Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

Twice every year, two-thirds of the company drove out of Foum el Hassane and Tindouf to make the 2,000-mile circuit around the Western Sahara as far south as Fort Gouraud in modern Mauritania. These tournées de police were supposed to take two months but often overran by two or three weeks. The 14hp trucks were underpowered, the going was extremely rough, and the frequent breakdowns had to be repaired on the spot. Patches of fech-fech – sand as fine as flour – could swallow a truck to its radiator cap, and in sandstorms all movement was impossible. Although the vehicles carried wire mesh sand-mats, the backbreaking, brain-boiling work of digging vehicles out under the Saharan sun had to be faced every few days.

  Inside the Laffly the NCO sat beside the driver and the eight légionnaires faced inwards along the side seats, with a 50-gallon fuel drum, an LMG, ammo boxes and tools between their feet down the middle. The trucks were also stacked and slung about like gypsy caravans with picks and shovels, the mens’ carbines, personal kit and waterbottles, reserves of water, eight days’ rations, firewood, and as many spare parts as the mechanics could cram aboard. The infantry’s only consolation was that the ordeal of the armoured car crews enclosed in their steel ovens was even worse. It was almost unknown for shots to be fired in anger, but that did not mean that the patrols did not sometimes leave graves behind them. In the 1970s the traveller Richard Trench drove the stage between Tindouf and Chegga:We had left in the small hours, and by the time the pre-dawn half-light had emerged with its cold, silvery mist, Tindouf and the century that it represented had disappeared far behind us. The dawn light was easy on the eyes, and the rising red glow in the east softened the bright austerity of sand and rocks. Then the sun rose high above us, melting the colours of the desert into a single glaring tone that stayed with us all day, jarring our senses and blurring our horizons, until it slipped down in the west and the harsh light gave way to that peculiar bluish hue that always covers the desert in the early hours of the night.

  All along the route the landscape changed, from flat plains of gravel to neurotic outbursts of jagged rock, from slabs of jet black stone to carpets of coloured pebbles, from rounded breast-shaped dunes to skyscraping phallic buttes. The further we went into the desert, the more time seemed to slow down, until it stopped altogether and everything was as it always had been . . . Even the dead were clean. The first camel I saw was a pattern of shining bones picked clean by the wind, its neck twisted in a dying agony. We drove like that for three days . . .6

  ON 20 DECEMBER 1935 – his sixtieth birthday, though he looked older – General Paul Rollet passed from the active list. (He would have been pleased to know how eagerly a young Hungarian recruit was responding to the culture he had done so much to create; by 1939 Charles Milassin would be a career sergeant, dedicated to a life in the Legion.) Rollet found the unstructured Paris life of a retired general intolerable, and threw himself into work for the Legion old comrades’ associations with a generosity that was sometimes abused. In 1938 he also accepted the presidency of l’Association des Gueules Cassées (the ‘Broken Gobs’, or disfigured war veterans). He worked for this new cause with characteristic energy, and not only behind a desk; he could sometimes be seen on the boulevards of the capital in full uniform and medals, shaking a collection tin and selling lottery tickets for his two associations. When the Legion contingent arrived at the Gare de Lyon for the 14 July 1939 parade, in the snowy white-covered képis, green-and-red epaulettes and blue sashes that he had won back for them, he was there to salute them.

  In May 1940, Rollet’s request to return to active service was refused, and it is sad to imagine how unbearable the following months must have been for him as a helpless observer. Another ‘Terrible Year’ had come upon France, and a wholly new age of warfare had consigned to history the types of soldiering in which he had spent his life. He died in Paris on 16 April 1941, at the age of 65.7

  In late 1939, the 4th Foreign, like the other three infantry regiments in North Africa, had provided drafts for new units being raised hastily in France from a mixture of serving personnel, reservists, new recruits, and Spanish internees from the grim camps in the south-west. The first 500 men went to provide a core of experience for the 11th and 12th REI (the first commanded originally by the recalled Colonel Fernand Maire), both of which would be destroyed in May – June 1940. A subsequent draft joined a rather more battle-ready unit being formed for mountain training; the 13th Foreign Legion Half-Brigade (13th DBLE) was also to see action in spring 1940, but alongside British and Polish troops at Narvik in Norway. By that time both Captain Gaultier and his rival Captain Robitaille had left the Sahara, the one for a Line command in France and the other for the 6th Foreign in the Levant. In June 1941, that regiment would face the 13th DBLE – the first infantrymen to declare for General de Gaulle – in fratricidal battle.

  Although France’s North African possessions survived the Franco-German armistices, the Legion’s strength was greatly reduced, and the 4th Foreign Infantry Regiment was disbanded on 14 November 1940. Its remaining personnel passed into the 2nd Foreign, and its motorized company became the 8th Composite Mounted Company/2nd REI. Like the rest of the Legion in North Africa, it would have to wait until the winter of 1942/3, in the aftermath of the Anglo-American ‘Torch’ landings, before it got back into the war on the right side.

  After the great silence of the Sahara, Charles Milassin would hear plenty of shots fired in anger during the rest of his 25 years’ service with the Legion. He would fight the Wehrmacht in Tunisia and in North-West Europe for more than two years; he would suffer several wounds, and on one occasion he would walk out of the desert to find that an unidentifiable corpse had been buried under a cross marked with his name. After fighting with the reborn RMLE in the Belfort Gap during the winter campaign of 1944/5, he would be troubled for the rest of his life by steel fragments from a 20mm cannon shell working their way out of his head and endangering his eyes. Nevertheless, he went on to serve a tour in Indochina with the 2nd Foreign, and before retiring at the beginning of the 1960s he reached the rank of chief warrant officer. Although awarded a 100 per cent disability pension, he proceeded to build with his own hands a new home in the Vosges for his wife and three children. He remained a légionnaire to his backbone until the day he died; and he always looked back with a special nostalgia to his first hitch at Foum el Hassane, where he was one of the last few hundred men ever to live the life of the Old Legion.

  IN 1993, UNITED NATIONS SOLDIERS of the multinational MINURSO mission, monitoring the ceasefire in the Western Sahara between the Sharifian Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Front independence movement, regularly retraced part of the tracks of the old Composite Automobile Company/4th Foreign of 60 years before. Tindouf was now the centre of the main Polisario refugee camp, and one of the way-points that the UN patrols used for overnight stops was Ain ben Tili in the tri-border region, close to where the frontiers of Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria meet. The abandoned fort was largely intact, standing silent in the middle of an utterly featureless plain.

  About half a mile from the flaking walls and the sand-choked barbed wire a British officer, Captain David Craig, found a partially defaced gravestone made of coarse concrete. The name it bore began with the letters ‘Tison . . .’; the year of his birth was unclear, but his death-date of 12 December 1934, and his identity as a corporal in the 5th (Mechanized) Squadron of the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment were still legible. That corporal’s resting place must be one of the loneliest on Earth, and his stone stands to remind us of a kind of soldiering that is almost entirely forgotten. The Legion had a traditional toast to their dead: ‘À nos amis sous les sables’ —

  ‘To our friends beneath the sands.’

  Appendix 1

  Summary of Foreign Legion operations in Europe, 1914 – 18

  ON THE OUTBREAK OF WAR in August 1914 several thousand foreigners volunteered to fight for the Republic, and were diverted into the Foreign Legion as the only logical repository. In September 1914, the two Foreign R
egiments sent the equivalent of a marching battalion each to France, commanded by Colonels Pein and Passard. In fact these were organized in four half-battalions, so that they could be completed with duration-only volunteers to form two marching regiments each of 2 battalions. During their formation at Mailly le Camp, it was decided that the flood of volunteers allowed a doubling of the original plan, and the 2nd Marching Regiments/1st and 2nd RE were each enlarged to four battalions (lettered A to D), with the armature of pre-war regulars reduced from 50 per cent to 25 per cent. Despite some unfortunate consequences, the units’ performance in action in spring 1915 suggests that they had settled down well enough during a winter in the line.

  At first brigaded together, by November 1914 the 2nd RM/1st RE and 2nd RM/2nd RE had been separated, the first going into the trenches near Prunay in Champagne. The second was allocated to 36th Division near Craonelle on the Aisne; now commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Lecomte-Denis, the 2nd RM/2nd RE held its sector against German attacks in January 1915, and was relieved in May. Meanwhile, two more regiments were being raised, though their Legion identity was little more than nominal. A 3rd Marching Regiment/1st RE was formed – with very few veterans – at Reuilly barracks, Paris, in the autumn of 1914, but was finally disbanded in July 1915, the useful personnel transferring to the 2nd RM/1st RE. The entirely Italian 4th RM/1st RE, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Peppino’ Garibaldi, did well in the Argonne in December 1914 – January 1915, but was disbanded at the request of the (still neutral) Italian government in March 1915.

  Artois and Champagne, May – September 1915

  In spring 1915 the 2nd RM/1st RE, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Cot, were committed to the major offensive just north of Arras as part of the Moroccan Division in General Pétain’s 33rd Corps. The division was in the line opposite the German-held village of Neuville St Vaast, behind which rose the wooded slopes of Vimy Ridge. The 2nd/1st’s objectives were a deep German trench system called the White Works, and beyond them Hill 140, the highest point of the ridge. Zero hour was 10am on 9 May 1915; by 11.30am the regiment had advanced nearly 3 miles, taking all their objectives, and were on the summit of Hill 140. Now commanded by the sole surviving major, Collet of B Battalion, the regiment were finally relieved at 2am the next morning; from a starting strength of some 4,000 they had lost 50 officers and 1,889 enlisted ranks killed, missing or wounded. The Zouaves who relieved them were unable to hold the position against counter-attacks.1 On 16 June the remnants of the regiment were committed to another assault from Carency en Souchez to Hill 119; again the objective was taken but could not be held, and the regiment lost another 650 casualties.

  On 25 September 1915, the 2nd RM/2nd RE, now with General Marchand’s 10th Colonial Division, were committed to attacks near Auberive in Champagne. Their initial objectives were trench systems around Navarin Farm on the Butte de Souain; they took several successive lines of defences and advanced about 2 miles, at a cost of 320 casualties. On 28 September the 2nd RM/1st RE were also committed to this sector, paying 627 casualties for their objectives.

  The remnants of both regiments were rested behind the lines in the Vosges in October 1915, and on 11 November merged to form a single Régiment de Marche de la Légion Étrangère of three battalions, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Cot and retaining the decorated colours of the 2nd RM/1st RE. The RMLE went back into the second line with the Moroccan Division (General Codet) in February 1916.

  The Somme, July 1916

  On 4 July the RMLE, under command of 3rd Division, were committed to an assault on the ruins of Belloy en Santerre (II/RMLE were now led by Major James Waddell, a New Zealand-born veteran of Gallipoli).2 The attack did not begin until 5pm, in heavy rain, and I/RMLE took heavy casualties from machine guns in the Chancellier trenches to their south before managing to join II/RMLE in Belloy (this was the action in which the American poet Alan Seeger was killed). The whole regiment held off counter-attacks during the night, and by the time they were relieved at first light they had lost 869 all ranks – a third of their strength. On the night of 7/8 July, I/ and II/RMLE were sent back into Belloy, and two failed attempts on the Chancellier position cost another 830 casualties; in the week since 4 July the regiment had suffered some 70 per cent killed, wounded or missing. On 15 July they were pulled out of the line, and did not return to the trenches until 5 November 1916.

  Auberive, April 1917

  The Moroccan Division, including the RMLE (commanded since February by Lieutenant-Colonel Duriez) was committed to the Fourth Army attacks east of Rheims on the right flank of Nivelle’s Chemin des Dames offensive. The regiment would fight on virtually the same battlefield as had the old 2nd RM /2nd RE in September 1915, being assigned objectives in German trench systems on the west bank of the river Suippe opposite Auberive. The two lead battalions went over the top at 4.45am on 17 April; at about 7.30am Lieutenant-Colonel Duriez was mortally wounded by a shellburst and replaced by Major Deville. By nightfall the RMLE had made 600 yards and were embedded in the ‘Gulf’ trench system; there they withstood counter-attacks on the 18th, and on 19 – 20 April they ground their way forward into the ‘Labyrinth’ trenches. They were relieved on the 21st, after expending more than 50,000 hand grenades and capturing about 4 linear miles of trenches and dug-outs, at the price of around 30 per cent casualties overall (although by the night of 19 April, III/RMLE had been reduced to 275 men). One of those who particularly distinguished themselves was Warrant Officer Max Mader, who had once served with Captain Paul Rollet’s mule company in Morocco.

  In May 1917, command of the RMLE passed to Lieutenant-Colonel Rollet, who had been fighting with great distinction with the 31st and then as commander of 331st Line Infantry since 1914. Wounded twice early in the war, he had been recommended for promotion by General Henri Gouraud, then commanding 10th Division, who remembered him from Morocco. A reservist veteran of the 331st recalled that Rollet was loved for his unpretentious friendliness and care for his men as much as he was admired for his courage, and liked for his eccentricities (he tended to carry an umbrella in the trenches, where he was always accompanied by a dog; he clung stubbornly to his old sand-coloured Legion tunic, and it was said that the first time he was seen wearing a steel helmet was for the Paris parade of 14 July 1919). He proved to be a charismatic commander of the RMLE, inspiring a host of affectionate anecdotes.

  At the time of the 1917 mutinies provoked by the carnage on the Chemin des Dames, the Legion remained rock-solid; it held a sector at Berry au Bac in June – July, and after a brief rest it paraded in Paris on 14 July, its colours decorated (for its fifth citation in army orders) with the yellow-and-green lanyard of the Military Medal. In August, the RMLE was sent to the Verdun front.

  Verdun – Cumières, August – September 1917

  Under Second Army, the Moroccan Division was committed to an attack on German trenches between Cumières Wood and the west bank of the river Meuse. After a six-day preparatory bombardment, the RMLE went over the top on 20 August, advancing a mile and a half to take their initial objectives in two hours rather than the four allowed. They exploited forward, and despite counter-attacks and aerial strafing took the Cote de l’Oie and Regnéville the next day. By the time the regiment were relieved on 4 September they had paid the remarkably light price of 53 killed and 271 wounded and had earned their sixth citation, at that time unique in the French Army. While the RMLE rested at Bois l’Evêque on 27 September the colours were decorated with a newly introduced lanyard in the crimson of the Legion of Honour ribbon; General Pétain told them that he was happy to keep inventing new decorations for the regiment if they continued to fight as they had done at Cumières. A photo taken of the colour party on that parade became one of the most famous of all Legion images: Lieutenant-Colonel Rollet wearing his habitual desert tunic, holding the colour with its heavy garnish of cravats, medals and lanyards, and guarded by four other individual recipients of the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honour: Warrant Officer Max Mader and Corporal
s André Rocas, Jaime Dieta and Fortunato Leva.

  Amiens and Soissons, April – July 1918

  From October 1917 to January 1918 the RMLE held trenches in the Flirey sector, taking part in both offensive and defensive fighting. It was in a rest camp when, at the end of March, the German spring offensive burst on the Allied lines, and the regiment was rushed to the Amiens sector of the collapsing British front in Picardy. On 26 April the RMLE counter-attacked at Hangard Wood near Villers-Bretonneux, fighting alongside British infantry and tanks in chaotic terrain masked by fog; by the time they were relieved on the 28th the RMLE had lost some 850 casualties, and I/RMLE had been reduced to one officer and 187 men.

  The regiment were next committed on 30 May at the Montagne de Paris just west of Soissons, holding the ridge until nightfall on the 31st against repeated attacks at a cost of about 400 casualties. Reduced to some 1,200 all ranks, on 12 – 13 June they held more than a mile and a half of the Saint Bardry valley sector under heavy shelling, gas and infantry attacks. On 16 June the regiment went into reserve, having lost 1,300 casualties since 26 April.

  On the stormy night of 18/19 July the regiment advanced across the Dommiers plateau south of Soissons, on the left flank of the Moroccan Division and next to the US 1st Division. There was no preliminary artillery barrage to alert the enemy, and next day the Legion had both tank and air support. By the time they were relieved on the night of 20/21 July the RMLE had reached the Soissons-Château Thierry road, at a cost of 780 casualties. This success brought their eighth citation in army orders.

  The Hindenburg Line, September 1918