Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  On the regiment’s right, I/RE took their last barricade at the corner of Rues de Belleville and Puebla; General Grisot wrote that this last day cost the RE two killed and 14 wounded. It was west of Rue de Puebla that the diehards of the Federal 191st Battalion went down fighting, around Faubourg du Temple and Rue Saint Maur. Most of the shooting was over by 2pm on Sunday afternoon, but what seems to have been the very last barricade was taken at about 6pm by men from the Legion’s brigade-mates, the 30th Light Infantry. It was there, at the corner of Rue de Tourtille and Rue Ramponneau, that the Versaillais apparently suffered their last casualty: the passionate young Lieutenant Paul Déroulède, badly wounded in the arm, would get his Cross for seizing a red flag.51 That night, all three battalions of the Foreign Regiment were back in bivouac on the Buttes-Chaumont, where their drums and bugles beat ‘Retreat’ to remind Parisians that the Army now owned the hill.

  Total Versaillais casualties since the beginning of April had amounted to 877 killed (including three generals) and 6,454 wounded; during Bloody Week perhaps 3,500 Federals were killed in action or died of wounds.52 The Foreign Regiment spent 29 May gathering up weapons and disposing of Communards in Belleville. Although the regimental diary admits with some regret that ‘large numbers’ of prisoners were shot locally on 28 – 29 May, there is no apparent evidence that the RE played any part in the mass executions carried out in cold blood during the next fortnight.53 On 30 May the RE were sent to the barracks of La Pépinière; these former quarters of the Imperial Guard had been left in such a state of wrecked squalor by the Communards that it took the légionnaires four days to clean up.

  IN THE ANGUISHED HANGOVER from that ‘Terrible Year’, the French state and its army faced a painful period of introspection, and during this demoralizing exercise the presence in France of l’Armée d’Afrique would be neither necessary nor welcome. Since the participation of foreign mercenaries would have been positively embarrassing in MacMahon’s victory parade at Longchamp on 29 June, on the 10th a ministerial decision was taken to return the Foreign Regiment to Algeria. The next day the légionnaires left Paris by rail for Toulon, where on 15 June they embarked on the Drôme for Mers el Kebir.54 They belonged, after all, to a colonial regiment. However indistinguishable their behaviour in the streets of Paris from that of the improvised units of the Metropolitan Army, they had been raised and trained for a different sort of soldiering.

  PART ONE:

  SOLDIERING IN THE TIME OF FEVER

  1.

  The Tools of Empire

  With a whole Metropolitan regiment I could not venture two hours’ outside the town – with a single company of the Legion I could make a tour of Tonkin.

  General Francois Oscar de Négrier1

  THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR that culminated in the destruction of the Paris Commune was the first in which regiments raised specifically for service outside France had been employed in the defence of ‘the Hexagon’ itself. In comparison with the use there of three regiments of Algerian ‘turcos’, the illegal shipping of half the Legion to France had attracted little comment, but the distinction between Metropolitan troops and those transferred from North Africa was not solely racial. French colonial troops – in the generic, rather than the specific administrative use of that term – were tacitly understood to have a different character from the Metropolitan Army, and to have entered a different implicit covenant with the state. These were not French farmboys, conscripted into uniform to spend seven years in some other part of France before re-entering the life of their family and village. Colonial troops enlisted voluntarily, breaking not only their personal bonds but also many of their ties with the national family, to soldier far away in the service of a more robust military doctrine. In crude terms, they were a tool designed for dirtier work in harsher fields, and a glance at that work should perhaps precede a summary of their history and organization.

  THE DEFINING TASK of such troops was to kill those members of native populations who resisted the advance of the Europeans. If native fighting men could not be brought to battle and defeated immediately, then subjection was achieved by running off their flocks and destroying their villages, orchards, crops and stored food, thereby inflicting starvation on their families until their leaders submitted. The human reality behind the phrase ‘destroying their villages’ varied widely in practice. In North Africa a ‘village’ might be anything from a douar – a scatter of tents, overrun with a minimum of drama and bloodshed after a couple of volleys, to a ksar – something resembling a medieval castle, that had to be shelled and stormed, house by house, at the point of the bayonet.

  The French Army in the late nineteenth century (though not its native auxiliaries) was a disciplined force; its officers allowed petty looting for the cooking-pot, but well understood the dangers of unleashing their men to sack without control. But if some soldiers raised in today’s liberal democracies can occasionally behave barbarously during wars fought among populations that they perceive as wholly alien, then we can hardly be shocked that their great-grandfathers did the same. There were, of course, cultural differences between various national armies, and compassionate exceptions among Christian believers, but in those days any sense of global shared humanity was shallowly rooted. The colonial soldiers of those times and places lived in a past that is doubly a foreign country to us, and they did things differently there.

  It is easy to condemn such brutalities automatically, but we should beware of self-righteous cant; these soldiers were the organic products of a world that most of us would find terrifying. Statistically, it is safe to assume that only a tiny minority of the readers of this book have ever known lives of real Third World hardship, hunger, superstition, and arbitrary violence without appeal. For the nineteenth-century European underclasses such experiences might be the norm, and illiteracy denied most of them any understanding of a better world. When men born into such conditions were offered regular meals, a comprehensible system of reward and punishment, clearly defined tasks and a sense of collective self-esteem, they could be shaped into a weapon, but it would remain a rather indiscriminate one. It is dauntingly difficult for us to imagine ourselves into the minds of unreflective men – both the illiterate and the educated – who lived on the far side of the absolute historical watershed of the First World War. Before that uniquely traumatic experience most people simply did not question the need for wars nor the moral status of those who fought them, and the things that might sometimes happen on campaign were no business of civilians; after all, the adversaries that they were fighting never took prisoners themselves, except with the very worst of intentions.

  French colonial forces shared with all other such armies not only the values of their times, but also the lack of the external check that would be introduced – however haphazardly, and often unjustly – by the late twentieth-century mass media. In the absence of the babbling international conversation that deafens our own age, events had witnesses and some had chroniclers, but they did not have a world-wide reactive audience. After a distasteful episode the occasional letter from an indignant officer might reach his friends, but seldom any wider echo-chamber; in a deferential age there was a strong ethic, sincerely held by decent men, of discretion owed to the respected institutions of army and state. There were exceptions – in France, notably, when such a letter revealed the deranged butchery of two Naval Troops officers named Voulet and Chanoine in West Africa in 1899; but usually, the sound of brutalities committed far off in the wilderness died away into silence after the passage of a few miles and a few days – if they were even considered to be brutalities, in that environment.2 In justice, it must be said that by the turn of the century crimes such as those of Voulet and Chanoine were exceptional, particularly north of the Sahara. The more intelligent commanders insisted that gratuitous brutality was both contemptible and counter-productive, and generally the troops’ attitude to civilians was one of callous indifference rather than active cruelty, leavened with episodes of sentimental
kindness to children and their mothers. Ill-treatment is not an absolute: there are degrees, and we can assume that these differences were significant to the native populations.

  Once peace had been established in new colonies the French forces planted small dispersed garrisons to maintain local security. As the initial violence receded in the memory (for the native peoples it had been, after all, only one incident in a history of violence stretching back to time out of mind), so workaday contacts brought at least a degree of mutual toleration. There was little French intrusion into daily life, and most inland communities never even saw a white man. After a while, some benefits of the new stability might become apparent: a check upon tribal warfare, safer travel and increased internal trade, and – if they were lucky – some material improvements to their way of life.

  However, when a native people submitted to white administration there was always a vaguely defined frontier with the territory of those still unsubdued – the tribes of either a masterless hinterland or a neighbouring native state. Rebels could find safe refuge over these borders, and the free tribes also tended to raid the peaceful and thus more productive subdued tribes, who looked for protection to the colonial garrisons. Field columns would be assembled from among these troops, to march out once again; and so the process would be repeated, as European flags crawled steadily across the maps towards one another. The regiments that carried them showed a diversity of character that sometimes went beyond simple national differences.

  UNLIKE GREAT BRITAIN – whose all-volunteer battalions might be posted anywhere from Aldershot to Canada or to Burma – France had raised particular units specifically for service overseas. Initially, however, in the 1880s – 90s, the expeditionary forces for colonial conquests were a mixture of troops from three distinct organizations.

  The first was the Metropolitan Army, ‘le biff’ – the young conscripts fulfilling their years of obligatory military service. The second were the Naval Troops; these were volunteers before the mid-1870s, a mixture of volunteers and conscripts from then until 1893, and thereafter solely volunteers once again. The third was l’Armée d’Afrique (from 1873 designated the 19th Army Corps), raised mostly in Algeria from both Europeans and Arabs. The Africa Army’s infantry was composed of white Zouave and (penal) Africa Light Infantry conscripts; Foreign Legion volunteers; and native volunteer Algerian Skirmishers (‘turcos’). The cavalry were the Chasseurs d’Afrique (Africa Light Horse), who were white conscripts leavened with some volunteers both white and native, and the Arab volunteer Spahis.

  The Naval Troops (Troupes de la Marine) traced their history back to a company raised for overseas service in 1621. Their development had been complex, but by the late nineteenth century their mission was defined as protecting naval bases both in France and the colonies, while also providing temporary task-organized units (régiments de marche) for global operations, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the distant oceans. After the Franco-Prussian War four large regiments were based at Cherbourg, Brest, Rochefort and Toulon, with an unusual, baggy structure. A Régiment d’Infanterie de Marine might administer as many as 45 companies (instead of the conventional 12 of a Metropolitan Régiment de Ligne), of which 18 were usually serving overseas at any one time. In the early 1870s the Naval Infantry (‘marsouins’) totalled about 20,000 men and the Naval Artillery (‘bigors’) another 3,300. The first experiments in forming ad hoc West African auxiliary companies into regular battalions had also added some thousands of Senegalese Skirmishers, led and administered by Naval Infantry cadres.3

  This corps was administratively a historical leftover; the defence of home naval bases was now simply an aspect of overall national defence, and since 1856 the traditional tasks of embarked soldiers had been taken over by specially trained sailors (fusiliers-marins). Since the admirals wanted to spend their budgets on the Fleet, they neglected their land units badly, while reflexively snarling at the many recommendations that these simply be turned over to the War Ministry. Trapped by this inertia, officers of the Naval Infantry endured inferior career prospects and prestige to those in both the Fleet and the Army, until the Tonkin (North Vietnam) campaigns of 1883 – 5 raised the service’s profile and began to attract high-flyers.

  The death rate from disease was high among the Naval Troops, but higher still in the Metropolitan regiments sometimes deployed to colonial theatres. Shipping the conscripted sons of French voters to far-off, fever-ridden hellholes was eventually admitted to be politically unsustainable, militarily ineffective, and a distraction from their proper task – that of training for revenge against Germany for the disasters of 1870 – 71. The folly of sending Metropolitan units on such expeditions became a matter of scandal when the Madagascar campaign of 1895 cost the mixed Army/Navy/African expeditionary force some 5,000 deaths from tropical disease (nearly one-third of its strength), the highest price being paid by the Metropolitan troops.

  In 1900 the Army finally prised the Naval Troops – equivalent in peacetime to a whole army corps – from the grip of the admirals. An Act of 7 July 1900 transferred them to a separate 8th Directorate of the War Ministry under the title of Colonial Troops, with their own general staff and their own career structure; they also kept their anchor badge and all-blue uniforms for reasons of morale.4 Significantly, however, the conscription law of 30 July 1893 – which had seen their numbers drop by some 10,000 between 1897 and 1900 – remained in force. The Colonial Troops received no annual quota of conscripts, and had to fill their ranks entirely by voluntary enlistment; substantial bounties were offered, with pensions and reserved civilian employment after discharge. Despite its title, however, la Coloniale was not given back any monopoly of overseas operations.

  Since the early 1880s the predominance of the Naval Troops in every overseas theatre beyond North Africa had fanned inter-service rivalries, with consequent jockeying for political influence and funding. The Army, too, needed a solid core of stoic white infantry who could be sent anywhere in the world as an armature for the Arab regiments that provided most of the Army bayonets for colonial campaigns. Over the period 1883 – 1914, this tough spine was increasingly provided by the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion, whose numbers were steadily multiplied during those years from four to twelve battalions. One consequence would be an increasing sense of rivalry – robustly expressed during chance encounters in alleyways and brothels – between the French soldiers who wore the blue trousers and anchor badge of In Coloniale, and the mercenaries sporting the red trousers and seven-flamed grenade of la Légion.

  EVEN DURING THE THIRTY YEARS of vigorous colonial expansion before 1914 there was a general public vagueness about the Légion Étrangère, which had almost never been seen on French soil: many people had heard of it, but few felt any real curiosity. From the upper slopes of the Metropolitan military establishment the Legion was regarded as a functional but mildly embarrassing afterthought, little better than a labour corps. It was confused by civilians and even by some soldiers with the ‘joyeux’ of the Africa Light Infantry – Bataillons d’Infanterie Légère d’Afrique (BILA or ‘Bats d’Af ’) – the distinctly grim units in which convicted civil criminals had to fulfil their military service obligation, and to which military offenders were sometimes transferred.5 The French Army’s leadership under the early Third Republic was an uneasy amalgam of Bourbon monarchists (both Legitimists and Orléanists), Bonapartists and Republicans, but in an officer corps sharply conscious of the wide divisions within its own ranks, at least the more educated and monied could unite in regarding the Legion as an impossibly unfashionable bunch of dim roughnecks. Intellectuals from the École Polytechnique and exquisites of the cavalry assumed that it was led by black sheep or the socially untouchable, who were condemned to serve in lethally unhealthy postings far from the career-enhancing gossip and networking of officers’ club and city salon. Neither in France nor abroad, however, was the Legion’s image as a military underclass specifically due to the fact that it enlisted foreign soldiers
.

  The word ‘mercenary’ has been used and understood in different ways since the early 1960s, when the collapse of the former Belgian Congo first brought it into the headlines. In fact, there has always been a clear distinction between the hired freelance seeking high short-term rewards, and the foreign-born professional soldier accepting unremarkable wages for long-term service. It takes a rather wilful ignorance to refuse to recognize the essential difference between, say, the affreux of mid-twentieth-century Africa and the Royal Gurkha Rifles, though both could loosely be described as mercenaries. Given the possibility of confusion, however, the historical resonance of the term demands some examination.

  WRITERS FORAGING for a ringing epigraph have sometimes chanced upon A. E. Housman’s poem Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, but those splendidly stoic lines have nothing whatever to do with the Foreign Legion. Housman wrote it in September 1917, on the third anniversary of the First Battle of Ypres, in order to honour the regular soldiers of the old 1914 British Expeditionary Force who had fallen in their tens of thousands while resisting the German invasion of Flanders. To define long-service professional soldiers of our own national army as ‘mercenaries’ is not a usage many of us would recognize today – when it would embrace, among others, the whole armed forces of the English-speaking world – but in Housman’s day the term did not carry today’s baggage of disdain. It simply described soldiers who enlisted voluntarily for pay rather than being conscripted by compulsion; in the nineteenth century, and still when Housman wrote his praise-song over the graves of the BEF, the word was simply a technical description, which could apply equally to home-born and foreign volunteers. In the past, European powers had routinely hired foreign troops in formed regiments; equally, many officers were permitted, even encouraged, by their governments to rent out their skills to other friendly rulers.