the chanting of the Legion songs and the Code of Honour is a statement of belonging to a family or brotherhood.

  Rollet was as shrewd a psychologist as he was a gifted leader – perhaps the first is part of the second – and in creating a ready-made identity for the legionnaire, he was baiting a hook. Many men and women don uniform as soldiers, sailors, airmen, doctors, nurses, priests and nuns because it gives them an identity. Rollet’s genius was to make this identity of legionnaire available for men from all educational and social classes anywhere in the world by not defining too closely the image, except in ideals they could all reach out for.

  A number of psychologists and psychiatrists have tried to analyse the Legion’s mystique. If one believes the psychobabble, all legionnaires are emotionally inadequate and enlist to find an identity or a family they can belong to. But that does not explain why royals like Peter of Serbia, Louis II of Monaco, Sisowath Monireth of Thailand, Aage of Denmark and Amilakvari from Georgia and all the former and future generals, writers and government ministers joined as ordinary legionnaires? Didn’t they have an identity already? The truth is that there are many reasons for a man to become a legionnaire and Rollet’s branding still allows young men not even born in his lifetime to live the dream in fulfilment of an inner need so deep that in return they will give their lives when called upon to do so.

  Chapter 26: At both ends of the Med

  North Africa, 1918 - 1933; Syria/Lebanon 1918 - 1927

  During the First World War, Lyautey managed to hold on to most of France’s gains in Morocco. As his forces slowly built up again after the cessation of hostilities, the annual rhythm was to send fighting columns each spring further and further into unsubdued territory and there build ugly but functional blockhouse forts, in which a garrison was abandoned for months, well stocked with food and ammunition. Once the main force had left the area, every sortie for water, to effect repairs to the outside of the walls or whatever, laid them open to ambush. A posting to these forts in featureless desert and bleak mountain scenery with no contact with the local population, nor even the sight of living animals for months on end, where one saw only the same few faces day after day – and came to hate them – drove men into depression. They blamed it on the bite of the cafard cockroach, but it was really sensory deprivation, for which the only remedy was to numb oneself with alcohol.

  The feeling of being relentlessly watched by invisible eyes and the ever-present danger of being killed by a hidden marksman preyed on the nerves of men living on a knife-edge. With masochistic glee they told each other horror stories, like the one about the night at Tadlount in Morocco in 1923 when Lt Christian Aage despatched a four-man guard to an outlying tower, where they were to spend the night after drawing up the ladder which was the only access. When they
did not return to the fort in the morning, he took six men to investigate. They found the ladder lying in the desert. At the top of the tower the German corporal was lying with his throat cut from ear to ear, while a Russian legionnaire crouched in a corner, out of his mind but physically unharmed. The other two legionnaires were never found. Stories like this soon went the rounds.

  It was all very well for officers like Prince Aage to talk of bayonet assaults as beautiful work. The everyday reality of Moroccan warfare was hardship, torture and mutilation, which made excellent material for sensationalised legionnaires’ memoirs such as Hell Hounds of France and Legion of the Lost by ‘ex-légionnaire 1384’.[296]

  The man of the moment who arose to exploit the vulnerability and the poor morale of the French and Spanish colonial forces in Morocco was an exceptional Berber warlord of the Banu Uriaghel tribe. Abd el-Krim was educated in the Spanish enclave at Tetouan by European teachers and also attended Islamic school in Fez before entering the Bureau of Native Affairs. Elected qadi al-qudat or chief Muslim judge in Melilla, he was the editor of the Arabic supplement of the Spanish-language newspaper El Telegrama del Rif. Imprisoned in 1917 for writing anti-colonialist articles, he was released the following year but came to fear for his safety when the Spanish authorities started cracking down on dissidents and even handing back refugees from French territory, which had not formerly been the custom.

  Taking to the mountains of the Rif with his brother as chief-of-staff, he achieved the difficult feat of raising a temporary confederation of tribes to fight the Spanish, killing somewhere around 13,000 of their soldiers including Gen Manuel Silvestre, the most senior officer in Spanish North Africa. In the second half of his campaign, Abd el-Krim also routed La Bandera and narrowly missed killing Col Francisco Franco, who reached safety in Tetouan on 13 December 1924 leaving several thousand more men dead behind him. The weapons abandoned in their headlong flight were carefully collected and carted off for future use. Thus came about the nightmare of colonial warfare, the ideal situation in which was summed up in Hilaire Belloc’s couplet:

  Whatever happens, we have got

  the Maxim gun and they have not.

  Abd el-Krim not only had machine guns; he also had a favourable Press, with British and American journalists apparently thinking that he intended to introduce Western-style democracy.[297] Most importantly, he had Franco’s artillery. Unwilling to wait until the guns were pointed at him, Lyautey decided to strike first by establishing a blocking line of sixty-six forts garrisoned with Senegalese and Algerian troops, stretching from Fez to Kifan in territory claimed, but not occupied, by Spain.

  In all this the Legion had little part because fear of their men deserting to Spanish territory made their commanders keep them well away from the border. When even the threat of being sent to Bechar if caught was not enough to dissuade 106 of his men from deserting into Spanish Morocco by the simple expedient of walking there, Fernand Maire introduced a bounty system, offering the local Berber tribesmen twenty francs for returning a deserter alive or 100 francs for bringing back just the man’s head.

  This contrasted with Abd el-Krim’s enlightened approach. He forbade his men to torture and kill Legion deserters and instead hired them as instructors to pass on to his tribesmen their expertise with captured weapons. To encourage more legionnaires to turn their coats, he printed leaflets in German, which they could bring with them as safe-conducts, and which promised better pay than in the Legion and/or repatriation through Tangiers. After his capture, he admitted to a French journalist that he had never trusted the men who came to offer him their services after deserting from La Bandera or the Legion, and allowed them into action only under close surveillance.

  During the period when French military attachés and consuls abroad were actively recruiting to fill the post-war gap, they arranged the transportation of men who in many cases signed up on a whim, or from hunger, but who would have changed their minds if left to find their own way to France. It is for this reason that the Legion now offers no travel assistance today to would-be legionnaires. If they do not have the initiative and determination to get to a recruiting office in France under their own steam, they are the wrong type.[298]

  Joseph Klems was a pretty good example of this. A German from Düsseldorf, he joined the Legion in 1920 and served in the mounted company of 2 REI, winning his sergeant’s stripes two years later. For reasons that had something do with excessive violence to subordinates, he was broken. In many armies, NCOs are promoted, busted and promoted again. Certainly, this was normal form in the old Legion where drink caused many men to lose their stripes. But in Klems’ case, once no longer protected by his rank, he was put through the mill by men who had suffered under him while he was a sergeant.

  Instead of taking his punishment and learning to behave better when next promoted, he deserted with his rifle in 1923 and passed himself off among the Berbers of the Middle Atlas as hadji-aliman – a German convert to Islam who had been on the hadj to Mecca. The penalty for failing in this ruse would have been surgical. To carry it off successfully implies some mastery of the Koran, or perhaps the mentality of a con-man. Whichever, Abd el-Krim saw in Klems the man he had been waiting for, and put him in charge of the artillery and machine guns captured from Gen Silvestre, which were by then sadly in need of tender loving care.

  Until Lyautey drew his line in the sand too close for Abd el-Krim’s comfort, the Berber warlord had no overt quarrel with the French, but since the new line of blockhouses cut his Riffians off from their food sources in the Ouerrha valley, he unleashed 4,000 warriors against them on 13 April 1925. Thanks to Klems training the Berber tribesmen in modern infantry tactics instead of indulging in the traditional fantasia of deliberately exposing themselves to French bullets as a demonstration of their trust in Allah to protect them, half of Lyautey’s blockhouse forts were neutralised in weeks, thirty being evacuated as impossible to defend and nine captured by el-Krim and Klems, with the defenders slaughtered.

  Although certainly sensationalised, this account by an anonymous British legionnaire described what it was like to be at the receiving end of such an attack:

  I woke with a start to hear a shrill cry like a child screaming in pain, then a volley of rifle shots rent the air, followed by the well-known shout of, ‘Illah, illah allah akbar!’ I leaped to my feet as I heard the sous-officer crying, ‘Aux armes! Aux armes! Prenez la garde, légionnaires!’ Men were crying out as they fell, pierced by knife or bullet. My friend Dell (a Canadian), the one man in the Legion I cared for, had been cut up right from the chest, and his eyes were staring with a pitiful look of surprise in his deadly white face. One hand was on his rifle, but the other had been shot away.

  Seeing the dark faces of the Arabs in front of me and knowing it was they who had knifed my pal, I went berserk and fought like a madman. From another part of the fort we could hear the sharp rat-tat of the machine guns, but where we were they could not be used as the enemy were right in the middle of us. The Captain seemed madder than ever, and now and again he roared with laughter. He emptied his revolver into the thick of the fight, standing on the edge of the wall and suddenly with one last cry of ‘Vive la Légion!’ I saw him topple over backwards and disappear.’[299]

  In the fort at Beni Derkul Lt Pol Lapeyre held out with his Senegalese garrison for seven weeks. With no chance of relief, he laid demolition charges and blew the entire fort up with himself and his men inside as the doors were at last forced with a battering ram and the tribesmen poured through. To relieve another besieged fort where ammunition was almost down to the last bullet husbanded to blow one’s own brains, two officers and forty legionnaires of 6th Battalion of 1 REI volunteered to infiltrate the siege lines at night and rescue the garrison.

  A lieutenant and ten men made it as far as the blockhouse, where the noise of their arrival prompted the defenders to prime the fuses set to blow the whole place up. This obliged the rescuers to attempt an immediate return journey through the
lines of now thoroughly aroused besiegers in company with the remnants of the garrison. Three legionnaires only made it back to base, earning a mention in despatches.[300]

  Given the rapid development of aerial warfare in the First World War, it would have been surprising if the French command had not used aircraft to support ground troops working in such difficult mountainous terrain. US ex-legionnaire Charles Sweeney was hired to organise on a shoe-string budget a group of daredevil American pilots in the Escadrille Chérifienne, or Cherif Squadron, who flew 470 missions in the Rif war before being disbanded under diplomatic pressure from Washington in November 1925. Anticipating the Luftwaffe’s last flights over Gen Paulus’ forces marooned at Stalingrad to drop cargoes of Iron Crosses, the future C-in-C Vietnam Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny tried to get Sweeney’s pilots to air-drop into forts surrounded by Abd el-Krim’s forces small bundles of ice cubes and medals. It was not a success. Bombing tribal villages was easy with no anti-aircraft defences to worry about, but precision air-drops into the interior courtyard of surrounded blockhouses proved impossible.

  Lyautey appealed to Paris for reinforcements, but his political masters turned a deaf ear. The only concession was the authorisation to form horse-mounted Legion cavalry units to compensate for the disbanding of the Algerian Spahis, suspected of nationalist tendencies. Not every Legion officer was in favour of mounting legionnaires on horses, one to a man. Gen Niessel, commanding 19 Army Corps in Algiers, reckoned that it would simply enable them to desert too fast to be caught! Even Rollet thought cavalry unnecessary, seeing the Legion as an infantry arm. He also agitated against Legion artillery because gunnery officers were cool and calculating mathematicians, who would ruin the gung-ho ambiance of Legion messes.[301] Nevertheless, four companies of sappers were formed and several battalions given their own field batteries.