Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  The unthinking presumption that a nation’s army should, in honour, consist only of men born in that country is of recent origin. The very concept of a national standing army dates only from the seventeenth century, and its birth certainly did not make the medieval practice of employing foreign soldiers obsolete. For instance, a quarter in modern Gdansk is still known as ‘Old Scotland’, and it is estimated that in 1600 no fewer than 37,000 Scots were living in Poland to provide a pool for mercenary recruitment. The Thirty Years War (1618 – 48) saw the beginnings of permanent national forces, and during the 1620s King Gustavus Adolphus was conscripting about 2 per cent of Sweden’s male population for regional regiments each year; but at the same time he was also employing very large numbers of Germans and more than 30,000 Scottish, English and Irish soldiers .6 Long-term employment of whole foreign brigades (notably, Swiss and Irish) was a permanent feature of several eighteenth-century European standing armies. While Britain’s naval strength allowed it to avoid military conscription, its small volunteer army was supplemented by many foreign mercenary units led by a mixture of skilled professionals and political emigrés.

  During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars between 1793 and 1815, Britain’s field armies included many battalions of Germans other than King George’s Hanoverian countrymen, and also of Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, Swiss, Italians, Sicilians, Corsicans, Maltese, Greeks, Albanians and Croats – to say nothing of its non-European garrisons in the West Indies, South Africa, Asia and the East Indies.7 Neither was this trade all in one direction, for the flow reversed in parallel with political developments. The aftermath of Waterloo threw many British ex-soldiers into penury, and some 5,500 of them sailed off to fight for Simon Bolivar in the South American wars of independence, led by officers many of whom had also served under Wellington.8 French and Italian officers, in their turn, travelled as far afield as the Punjab to rent out the skills they had learned under Bonaparte.

  WHEN LOUIS-PHILIPPE, THE LAST KING OF FRANCE, raised the Légion Étrangère on 9 March 1831 specifically for service in Algeria (see Chapter 2), there was no disgrace in regular mercenary soldiering. A foreign regiment on the payroll was simply another state asset – indeed, in 1835 Louis-Philippe passed the original formation over as a gift to the Queen Regent of Spain during the Carlist civil war (though he had to re-raise it almost at once). By 1870 the Foreign Legion may not have been fashionable, but militarily it was perfectly respectable. This respect had not been earned by its hard labour and savage little battles in Algeria – in which the French public showed little interest – but during ‘proper’ wars: the foreign expeditions mounted by Napoleon III in the 1850s – 60s.

  The last surviving son of the great Corsican adventurer’s brother Louis had grown up in exile, but after the Orléanist monarchy fell to the 1848 Revolution this tireless conspirator had managed to get himself elected president of the Second Republic, France’s first experiment in democracy. The ‘prince-president’ proved an untrustworthy guardian for this political infant: in December 1851 a slick military coup raised him to absolute power, massively endorsed by a popular plebiscite and consolidated by means of purges and police spies. A year later he was proclaimed Emperor of the French, taking the regnal name Napoleon III in deference to his dead cousin, ‘l’Aiglon’. The emperor inherited the conditions for a decade of impressive industrial and economic growth that expanded a newly wealthy, and thus broadly contented bourgeoisie. Since his Bonaparte blood was his only real claim to power, and resurrecting French prestige his only real policy, he launched a number of military expeditions during his first decade on the throne, and his generals from Algeria won him some of the laurels with which he hoped to distract Frenchmen from his domestic police state.

  When a French army fought alongside the British in the Crimea in 1854 – 5, four battalions of the Legion spent freezing months in the trenches before Sebastopol. In May 1855 their Colonel Viénot was killed in a night attack on the city’s Malakoff bastion, and in September a hand-picked company of légionnaires carried scaling ladders for the final successful assault; however, despite its thousand dead in the Crimea, the Legion was still virtually unknown outside l’Armée d’Afrique itself. In 1859 Napoleon decided to meddle in northern Italy’s war of independence from Austria, and the Legion distinguished itself at Magenta in June. Another colonel, de Chabrière, fell at the head of his men, and as the légionnaires fought their way into the town their corps commander, General Patrice MacMahon (himself descended from an emigré mercenary) was said to have remarked ‘The Legion’s there – this job’s in the bag!’. Before the Crimea the Legion’s ability to face modern armies in battle had been questioned, but now the mercenaries were given a place of honour in the victory parade through Milan. The prohibition on their ever serving on French soil that had been decreed at their raising in 1831 was briefly relaxed, and Parisians were mildly intrigued by their participation in the triumphal march through the capital on 14 August 1859. Within a few years, however, the Imperial gambler’s luck ran out, and the légionnaires found themselves among the chips thrown down for his losing bet.

  ‘L’AVENTURE MEXICAINE’ began as an international attempt to recover debts owed by the government of President Benito Juárez of Mexico. With the United States safely embroiled in its own Civil War, in December 1861 Spanish, French and British troops landed at Veracruz on the east coast to seize the customs house. The Spanish and British sensibly withdrew in April 1862; but Napoleon (and his forceful Spanish empress, Eugénie) allowed himself to be convinced that a Catholic client state could be created for France in the Americas. Mexican conservatives, incensed by the threat to their privileges posed by the Zapotec Indian reformer Juárez, assured French envoys that the people would rise up in support of an intervention. Apparently believing them, Napoleon used French bayonets to install the unemployed Austrian Archduke Maximilian as a vassal Emperor of Mexico, at the head of the reactionary party in this civil war.

  The anticipated easy victory did not materialize, and by April 1863 the French army was tied down by the difficult siege of Puebla, 150 miles inland and the key to any advance on Mexico City. Colonel Jeanningros’ Foreign Regiment were not in the trenches but on the lines of communication, dispersed through the pestilential ‘hot lands’ below the escarpment to guard 75 miles of the road up from Veracruz against frequent attacks. Although they had only been in sub-tropical Mexico for a month they had already paid a heavy toll to the ‘black vomit’ and malaria. On 29 April, when the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion were ordered to march back down the track to meet and escort an important convoy carrying up stores and pay for the siege army they numbered only 62 NCOs and men and one officer, Sub-lieutenant Vilain. Two officers of the regimental staff volunteered for the mission: the standard-bearer, Sub-lieutenant Maudet (like Vilain, an ex-NCO), and the adjutant-major Captain Jean Danjou. A veteran of Sebastopol, Magenta and Solferino, Danjou was recognizable to all by his articulated wooden left hand, carved for him in Algeria in May 1853 after a signal gun had blown up in his fingers. In the pre-dawn darkness of 30 April 1863, he led the company out of Chiquihuite and down the track; the cliché is that they ‘marched into legend’, but it was a legend that took many years to spread very far.

  This is not the place for yet another detailed account of what became – long afterwards – the Legion’s holy day. The defence of the stableyard of La Trinidad farm at Camaron (immortalized by a misspelt report as ‘Camerone’) has been pored over by historians with the same reverent pedantry accorded to the defence of Rorke’s Drift.9 In brief, about 45 légionnaires who survived a first attack in the open held the walls against nearly 2,000 Mexicans throughout a furnace-hot day, with virtually no water. Before he was killed, Danjou made them swear not to surrender; they fell fighting, one by one, rejecting two more calls to lay down their arms and save their lives. Late afternoon found only five left on their feet: Sub-lieutenant Clément Maudet, Corporal Philippe Maine, and légionnaires Victor Catteau, G
ottfried Wenzel and Laurent Constantin. They decided to die fighting; firing their last shots at point-blank range, the five charged the enemy with the bayonet. Catteau tried to protect his officer and died with 19 bullet wounds, despite which Maudet fell mortally wounded; but the Mexican Colonel Cambas prevented his men from killing the other three. In accordance with Cambas’ promise to Corporal Maine, the provincial governor Colonel Don Francisco de Paula Milán had the French wounded taken from the field and treated as well as circumstances allowed; of the légionnaires taken alive, 20, or possibly 22, would survive captivity. The convoy, warned of the ambush, had halted, and reached Chiquihuite in safety on 4 May; and on 19 May, Puebla finally fell to General Forey’s siege army.

  When Colonel Jeanningros’ column approached Camerone on 1 May they rescued from his hiding-place in the cactus Drummer Casimir Laï, wounded nine times. In a ditch behind the farmhouse they found the stripped corpses of 23 dead, but were forced to leave them where they lay until they were able to return two days later. When they finally buried what the vultures and coyotes had left of Jean Danjou, his wooden hand was nowhere to be seen. In 1865 Colonel Thun of the allied Austrian Legion in Mexico wrote to Jeanningros that one of his officers had found it some 75 miles away, in the possession of a French-born rancher named L’Anglais (but that this patriot wanted 50 piastres for it). The recovery of this ‘precious souvenir’ attracted the attention of the French commander-in-chief in Mexico, Marshal Bazaine, but only because he himself was a former Legion sergeant who had fought in Algeria.

  When the Legion were shipped home to Algeria in February 1867 the wooden hand went with them in the baggage of Colonel Guilhem. In time it would become the Legion’s most sacred relic; but the great annual ceremony of which it forms the centrepiece today was choreographed only in 1931, and the anniversary does not seem to have been specifically celebrated even at unit level before 30 April 1906 (when a historically minded lieutenant in a tiny post in North Vietnam paraded his platoon and told them the story). The 3rd Company’s stubborn defiance, unto death, was admired in the expeditionary army, and the emperor himself instructed that ‘Camerone’ should be embroidered as a battle honour on the regimental flag. He also ordered that the names of the company’s three officers be inscribed in gold on the walls of the Hôtel des Invalides, the shrine to French Army tradition in Paris, but the fact that this instruction was not obeyed until eighty-six years later suggests that the Legion still did not carry much weight with the military establishment.

  After Camerone the Mexican civil war dragged on for four more years, and French troops increasingly became involved in self-defeating counter-insurgency. In 1865, Union victory in the American Civil War brought General Phil Sheridan down to the Rio Grande with a corps of 50,000 men to make threatening noises. The ‘Mexican adventure’ ended in death by firing squad for Maximilien and in humiliation for Napoleon, and thereafter most Frenchmen were inclined to forget about it as quickly as possible. Their focus of attention now lay to the east, where Prussia’s astonishing defeat of Austria – Hungary at Sadowa in July 1866 had forced the other European nations to adjust themselves to a drastically revised balance of power.

  In October 1866, while the French expeditionary force was retreating towards Veracruz for withdrawal, it was announced that the Legion would be left behind in Mexico to continue serving Maximilien, just as it had been gifted to Queen Isabella of Spain thirty years before; if the order had not been countermanded on 16 December almost nobody today would ever have heard of the French Foreign Legion. The regiment sailed for Algeria in February 1867, leaving behind nearly 2,000 dead, probably 80 per cent of whom had died of disease.10

  EIGHT YEARS AFTER CAMERONE, as we have seen, a few hundred men of the old Foreign Legion would visit the French capital for a second time, in a less celebratory mood than in 1859. At the earliest opportunity they were shipped back to Algeria, where – as in Metropolitan France – the fall of the Second Empire had unleashed both political turmoil and violent rebellion.

  2.

  ‘France Overseas’

  What could be more legitimate than to oblige the convenience of 2.5 million Arabs to give way to the higher interests of 40 million Frenchmen?

  Napoleon Lannes de Montebello, 1871

  Should any misfortune have attended the march of the column, and a retreat become necessary, these Arabs, hitherto so timid, will not hesitate to engage in a hand-to-hand fight. The wounded, if left behind, are mutilated, and the pursuit assumes, by day and night, every feature that will try the nerves of the best troops.

  Major J. North Crealock, 18761

  THE BARBARY COAST OF ALGERIA was the frontier between the worlds of Mediterranean Europe and Africa, but some stretches of the shoreline were deceptive. The hills that rose immediately inland, cradling the white coastal towns, were often blue-green with aromatic maquis and tall maritime pines, like the coastal hills of Provence. Elsewhere they were treeless, their tan flanks sprayed with a dark speckling of scrub, and any illusion of familiarity was fleeting; when the breeze blew off the land, the soldiers waiting on deck picked up a scent that was not France.

  Behind the coast lay the Tell, a band of country stretching right across the 600-mile width of Algeria and reaching inland for about 70 to 100 miles. Between the hills, the valleys and plains were watered green by clouds from the sea, making it the only continuously fertile zone in the whole of Algeria. The northern slopes of the mountains were shaded by forests of cork-oak, holly-oak, conifers and cedar on the upper shoulders. The highest peaks, rising to 7,000 feet, were snow-capped for five months of the year; the winter rains and spring snow-melt fed countless watercourses that irrigated fruit orchards in the valleys and wheatfields on the plains, and near the coast there were still stretches of the stagnant malarial marshland that had killed so many of the early immigrants and soldiers. Between May and October the climate was Mediterranean, but this was still Africa; in late September the sirocco wind from the Sahara might last for three days at a time, raising the temperature to a dry, brain-baking 110°F (43°C) in the shade, kicking up dust-devils, sifting fine orange powder into every cranny, and sometimes blowing strongly enough to break windows.2

  By the 1870s this area of roughly 70,000 square miles had been brought under extensive cultivation by a single generation of white settlers, and these colons had achieved a great deal in thirty years. The plains and valleys between the chains of mountains were a granary and vegetable garden; many of the hillsides were dark with olive groves, and since the 1860s some had been planted with vines, though others were useful only to the goats that foraged through the crackling scrub. Most of the immigrants who were transforming this land had come from Spain and Italy, desperate for a better life than tiny patches of poor soil and rigid, introverted societies had allowed them, and here they had found the masterless horizons of which their ancestors could not even dream. Of a total European population of about 280,000 in 1870, some 120,000 were pioneer farmers, whose lonely homesteads were scattered across the Tell around isolated villages linked at long distances by a sparse network of bad dirt roads. When men travelled, they rode armed; since many of them had carried from Europe a visceral hostility to the ‘Moors’, their daily lives were almost completely divorced from the more than 2 million Muslim Arabs among whose tribal territories they worked their jealously guarded land grants.

  South of the Tell lay the ‘high plateaux’ – more than 30,000 square miles of treeless steppes. Stony and uncultivatable, they were nevertheless covered by an ocean of the salty esparto grass on which the flocks and herds of colon ranchers and Arab seasonal nomads thrived. In summer the temperature under the immense blue vault of the sky might be 100°F (39°C), but it could rise and fall dramatically with little warning. Snow fell up here in winter; it did not usually lie for long, but occasional freak years could see men trapped by blizzards and frozen to death as late as April. Rainfall on these prairies was unpredictable, and there was hardly any running water; what the
storms did drop disappeared quickly far below ground, and despite the occasional shallow ponds lying in broad depressions, good wells were few and far between.

  Along the southern edges of the high plains, ranges of mountains came slanting up from the south-west in extensions of the great Atlas; in the western province of Oran (see Map 3) they lay on the furthest southern frontiers of even military penetration into the ‘Sud-Oranais’, but in the centre and east – the ‘Algérois’ and ‘Constantinois’ – they slashed right up to the coast. They were separated into parallel blades by corridors of plain; here, too, water tended to lie in shallow, brackish lakes, which evaporated in summer but still fed stripes of thick vegetation. From the alpine landscape of Greater Kabylia behind the central coast east of Algiers, other spurs and massifs stuttered roughly south-eastwards again down towards the Tunisian border – Lesser Kabylia, the Hodna plateau, the Aurès and the Nemenchas, their parched and jumbled strata cut by the hidden green gorges of streams. Here, from natural fortresses of peaks and canyons, the fiercely independent Berber highland clans had defied Arab amirs and Turkish beys for twelve centuries, and in 1870 their nominal submission to the French was recent and sullen.