Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  HERBINGER HAD GRADUATED FIRST in his St Cyr class of 1861, and after field experience in Mexico and the Franco-Prussian War he had been appointed professor of tactics at the War College (École Supérieure de Guerre).62 He was obviously a gifted officer, but he may have flinched under the sudden weight of this unexpected responsibility. At all events, he immediately took the decision to abandon Lang Son and retreat that night. He sent a message down the chain of optical signal stations to General Brière, saying (in part):I will profit by the night to fall back on Dong Son [Pho Vy] and Thanh Moi in two columns. Impossible to maintain our positions for lack of ammunition and rations. I personally am going towards Cut and Thanh Moi. Major Schoeffer of the Legion takes command of the [Pho Vy] column.

  Having already taken this decision, Herbinger consulted the wounded General de Négrier, who dictated to Lieutenant Dégot the following memorandum:In my view, it is a matter of holding the important crossings on the roads [south of Lang Son] to Pho Vy and Thanh Moi – getting rid of everything that could be a nuisance – and in that situation watching what the enemy does while only leaving a rearguard at Ky Lua, while all the troops hold themselves on the heights of the left bank [?] in such a way that if – as I believe – the enemy do not want to attack, it becomes needless to evacuate. Lieutenant-Colonel Herbinger, who can see the situation, is the best judge, and I only give him this advice as my personal view.63

  Herbinger would quickly become the designated scapegoat for a retreat that was claimed to be unnecessary, but officers who were present had mixed opinions. Servières of the 2nd Bat d’Af protested that his battalion could have held Lang Son alone; Négrier would write that the Chinese had been soundly beaten, and the fact that they did not pursue the retreat showed that evacuation had indeed been needless; but Schoeffer of III/2nd RE believed they would have attacked again the next day, with every advantage. The available food and ammunition stocks are also disputed; certainly, légionnaires were able to fill their pockets with cartridges from broken chests before leaving, and the commander-in-chief claimed that the garrison had twenty days’ rations in hand. Whatever the soundness or otherwise of Herbinger’s decision, it was executed badly, and his haste in ordering a move before the fast-approaching nightfall of 28 March was certainly to blame for that.

  As the light faded, confusion gripped the camps and streets, and the destruction of stores and equipment – prompted by a lack of porters and mules – was haphazard. Captain Martin’s battery of naval 4-pounders were tipped into the river, and a paychest with about 600,000 francs in silver was also dumped. (It was later suggested, with wonderful innocence, that the cash could have been divided up between the troops for the journey, and collected again later.) Kegs of spirits were not smashed but merely abandoned, and inevitably some men got drunk; Herbinger singled out II/1st RE for particular blame, but Major Diguet furiously defended his légionnaires, and we should recall that there was also a Bat d’Af at Lang Son whose uniforms were identical. More than one Legion memoir states that the men were ashamed and upset by what they thought an unnecessary retreat after a successful defence.64 (The modern reader’s willingness to convict Herbinger of needless fears is perhaps illogically influenced by the fact that in October 1950 a second panic withdrawal from Lang Son – after a considerably worse defeat – marked a turning point in France’s war to retain its Indochinese colonies. Indeed, for readers familiar with that war, other place names in this chapter – particularly Dong Dang – will have a sinister resonance.)65

  At 10pm on 28 March, Herbinger took the first column of Line troops and the Bat d’Af out of Lang Son on the Mandarin Road, followed shortly afterwards by the Legion and Tonkinese Skirmishers, who retraced the route of the advance through the hills via Dong Son. The columns arrived back at Chu on 30 March and 1 April respectively, without any interference from the Chinese. By then General Brière de l’Isle had made what was arguably the worst mistake of this whole episode. On 29 March the Paris newspapers carried the leaked text of a cable from the commander-in-chief to the Ministry of War:Colonel Herbinger, short of munitions and worn out by earlier battles, tells me position untenable and he is forced to retreat – enemy strength growing, we appear to have the whole Chinese army against us . . . Whatever happens, hope to be able to hold Delta, but government must send reinforcements – men, munitions, animals – urgently.66

  It may be over-cynical to pay too much attention to the final request when speculating about Brière’s motives in choosing such apocalyptic language. Two days later – by which time Brière was clearly adjusting the noose around Herbinger’s neck – he sent the ministry another cable that flatly contradicted his first:The evacuation of Lang Son . . . and above all the precipitous retreat are due to a weakness in the command after the wounding of General de Négrier. The 2nd Brigade at Lang Son still had 20 days’ rations and sufficient ammunition to await the convoy that was on its way and of which they had been informed. The Navy 4-pdr battery was thrown into the river by order, and without protest from Major de Douvres. The abandoned money (130,000 piastres) [was] also thrown away by order, and all this after the success of our counter-attacks. The same haste [is evident in] the evacuation of Dong Son, with even less justification. The Chinese seem at present content to occupy their former positions north of Deo Quan and Deo Van [passes]. In sum, our situation is not compromised and better than the alarming reports suggest.67

  This attempt to backtrack blithely ignored the fact that his own first cable had been entirely responsible for the ‘alarming reports’ reaching Paris. On 8 April – after giving provisional command of 2nd Brigade to Colonel Borgnis-Desbordes of the Naval Artillery, and inspecting the troops at Chu – the commander-in-chief issued an extraordinary order of the day to all ranks:‘. . . by a bitter joke of destiny, at the very moment when the Chinese columns were retreating hurriedly under the impact of your counter-attack, you learned that your valiant chief General de Négrier – that brave among braves – was being carried to the dressing station. In consequence of this misfortune the command fell into hands insufficiently prepared for it . . .’68

  That Brière de l’Ile chose to criticize an individual senior officer to his troops left no doubt that Herbinger was, professionally speaking, a dead man walking. (To our eyes, it also seems a reckless incitement to disrespect and indiscipline – though we must remember that Brière was a Navy general, and Herbinger an Army officer.) But whoever the high command decided to sacrifice, the French political world had already sated its more ambitious appetite.69

  ON 30 MARCH, JULES FERRY had addressed the Chamber to request additional funds for his war, and the Chamber had torn him apart. Observers said that the news of Waterloo can hardly have caused such a panic in parliament and press as this distant and ambiguous setback, which was denounced in the most extravagant language as a military and political disaster. Ferry was shouted down from both Left and Right, and with particular savagery by Georges Clemenceau: ‘We do not wish to hear any more from you; we do not wish to discuss with you any longer the great affairs of state. We do not know you any longer; we do not wish to know you any longer!’ Ferry was defeated by a majority of 155 votes, and his government fell. Considering that crowds in the Place de la Concorde were baying for his blood, ‘le Tonkinois’ showed remarkable strength of character in keeping the secret (as he had solemnly promised) that within a few days a peace agreement with China would be announced.70

  On 4 April 1885, a Sino-French ceasefire was agreed through the mediation of European officials of the Chinese customs service, as a preliminary to the full Treaty of Tienstin signed on 11 June. Chinese troops would withdraw into Guangxi and Yunnan by 30 May, supervised by a joint commission, and French troops were soon back at Lang Son.71 China formally repudiated the Black Flags, though in fact many of them – and Chinese deserters – remained in Tonkin, some almost as far down the Red river as Hung Hoa. Despite the fury over Lang Son, the new war minister, General Campenon, would be voted the funds to almost
double the Expeditionary Corps to 35,000 men (among the reinforcements were the hollow-eyed IV/2nd RE from Formosa, already bought and paid for).72 Despite Lang Son, morale remained high in the Expeditionary Corps, and when Saigon newspapers reached them in April, officers in Tonkin were astonished by the violence of the reactions in Paris. Many Army officers felt that Herbinger had not deserved to be thrown to the wolves by the Navy theatre commander, and his fate would remain a sore point for years. (When Major Lyautey met veterans on the frontier ten years later, he wrote home that ‘Great responsibilities attach to this matter, and they are not always what is said and believed’.)73

  The enlargement of the CET to three divisions brought General Roussel de Courcy out as theatre commander. General Brière de l’Ile accepted one of the divisional commands, on condition that General de Négrier should be promoted to one of the others (which he was, with his third star backdated to 29 March in compliment to his wound at Ky Lua). The Treaty of Tientsin provoked an attempted putsch in Hué on the night of 4/5 July 1885, when the regents Nguyen and Ton sent some 6,000 Annamese troops to attack the palace and the French legation, but these unsophisticated soldiers were beaten off by a single battalion of Zouaves. (A Vietnamese text quoted a soldier thus: ‘. . . stupidly, we did not grasp their strategy at all. On the contrary, we made every effort to show our power by firing continually. When they judged that our supply of powder had run out, all the French got up and fired . . .’). The young King Ham Nghi then escaped into the hills with the royal treasury, and – still manipulated by the regents – proclaimed a national uprising against the French. In September he was formally replaced on the throne by a complacent older brother, Dong Khanh – the sixth King of Annam in two years.74

  ON 24 DECEMBER 1885 THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY considered the report of a commission of enquiry into the commitment to Tonkin; this predicted that either annexation or a protectorate would be equally disastrous for France. The Assembly rejected this report by a majority of just four votes, and it was with that slim mandate that French troops remained in Tonkin.75 It would take them another fifteen years to pacify the jungle hills; légionnaires would play a prominent and continuous part in those campaigns – during which we shall revisit them, at a time when two colonial commanders who learned to trust them were beginning to climb towards unrivalled reputations.

  5.

  General Vengeance and King Zinc-Nose

  Punishments, to be effective, must be adapted to the thickness of the skin that they have to get through.

  Corporal Frederic Martyn1

  ALTHOUGH THE CHURNING SURFACE of the National Assembly threw up seven different war ministers between the invasion of Tunisia in April 1881 and the Tonkin ceasefire in April 1885, in the quiet depths the movement for Army reform continued to make gradual progress. There was an unprecedented harvest of thoughtful publications, and some generals whose habits of mind had been shaped by the Imperial world applied themselves to their professional studies in middle age. Even General Gallifet – a model of the old-style Bonapartist beau sabreur, glossy with blood and champagne – honestly declared that ‘before the war none of us knew anything’. 2

  From 1880, an École Supérieure de Guerre (Staff College) replaced the old system that had created a remote and unresponsive caste of over-specialized staff officers, and during the 1870s and 1880s there was a marked improvement in the average intellectual level of junior officers. This was true not only of the traditionally scholarly output of gunners and sappers from the École Polytechnique; St Cyr, too, began to attract an increasing proportion of intelligent young patriots who saw the Army not just as a fashionable way to spend their twenties before inheritance or a good marriage allowed them to relax, but as a lifetime career. From 1881, NCOs could no longer be commissioned directly from the ranks (except as a reward for outstanding battlefield leadership); now they had to complete a punishing course of study before sitting examinations for entry to new officer academies.3 In the Legion, these new requirements reduced the already modest number of foreign-born officers from other than francophone countries, since passing the exam for the St Maixent infantry academy demanded much more of them than simply mastering enough French to perform a squad sergeant’s duties.4

  Despite the conscription law of 1872, wrangling continued over the exact terms of national service in the ranks of the Line. In 1884 the Chamber debated a bill that would have reduced the five years’ regular service to three, but with many fewer ‘bourgeois’ exemptions. The usual circular arguments were silenced in January 1886 by the appointment as war minister of an officer with ambitions to absorb conscription reform within a grand root-and-branch programme of his own. Since the spring of 1871, when he had been shooting Communard prisoners as colonel of the 114th Line, General Georges Boulanger had undergone a remarkable transformation into an outspoken Republican democrat; one of his sponsors for the ministerial portfolio was Clemenceau, leader of the Radicals in the Assembly.

  BY THE AGE OF 49, Boulanger could boast six wounds; he was also charismatic, energetic, an administrator of real ability, and alive to the welfare and morale of the troops. The Republican Prime Minister Charles Freycinet had confidence in Boulanger’s professional gifts and assumed that as a newcomer to government he would be politically obedient, while the nationalist Right were reassured by the general’s noisy anti-German patriotism. At the Longchamp review of 14 July 1886 the crowds cheered as he rode past on his gleaming black charger ‘Tunis’ (it is tempting to see in this choice of name – a reference to a command that had brought him no glory and a quarrel with the civil powers – evidence of his deafness to perfect pitch). Boulanger had no important enemies, but he did not need any, given the tumescence of his own ego when he became, literally, a national pin-up. Although the Freycinet government fell in December 1886, the general’s popularity ensured his retention in the succeeding Gobelt cabinet. Basking in the warmth of an acclaim that he judged to be nothing but his due, Boulanger soon allowed himself to become slightly deranged.

  When first in office he had presented to the Chamber a grandiose Army reform bill with no fewer than 217 articles, and was frustrated when this was nibbled to death by the usual vested interests. His haste to see a revolutionary new weapon adopted during his tenure led to the premature production of the Lebel repeating rifle, taking smokeless, non-fouling ammunition; an innovative weapon and its cartridge have to be designed in harmony as a single integrated system, but again Boulanger proved to be tone-deaf.5 He picked hasty quarrels with older and wiser heads, and he enjoyed rather too much the sound of his own brusque, soldierly tones in parliamentary exchanges. He played to the Left by preaching the solidarity of the troops with the workers, while courting the Right by posing as ‘General Vengeance’; during an irritating but manageable crisis in Franco-German relations in April 1887, he made dangerously provocative speeches that delighted the extremists of Paul Déroulède’s League of Patriots. The Gobelt government fell in its turn in May 1887, and there was a public outcry when Boulanger lost his ministry and was appointed to command 13th Corps at Clermont-Ferrand.

  His more thoughtful political friends distanced themselves, but Boulanger ignored all warnings that he should stop playing to the crowd and concentrate on his duties. Addicted to cheering audiences, he now posed a real threat to the equilibrium that the Army and the Assembly had achieved, with some difficulty, over the previous decade. He also had a weakness for challenging elderly politicians to duels, and his pretensions earned him Jules Ferry’s contemptuous dismissal as a ‘Saint-Arnaud de café-concert’; the flavour of this is hard to convey in modern English, but ‘a music-hall Franco’ may come close.6 The talkative general allowed himself to be courted by an extraordinary galère of political factions of both Left and Right, each of which must have painted the face they wanted to see on to the essentially vacuous dummy inhabiting his uniform.

  In March 1888 an illegal electoral adventure finally earned Boulanger dismissal from the service, but this did not
silence him or his noisy claque, some of whom hungered for the Army to step beyond its constitutional bounds. Representing no coherent political interest, he continued to ride his theatrical cult of personality into irrelevance, disgrace, ridicule and final exile. In January 1889 Paul Déroulède – completely misjudging the mood of the Army, and apparently forgetful of what can happen at barricades – urged Boulanger to launch a military putsch, but the general was not quite deranged enough for that. The Army remained scrupulously silent throughout these public spasms, but by the time of his eclipse Boulanger had already done the service real damage by seeming to justify traditional Republican suspicions.7

  In April 1888 the generals were fortunate to get Charles Freycinet as their new war minister. Politically both Boulanger’s midwife and his executioner, Freycinet was a lifelong machine politician, four times prime minister, but though sometimes criticized for indecision this so-called ‘white mouse’ would prove unexpectedly capable. In 1889 he presided over a reduction of the conscription period from five to three years; and, by the time of his departure in January 1893 after a unique five-year term, he had demonstrated calm intelligence, administrative talent, and parliamentary skills that had even secured a slight loosening of the political shackles on the chiefs of the Army general staff. Despite Freycinet’s stewardship, however, within a few years the Army would have great cause to regret the impression that Boulanger had left on the minds of the French Left.8