French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  But the rebels were everywhere. The legionnaires charged and drove them into the forest, where they were at a decided disadvantage against an enemy who knew well every fold and wrinkle in the terrain and who were more at home in the irregular skirmishing that now ensued. “We crossed a ravine without looking to see if we were supported,” Azan wrote. “We were surprised and on the point of being taken prisoner. Without keeping our heads, we would not have been able to withdraw. By luck, a drummer was with us. I told him to beat a charge, and this saved us: The enemy thought our battalions were near, and fled. This gave us time to cross the ravine and rejoin our column which was retreating.”57 Theirs was a mistake that Bernelle had criticized at Tirapegui, and one brought on by a combination of excessive ardor, the difficulties of controlling battle in the wooded, hilly terrain, and perhaps also by contempt for the enemy. It is also likely that the Carlists, realizing that they were no match for the better-disciplined Legion in the open, tried to draw them into situations where the individual fighting skills of the mountain men could be turned to advantage. By the time the Legion reached the valley and the sanctuary of Larrainzar, it counted nineteen dead, including four officers; five officers were wounded, as were fifty-four legionnaires and NCOs.58 Nor was the retreat to Pamplona an easy one: “We marched and fought without letup,” wrote Lieutenant Jean Bamberg, a German serving with the Legion, “because the battalions of the Legion were vigorously and closely followed.”59

  After Larrainzar, the Legion deteriorated rapidly. Conrad was forced increasingly to resort to the firing squad to discourage desertion: “It is painful to think that, while we do not keep our promises to these brave men, we hold them religiously to theirs,” he wrote.60 Morale plummeted and Conrad hesitated to appear before his men, “because I no longer know what to reply to their well founded and just reclamations which assail me from all quarters, which remind me of the often repeated and never kept promises which I never ceased to make.”61 Desertions and departures reduced the Legion to two battalions, two cavalry squadrons and an artillery battery. Officers were driven into debt simply to eat, and Conrad was even forced to sell his horse after he went five months without pay: “I really don't know how all this will finish,” he wrote to General Harispe at the end of March.62

  It all finished, more or less, in the early summer of 1837. An army under Spanish General Iribarren, of which the Legion was part, had spent much of the month shadowing a Carlist army as it moved west into Catalonia. On May 24 at five o'clock in the evening, the government forces were drawn up on a range of low hills before the town of Huesca. The Carlists obviously believed that it was far too late in the day to fight, for their officers had begun to hand out lodging billets. According to Bazaine, as the Legion watched the enemy nonchalantly preparing to settle down for the night, several of Iribarren's staff officers arrived shouting: “The Legion forward! The Legion forward!”

  It is not entirely clear why Iribarren decided to give battle at Huesca. His decision might have been one of impulse, as his troops apparently were calling for a fight, and the Carlists seemed poorly prepared to receive an onslaught. However, Iribarren's attack at Huesca made little sense, either strategically or tactically. Strategically, his objective should have been to block the Carlist advance into Catalonia. To do this, he should have selected a strong defensive position, like the one he was in, and forced the rebels to attack him. Defensive battles are easier to control and usually inflict a greater number of casualties on the enemy. Tactically, it made little sense to attack, for the day was already well advanced and the battle was bound to be overtaken by nightfall, when the individual fighting skills of the Carlists would give them the edge. Also, even if the Carlists seemed half-asleep, they still occupied strong defensive positions in the gardens around Huesca and in the town itself, which would have to be taken in brutal street fighting.

  Should Conrad have questioned the order to attack? Almost certainly, as commander of a foreign division it would have been his right. Given Iribarren's poor record as a commander, it should have been Conrad's duty, for it was the height of folly to sacrifice what was left of his corps in a hazardous frontal assault that could bring no substantial strategic gain. But this was not Conrad's style. Nor, probably, did a man of such aggressive temperament wish to avoid battle. Conrad threw his troops into the walled gardens and orchards before him and drove almost to the gates of Huesca itself. Caught off guard, the Carlist soldiers were badly cut up. But soon realizing that the Legion, typically left dangling without support from its Spanish allies, was dangerously far forward, the enemy swarmed out of the town and took up defensive positions behind the walls on the Legion flanks. Iribarren sent a battalion to reinforce Conrad, but the enemy was by now far too numerous and well entrenched. “More than 600 men were shooting at us as at a target,” Galant recorded. The Carlists took advantage of the twilight and the enormous amount of dust and smoke to attack the government troops to the left of the Legion, who inexplicably had failed to move to Conrad's aid. In this attack, Iribarren was mortally wounded leading his cavalry in a countercharge. Despairing of support, Conrad ordered a retreat: “It was executed in step, ordered and without haste, carrying a good third of our wounded with us.... The enemy followed, but at a respectful distance,” Galant wrote.

  However, at one o'clock in the morning, when the Legion reached its bivouac in the village of Almudevar, it could take account of the extent of the catastrophe: “Almost half our officers were put hors de combat [and] we lost nearly 500 men in this fatal day,” Galant wrote. In fact, although Galant as usual overestimated Legion casualties, reality was bad enough— between 350 and 400 legionnaires hors de combat, including 28 officers, of whom four were dead. And if this were not loss enough, a further one thousand legionnaires, their enlistments run out, were marched toward Pamplona.63

  It is difficult to know how much fight was left in the Legion after Huesca. Perhaps none at all had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances of its final battle only a few days later. Don Carlos led his army west from Huesca marching toward Catalonia and, he hoped, rapturous popular acclamation. On June 2, the Carlist troops were preparing their noon meal at Barbastro, a small town of narrow streets, grey stucco houses and red-tiled roofs that caps a hill next to the Vero River, when the new Spanish commander, General Marcelino Oraa, attacked out of the west with eighteen thousand troops. As at Huesca, the Carlists rallied from their initial surprise and counterattacked. Probably more by chance than by design, they fell upon the flank of Oraa's first line, which fled through the olive groves that covered the hills to the west of town. Conrad and the Legion, which occupied the flank of the second line, suddenly saw the enemy loom up before them through the olive trees. There was a pause, a moment of utter stupefaction, for as the musket balls clipped twigs over their heads or kicked up chunks of desiccated earth around their feet, they realized that before them in ranks as serried as the broken terrain and wood allowed stood many of their ex-comrades.

  Desertion to the enemy, while not a great problem for the Legion in their first year in Spain, became more serious after September 1836. The Carlists began to make a concerted effort to exploit the obvious disaffection in the ranks of their most redoubtable opponents, and with some success. The Carlist legion that filed through the groves around Barbastro on that June afternoon numbered around eight hundred men. It was undoubtedly their presence that stimulated the badly suffering Legion into one final effort. Baron Wilhelm von Rahden, a German officer serving with the Carlists, witnessed the battle: “I have never seen during my very full military career—neither before nor after—the spectacle of a melee as bloody as this one,” he wrote. “The soldiers recognized each other during the combat. They called out their names and their nicknames, in French or in German, approached each other as friends, spoke, asked questions, and then killed each other in cold blood.”64

  The Legion occupied the extreme right of the constitutionalist line. To their left, the Spanish troops broke
under the ferocity of the Carlist onslaught. What happened next is best described by Bazaine: “Our troops hesitated, confusion began to appear in our ranks,” he wrote to General Harispe. “[Conrad] believed that by setting an example through his own courage, he could rally them. He went well to the front of the skirmish line, placed his cap on the end of his cane, and shouted: ‘Forward!’ But the men, seized by panic, did not hear his voice. They continued to flee....” A bullet in the forehead brought Conrad to the ground. “His body almost fell into the hands of the enemy. But thanks to the help of an officer and four courageous NCOs and soldiers of the Legion, I got him onto my horse and across the battlefield. However, as we were outflanked on our left, I needed a half-hour to get his body out of danger.”65 The Legion, disheartened, demoralized, leaderless, fled from the smoldering olive grove following the retreat of General Oraa's troops. But it was no disgrace, only the last straw.

  Some saw in Conrad's solitary charge a willful suicide brought on by his sense of shame and personal responsibility for the agony of his corps. Perhaps, but it is equally true that the low state of Legion morale, especially since Larrainzar, had forced him to take risks: “After the battles of 20, 21 and 22 March, I could only acquit myself with honor by exposing myself continually to set the example, for already the officers and soldiers were no longer the same,” he had written to General Harispe on April 29.66 Had he lived he might have consoled himself with the certainty that he had decimated the Carlist legion—only 160 of the 800 men had survived the battle unscathed, and the Carlist legion was disbanded a few weeks later. The Due d'Orléans, the eldest son of Louis-Philippe and heir to the French throne, assumed responsibility for Conrad's two sons, who were placed in a military college, while his widow was given a pension by the king.67

  The Carlist War sputtered on for another two years, but the Legion's contribution to it was much diminished. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel André-Camille Ferray, the Legion, or what was left of it, fought a victorious action at Astrain in Navarre on September 10, 1837, against three Carlist battalions. Of 350 men who took the field, 100 were officers. The understrength regiment of Polish lancers was reduced to two squadrons when, on June 20,1837, it was incorporated directly into the Spanish army with which it fought until disbanded in September 1838. Perhaps the greatest success story of the war was the Legion artillery and sapper units created by Bernelle. The artillery battery, which included 37 legionnaires, would fight with the Spanish virtually until the end, only disbanding on April 1, 1839. It earned the praise of its hosts, while the sappers, originally raised by Bernelle to act as a personal guard, were revived in the twentieth century when, wearing beards and leather aprons and carrying axes, they were given the task of leading every Legion march. When, in January 1839, the Legion was finally repatriated to France, it contained 63 officers and 159 NCOs and legionnaires, and an indeterminate number of their women and children.68

  Divisions in the rebel ranks as well as the sheer desolation the war had brought on the northern provinces eventually splintered the rebel effort. In August 1839, one of Don Carlos's principal commanders arrested and shot four rival generals and then, in August, signed an armistice on favorable terms. In mid-September, the Pretender fled into France at the head of twenty thousand supporters and into the arms of the French police. Six thousand rebel diehards fought on until they too crossed the Pyrenees into exile in May 1840. “The arrival of the Carlists was a veritable exodus,” wrote Captain Certain Canrobert, future Marshal of France who was stationed in Perpignan near the Spanish frontier. “Several of the battalions were more or less intact: the men had white, blue or red berets, capes and tunics with military buttons and all sorts of trousers. Some wore sandals. Others marched barefooted and even barelegged. Women, children, old people followed the soldiers, Lord knows in what rags and in what misery.”69 Pragmatic to the last, the Legion even recruited a battalion from among their old enemies.

  If there was a lesson in all of this for the Legion, it was succinctly put by Abel Galant: “Each time that a military force unfortunately finds itself placed between politics, diplomacy and the cannon,” he wrote in 1842, “it must be sacrificed.”70 And because it was a foreign force, the Legion, like a destitute relative dependent upon the charity and continued goodwill of more fortunate relatives, would find itself placed in this equivocal position more often than most. In these conditions, the challenge of maintaining a high level of performance in the face of official indifference and neglect was no less daunting. But institutional memory was short. Indeed, January 1839 closed the records on what was already being called the ancienne Légion.

  However, if the “old Legion” had been sacrificed in Spain, a new Legion, inadvertently almost, had been resurrected by an ordinance of December 16, 1835. While the government dithered over whether to commit this new force to Spain, on June 7, 1836, the war minister, seeking to avoid the problems that had surrounded the “delivery” of the Legion to Spain the preceding year, stipulated in the enlistment contract that each legionnaire must be prepared to “follow the Legion or each detachment of the Legion anywhere that the government will judge convenient to send it.” When Thiers resigned in 1836 over Louis-Philippe's refusal to reinforce the Legion in Spain, this “new Legion” was dispatched to Algiers where, by 1839, it had already earned the praise of one officer who was to rise to great prominence in the military history of France—the future Marshal Achille Leroy de Saint-Arnaud.

  Chapter 3

  “THE NEW LEGION”

  AT THE VERY MOMENT that the Foreign Legion appeared destined for destruction in Spain, the unstoppable flow of refugees into France combined with the manpower needs of the Algerian generals to give the Legion experiment a new lease on life. On December 16, 1835, Louis-Philippe created a nouvelle légion whose purpose was to supply recruits to the Legion in Spain. In August 1836, a battalion of legionnaires—the last to be cast into the Iberian maw—was dispatched under Conrad. By late November, another eight-company battalion of foreigners had been recruited, according to inspection reports largely among Dutchmen. But France had now washed her hands of the Spanish intervention and so directed this new Legion to Africa.

  On December 15, 1836, this new Legion set foot upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean, where it became part of the 2nd Brigade, whose duty was to ensure the tenuous security of the Mitidja plain behind Algiers. But punitive raids into the mountainous Algiers hinterland against elusive tribesmen proved frustrating, especially for the Legion, which appears to have been recruited in haste and poorly trained. Its new commander, Major and future general Alphonse Bedeau, discovered that many of his legionnaires simply were not up to the rigors of campaigning in the African climate, and that of a paper strength of 1,600 men, only 1,200 or 1,300 were fit for service.1 In France, recruitment of the Legion continued, so that by September 1837 a second battalion was in existence, which allowed the army to give the Legion an organization identical to that of a French regiment.

  The treaty of Tafna signed between the French and resistance leader Abd el-Kader brought a temporary peace to the eastern Oran region by the summer of 1837, while operations around Algiers, though cumbersome, had pushed the tribes back into their mountains. This left the French free to settle a score with Ahmed, the Bey of Constantine. And a heavy score it was. In November 1836, the French had marched a column of 8,700 troops to the very gates of Constantine, only to be repulsed before a city that proved far more difficult to take than, in their overconfidence, they had supposed. But French embarrassment had turned to disaster as they struggled back to the coast at Bone through appalling weather. They had been harassed as far as Guelma by the Algerians, elated and emboldened by the humiliation they had just inflicted on what many still considered, despite Waterloo, to be Europe's premier army. And humiliation it was—most of the baggage train had been lost or thoroughly pillaged even before the siege was abandoned. Some of the soldiers had not been informed of the retreat and many of the wounded had be
en left to their fate on the battlefield, while a thousand others had perished in the hospitals in the days following the retreat, 108 of them in an accidental explosion.

  The governor-general, Marshal Clauzel, just before he lost his post as a result of the debacle, insisted that the honor of French arms be avenged. It was in part to compensate for the losses suffered in this first siege of Constantine that the nouvelle Légion left Pau on December 5, 1836, bound for Algeria. One historian of French expansion in Algeria, Charles-André Julien, saw in the second siege of Constantine the beginning of a pattern that would become an all too familiar one during the next 130 years of French colonialism—French soldiers pushing the bounds of empire ever outward amidst the ignorance and indifference of French public and political opinion. “Molé [the prime minister] had no policy,” Julien wrote, “and General Baron Bernard, the war minister ... had no personality.”2

  Clauzel's successor, General Count Charles Denys de Damrémont, was taking no chances this time. On October 1, 1837, he marched out of his camp at Medjez-Amar, eight miles southwest of Guelma, at the head of a 20,400-man force that included a large battalion of military engineers commanded by Lieutenant General Rohault de Fleury and a substantial siege artillery directed by General Sylvain-Charles Valée, aging, stiff, severe, but considered the first artilleryman of France. When, on October 5, the French column arrived on the plateau of Mansoura before Constantine, they realized that their commander could not be accused of bringing a hammer to crush a fly. One look at the citadel set upon a huge outcropping of stone in the uplands of eastern Algeria was enough to ruin the week of even the most optimistic military engineer. “The oriental fairies could not imagine a more precipitous and inaccessible fortified town than Constantine,” the expedition's surgeon major wrote. “Sitting atop a single rock whose cliffs are sheer and of an immense height, at the foot of which flows the Rummel. It seems to defy man to attack it.”3 Constantine was approachable only from the southwest across a narrow neck of land called the Coudiat-Aty. Otherwise, the Rummel had sliced a deep gorge that shaped an impregnable peninsula of stone around the city. Nor, obviously, had the return of the French eleven months after their unsuccessful siege caught Constantine by surprise. The walls were crowded with Kabyles, fierce hill people determined to resist the French, and their commanders, Bey Ahmed and his adjutant Ben Aïssa, had even conjured up an artillery of their own—sixty-three cannon competently served by Turks. Substantial groups of Berbers also lolled about on the surrounding hills ready to pounce upon any attackers who became careless.