Our Friends Beneath the Sands
Page 23
SAFELY DISTANT FROM THE PARISIAN JUNGLE, half the Foreign Legion were living a life of routine in Algeria while providing regular drafts for the other half in Tonkin. (These amounted to about a battalion’s strength of replacements each year, suggesting an annual wastage of 25 per cent in the four Tonkin units.) The first generation of British memoirists served in the early 1890s, and one book of reminiscences would be published by Frederic Martyn, a British Army veteran who enlisted in the 1st RE in 1889. His perspective on Legion life at this time thus has a standard of comparison that many others lack, and is worth quoting in some detail, alongside that of his contemporary George Manington.9
Martyn enlisted at a recruiting office in Paris, where he was warned of what he was letting himself in for and urged to reconsider. He mentions that Frenchmen wishing to enlist had to show their identity papers, but that those unwilling to do so simply claimed to be Belgian or Swiss and were asked for no proof.10 Given a rail warrant for Marseille and travelling money, Martyn was shipped over to Oran on the regular mailship and from there took the slow train to Sidi bel Abbès. The most substantial buildings in this small, Spanish-looking town of perhaps 30,000 civilians were the barracks of the 2nd Spahis and the Quartier Viénot, depot of the 1st Foreign Regiment.
The recruits were marched through the main gate between guardhouses, on to a parade square lined with small trees and surrounded on three sides by a four-storey U-shaped block. In one of the side-wings Martyn was given a bed in one of the large, high-ceilinged barrack rooms, which typically had 25 or 30 beds, for a half-platoon with two corporals. The beds were simply three planks laid over two iron trestles with a straw-packed mattress and bolster, a sleeping bag of coarse sheeting and two blankets. A card with each man’s name and number was pinned above his bed to the edge of a long, deep shelf; on this space he had to keep his folded clothing, immaculately stacked in regulation order in a perfectly squared tower, with his equipment hung on hooks below it behind a towel curtain. At the inner end of the room was a rifle rack, and down the middle ran a long deal table and benches; above this, iron rods from the ceiling suspended a box-cupboard for tableware, with a small petrol lamp hung below it. The men took turns as room orderly, sweeping and cleaning, fetching meals from the cookhouse for their squad, and washing their dishes.11
The first day was taken up with a fairly cursory medical inspection, allocation of a serial number (matricule) and assignment to a recruit company, a visit to the washroom, and drawing uniforms and kit from stores. The men were not allowed to keep their civilian clothes, and the sergeant-major in the company office offered to sell Martyn’s for him in the town for a fair price. The uniform issue was a considerable load to carry back to the barrack room: a red-crowned kepi with the Legion’s red seven-flamed grenade badge on its midnight-blue band; a midnight-blue tunic with red trim and the Legion’s green-and-red fringed epaulettes for dress wear, and a midnight-blue veste or stable jacket for everyday; red trousers; a greatcoat of ‘bluediron grey’; two suits of coarse white linen fatigue blouse and trousers; the long sky-blue sash or body-belt; two shirts and two pairs of drawers; two pairs of carefully fitted boots; and one pair each of black leather gaiters and white linen spats.12
DAILY ROUTINE FOR MARTYN began at 5.30am, when the duty orderly came round the beds with a jug and the men held out their mugs for black, sweetened coffee. ‘Reveille’ was called a few moments later; the corporals stayed in bed until the last moment, bellowing at the others to get moving – there were only 15 minutes before ‘Fall in’, and only the quickest got the chance to splash their faces in the washroom before folding their blankets, rolling their mattresses, sweeping under their beds (the orderly did the rest of the floor), and clattering down to the barrack square. When most of the battalion were marched off in batches to the drill grounds outside the town, led by the fifes and drums, the recruits were left to their basic training.
Learning the rank insignia and proper compliments was followed by physical exercises and basic foot drill. The corporals repeated simple orders in both French and German as a matter of course, and had a smattering of many other languages; after six months in the ranks every man could get by in the undemanding sort of French he needed. The corporals instructed by repetition, demonstration and practice; sergeants – who had higher status than in the British Army – hardly ever intervened.13 At 8am the recruits were dismissed to wash and to work on their kit, but lurking NCOs collared many to make up fatigue parties for which the punishment book had provided too few defaulters. Morning soupe was at 9.30am, and was eaten in the barrack room; the usual manifestation of this all-purpose term for main meals was in fact a meat and vegetable stew. The food was plentiful, and varied to some extent, but always provided bulk rather than diversity – beef, pork or mutton, with beans, lentils, rice or macaroni. There was plenty of fresh bread, and a daily wine ration of half a litre; the men pooled their cash to buy extras like salad and additional wine.14
At 10am there was a semi-formal parade for ‘Report’ (announcements and daily orders), then recruit training resumed from 10.30am to 4pm. This progressed from simple movements to drill with rifles. Two hours in squads under the NCOs were followed by an hour of company or battalion drill under the distant supervision of officers. These sessions alternated with gymnastics, running, bayonet-fencing, lectures and theoretical instruction from manuals. The evening soupe was at 4.30pm; thereafter the recruits cleaned their kit for the next day. Then it was down to the canteen, or – provided they were not on duty or the defaulters’ list, and could pass inspection by the sergeant of the guard – they could go out into the town until ‘Retreat’ at 8.45pm. Evening rollcall was at 9pm, and ‘Lights out’ at 10pm.15
Each man was assigned to an old soldier to show him the ropes, and the wise bleu treated his ‘Legion daddy’ and his squad corporal to plenty of wine. The whole barrack room usually decamped after the evening meal to the bare, cheerless canteen, its zinc-topped bar presided over by a motherly harridan who kept a slate until the end of the evening. Booze was the leitmotiv of barracks life, both the great solace and the great curse of the légionnaire; pernod cost 15 centimes a shot and absinthe 40 centimes, but Algerian red wine (pinard) was just 5 centimes – a day’s pay – for a litre bottle. The men’s capacity was limited only by their pockets, and two or three bottles each was not unusual (astonishingly, it was claimed that the gold-standard for ‘real soldiers’ – including officers – was six bottles in a night).16
During his first days Martyn found it difficult to work up a polish on the grubby equipment and rifle he had been issued, but although there was a proper emphasis on personal cleanliness the NCOs were otherwise not unreasonably demanding at first, and there were ways to avoid the problem. Any man with a little money could make daily life more tolerable by paying the penniless to perform his drearier military chores – laundering his fatigues in the cold-water lavabo, polishing his kit and taking his turn as room orderly. By the First World War the accepted daily rate for getting another man to ‘do your truc’ was 5 centimes, thus doubling a drunkard’s drinking-money; this was considered entirely fair – indeed, it was felt that a man of means had an obligation to do his bit for trickle-down capitalism. 17 All new recruits soon learned the paramount importance of having a few coins to lay down, and this raises the question of Legion pay.
In Algeria the basic daily rate for a soldat de 2e classe around the turn of the century was 5 centimes – a twentieth part of one franc; a 1re classe was paid twice that, and a corporal four times as much, all wages being paid out on the 1st and 15th of the month.18 Confusion often arises from the use of the slang term sou; a sou was 20 centimes, one-fifth of a franc, or four days’ basic pay. Some British writers have thickened the fog by expressing the daily pay in sterling equivalents at various dates – Martyn, writing in 1911 but of his service twenty years previously, calls 5 centimes a penny, and Rankin, writing in 1908, calls it a halfpenny. Either way, it is obvious that the légionnaire could
never be accused of being a ‘mercenary’ in the modern sense; he received only a tiny fraction of the pay of a British regular private, which was then one shilling (12 pence) a day. The basic daily rate was simply pocket-money, and hard to stretch between the necessary small purchases (soap, bootlaces, polishes) and even a modest consumption of Algerian wine and tobacco at their heavily subsidised prices. The hardest drinkers therefore funded their thirst by selling items of their own and other people’s kit in the alleys of Sidi bel Abbès and Saida. Although the barrack rooms saw a constant game of larcenous musical-chairs – with the last, unsuccessful kit-thief paying the penalty at the next inspection – the crimes of a habitual drunk would inevitably be discovered, and he would inevitably end up in the cells. This was wholly unremarkable and unresented.19
A lucky few in the ranks actually received money from home or had banked some within reach, and others found ways to earn it locally; Martyn’s memoir makes clear that it was not unusual for a man to have spending money in addition to his pay. (The rare légionnaire of really bourgeois means, like one or two of the ex-officers in the ranks, might even keep a cheap rented room in the town, perhaps with a strictly forbidden change of civilian clothes for the occasional treat of a decent night out in a hotel restaurant.)
EVERY WEDNESDAY, IN ALL SEASONS, was devoted to a route march. At first the recruits carried only rifles and belt kit and the distance was imited to 12 miles; the fat or unfit found this hard enough, but both the burden and the distance were steadily increased, until the men were accustomed to marching 28 miles in ten hours (with the usual halts), carrying anything between 50lbs and 80lbs – a full knapsack of clothing and bivouac kit, a full waterbottle, rations for two days, and 120 rounds. The légionnaires became proud of their endurance, and there was a competitive spirit between companies and battalions. The other essential skill of the infantryman was taken just as seriously, and during his training Manington spent every Friday afternoon on the rifle range. He described the M1874 Gras as having properties much like the British Army’s Martini-Henry, so it is hardly surprising that he stressed its ‘tremendous kick’. Firing such a weapon requires a very tight embrace, so that at the moment of recoil the body ‘rides’ the shock, moving as one with the rifle; Manington recalled that firing with a ‘loose shoulder’ could cost the careless légionnaire a black eye or bleeding nose. However, he praised the rifle’s strong, simple mechanism, and wrote that during his tour in Tonkin, when prolonged firing caused black-powder fouling, men simply took the bolt out and washed it in a handy puddle. A high standard of marksmanship was encouraged by awarding a bugle-horn badge, and by the presentation of silver watches as shooting prizes.20
Basic training took between two and four months, until a man satisfied the depot company that he could drill smartly; keep himself, his clothing, his weapon and his quarters clean; shoot to a reasonable standard, and manage his bivouac gear. He was then posted to a rifle company, moving into a new barrack room among the men with whom he would serve from then on. There was some predictable hazing to put up with at first, but it soon stopped if taken in good part – Manington wrote that he never saw any example of real malice, and that the practical jokes were simply an excuse for levying ‘fines’ at the canteen bar. Although he might not still be with his official ‘daddy’, the newcomer soon learned that the Legion had a culture of parallel leadership, and a youngster was as likely to look for guidance and example to an encouraging ‘old moustache’ as to his corporal. In the multinational barrack rooms, experienced soldiers would often take fellow countrymen under their wing.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE NATIONALITIES claimed by enlisted men in 1896 – 97 gave about 26 per cent Alsace-Lorrainers, 25 per cent Germans, 18 per cent French, 17 per cent Belgians, 10 per cent Swiss, 3.5 per cent Austrians, and less than 1 per cent each Spaniards, British, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks, Turks, Russians and assorted oddities. Martyn wrote that in five years he only ever met about a dozen other British légionnaires, all but two of them ex-soldiers. The absence of Italians from this list is explained by an officer’s opinion that for some reason they habitually claimed to be Spanish, and he stresses that men often lied about their nationality, which might be a fluid concept in the age of the great empires. That of Austria – Hungary, in particular, was a factory of ethnic resentments and misfortunes, and a man might have all kinds of reasons for vagueness about his origins.
In the matter of class and working background, an averaged analysis of enlistments in six-month periods of 1885 and 1898 gives, from a total of c. 1,000 recruits, 369 without any skilled manual trade. Then and for long afterwards, unskilled or simply unlucky men all over Europe could easily find themselves begging in the gutter for lack of employment, and even among those with a reasonably assured subsistence income rural life was intolerably dull and confined for a young man with spirit. Most continental countries had systems of obligatory military training, so drifters often had one skill to sell; Martyn reckoned that a very high proportion of Legion recruits had previous military experience – of his intake of 20, all but two or three. As to claimed ages, the averaged analysis of 1885 and 1898 gives 27 per cent in their late teens, 56 per cent in their twenties, 16 per cent in their thirties, and a handful admitting to 40 to 45 years. Again, the officer commenting on these figures stressed that at the younger and older ends of the spectrum hopeful recruits habitually lied, but so long as the occasional 15- or 50-year-old was equal to his duties the Legion turned a blind eye. Martyn reckoned that in fact a high proportion were in their mid-thirties, and were better soldiers on account of this relative maturity. While labourers are the largest group in the listing of previous trades, the sheer variety makes it easy to understand the Legion battalion’s traditional ability to find any necessary skill within its ranks .21
The same analysis gives 11 per cent of the new enlistees’ backgrounds in the educated and monied classes – ruined gentlemen, members of the professions and ex-officers. This relatively high figure is striking, but plausible, and there is no need to seek reasons in Beau-Gestique fantasies of broken hearts and stolen jewels. In the volatile late nineteenth century it was not uncommon for members of the rentier classes to lose everything through the failure of some enterprise or a plunge in the markets. Then, as in any generation, young men of respectable background might gamble, drink and fornicate away their legacies and their social credit, and in those days such foolishness could bring real exclusion. Personal or political difficulties might also tip a military officer into limbo, with nothing to sell but his experience.
In the case of former French Line officers, it must be remembered that since the 1789 Revolution the officer corps as a whole had born little social resemblance to that of the British Army. In both, of course, there were aristocratic minorities and inheritors of new wealth who dominated the fashionable regiments; but while the mass of British officers were the sons of the modest country squirearchy and the professions, even under the Second Empire more than 60 per cent of new French commissions had been reserved for former NCOs. These men often had only primary education and limited ambitions; if an English subaltern’s dream was to command his battalion, a Frenchman’s was usually to retire as a captain. If such a man stumbled, there was a much lower mental barrier to seeking a second chance in the Legion. In 1889 Corporal Pfirmann knew three ex-officers in his own company – a Bavarian, a Hungarian, and a French former captain of Cuirassiers – as well as half-a-dozen other men from what he considered privileged backgrounds.22
Although the respectable pekins – ‘bloody civilians’ – of Sidi bel Abbès regarded légionnaires with an utter disdain that was warmly returned, it is clear that by 1889 the Legion had long since ‘achieved self-consciousness’. One of the Army innovations since the Franco-Prussian War was the establishment of regimental salles d’honneur – rudimentary unit museums – and that of the Legion was genuinely impressive to all but the dullest recruit. On one of his first days at the Viénot barracks Martyn and other
newly inducted men were taken there as if into a chapel. Surrounded by portraits of legendary figures and paintings of heroic scenes – ‘The End’ at Camerone, ‘The Breach’ at Tuyen Quang – the adjutant delivered an inspiring address on the Legion’s history and traditions. Martyn thought this an excellent way of instilling ésprit de corps, and felt genuine pride at having joined such a regiment. Manington, too, recalled the collective lift to morale of taking part in a spectacular general inspection parade; he described the huge, bemedalled Corporal Minnaert leading the squad of bearded pioneers, followed by the Legion’s magnificent band behind their Turkish ‘Jingling Johnnie’.23
THE FIRST RUNG OF THE PROMOTION LADDER could be attained surprisingly quickly, given the French system of identifying potential NCOs during recruit training. Frederic Martyn, with previous experience and good French and German, was picked for the éleve caporal course after a few weeks; he was assisting with rifle training before he ‘passed off the square’, and he got his two red stripes after less than three months. He noted a number of former Line NCOs and one ex-officer among the other aspirant corporals.24