French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  Thus equipped, the soldiers marched out of their garrisons, Usually before dawn. Hardly had they departed than bugle calls ordered a halt so that the tail of the column could catch up before it lurched off again. Once on the road, marching discipline relaxed, so that the soldiers were allowed to talk, sing, smoke or exchange friendly banter with the officers, some of whom were on horseback, most of whom walked beside their troops, collars open, heads covered with a white hood or a handkerchief dangling behind their képi. The general led the column, followed by the cavalry. A company of sappers came next, leading mules laden with their tools. Then came a portion of the infantry, followed by the artillery, their mountain guns lashed onto the backs of stolid mules; the ambulance flying a red flag; and the convoy carrying the regimental baggage and supplies, which usually included a small herd of cattle to be consumed during the march, all under the watchful gaze of NCOs. More infantry closed the march, followed by the rear guard accompanied by mules carrying cacolets —metal stretchers introduced in the 1840s to carry sick and wounded.23

  If the march was a long one, a pause of an hour and a half would be ordered at midday, the grande halte when the soldiers would brew up coffee. However, in arid regions where water was scarce, dry soldiers’ biscuits might be crumbled in the grounds and the coffee “eaten.” By afternoon, heat and fatigue had usually drained the men of all energy except that required to complain. “This heat takes away all appetite,” Lamping wrote, “and one longs for nothing but a shady tree and a gushing fountain. All else is vain.” If the column encountered a stream, the troops dissolved into a jostling mob: “General orders and sentinels are of no avail; what is punishment or even death to the soldier at this moment! He would rather die by a bullet than by thirst.”24

  After what seemed an eternity, the column heaved up at a spot where a staff officer accompanied by several Arab irregulars had traced out a camp—a square with the infantry in double file beside their arms on the outside, the cavalry, artillery and baggage in the middle. The soldiers were ordered to break ranks, and everyone scattered to their tasks. Each squad sent a man to fill the water bottles at a muddy well and another to build a fire to brew up the coffee—if, that is, it had not been “eaten” at midday— and others began to set up the three-man tents. One man was sent to collect the squad's meat ration, which was distributed by an NCO who, his back turned to the assembled soldiers, pointed to a ration composed ideally of 320 grams per man and shouted, “Pour qui?” (For whom?) A soldier claimed it and took it back to his camp, where the pot full of rice, onions and bacon was already boiling over the fire. If there was no water, the rations were fried in beef or lamb fat. The beef, freshly killed, was too tough for immediate consumption. It was usually boiled all night and consumed before departure the next morning. Sometimes, if food was scarce, the soldiers were forced to experiment. Lamborelle found that coagulated beef's blood spread on a dry biscuit made a passable meal, while experienced soldiers were able to identify wild carrots and potatoes, or leaves and herbs from which a passable salad could be concocted.25 “We cannot be accused of gluttony, at any rate,” Lamping insisted.26

  Once the evening “soup” was consumed, the soldiers had a brief moment to play cards or lotto, to wash or repair clothing or clean their weapons, before the first watch was set out and taps sounded—“Those savage, sharp notes thrown out into the silence of the camp had something of the sublime,” Lamborelle wrote.27 Lamping remembered the hyenas whose “hoarse croaking bark” was “my regular lullaby.”28 Each battalion sent a company to man the outposts, where the practice was to light a fire and then withdraw to observe if anyone came between them and the flame.

  Less sublime was reveille, when bugles and drums strategically placed among the tents would drive even the heaviest sleeper into the open. If the commander were in a cheerful mood, he would order the band to play popular dances while the troops bolted down their breakfast of meat that had been stewing all night, struck their city of tents, and frantically searched for stray pieces of equipment in the half-light of dawn. The corporals called the roll in each squad and, the report sent up the chain of command, the march resumed, the band playing “La casquette du père Bugeaud,” a song allegedly made popular in the Armée d'Afrique by the zouaves after Bugeaud rushed from his tent during a night alert wearing his cotton night cap.29 The verses were left to the imagination of the troops, but the refrain was sacred: “As-tu vu la casquette, la casquette, as-tu vu la casquette du père Bugeaud?”

  It all sounds like good clean fun, a sort of July Monarchy version of Boy Scouting. In fact, this sort of campaign life called for enormous stamina, which many men did not possess. If, for instance, the French column were hot on the trail of an Arab force, the pace could be unrelenting. Lacretelle said that his legionnaires sometimes pursued the enemy so closely that “the dung from their horses was still steaming.”30 If the march were pressed, many simply could not keep up, especially if they were suffering from fever or diarrhea. In January 1842, General d'Hautpoul complained that enlistment standards were too low and that many legionnaires lacked the ability to carry out long marches. General Fabviez repeated the complaint in November of that same year, adding that the government should stop enlisting men whose only qualification for the martial life was their status as political refugees who might trouble the public order in France.31 General Randon made the same point in 1845.32 Nor were the soldiers the only ones to fall by the wayside. Lacretelle noted that “les fatigues” of campaigning in North Africa were such that two of the three classmates who had volunteered with him for the Legion from Saint-Cyr in 1843 had died within a year.33

  Night alerts, which were frequent, or, in the south, the braying of camels shattered the short nights of men already exhausted after a hard day's march. The south was especially dreaded because of thirst, “... that horrible fever which overwhelmed me for several hours,” Lamborelle wrote. “I was not only thirsty in my mouth and in my throat. My entire body was thirsty. The only thing I swallowed was air which heated up passing through my mouth and burned my gullet. I fell down and lay behind a sand dune. I saw death as the only solution to my physical suffering, when a friend (should I say a brother?) appeared at my side.... [He] put his last mouthful of water to my lips. Then he got me up with several encouraging words which are never lost on a soldier. I got up with his help. He took my pack on his back, and I was able to rejoin my company.”34

  If any legionnaires were tempted to malinger, they might be dissuaded by a visit to the surgeon. MacMahon's doctor in the 2nd Regiment in 1843 was a Pole named Ridzeck, “a good warrior but a mediocre doctor,” who systematically bled to death seventeen men suffering from heatstroke. “Realizing that his method was not working, he took an ax and split open the skull of one of the dead to understand the cause of the problem.” According to MacMahon, Ridzeck had better success subsequently using ether to treat sunstroke, but his reputation could hardly have encouraged business.35

  This interminable marching, day after blistering day, tormented by heat, hunger and thirst, all in pursuit of an evasive foe, eventually took its toll. Lamping claimed that “The troops were so thoroughly disheartened” during these marches “that many of the soldiers destroyed themselves for fear of falling into the hands of the Bedouins.” Still others “... begin as usual to invent the most extraordinary theories, some asserting that the General has sold us to Abd el-Kader.” Most, however, grew “... indignant ... and railed at the cruelty of the General, who they said sacrificed his men to a mere caprice.... I several times heard the exclamation, ‘I wish that the Bedouins would grow out of the ground by millions and put an end to us all.’ The fatigues and hardships of this kind of war at last produce perfect indifference to life, which becomes a mere burden.”36 One French sergeant-major serving in the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment of the Legion in 1843 contemplated “putting an end to a life which is made up of deceptions, boredom, privations and misery, but more than once when I was about to put an end to my
self, one thing held me back; it's that I have always heard that only a coward puts an end to life.” Nevertheless, he reported that the Legion offered a demoralizing existence: “Since I came to this damned Africa, I have been constantly outside,” he reported. “... I spent six months continually outside and always marching in the greatest heat and, apart from a few Bedouins which we skewer with our bayonets because they are not worth a bullet, we rarely have the opportunity to fire our weapons. The life in Africa today is limited to fatigues, to miseries and to privations, but no more fights. The Arabs [are] too weak and deprived of their resources, because do you think that we are going to leave them a moment's peace?”37

  Bringing the enemy to battle was the great problem of these expeditions. Sometimes the columns were detected early, so that they would be harassed from dawn till dusk by swarms of horsemen: “It is no joke to be firing in all directions from sunrise to sunset, and to march at the same time, for we seldom halt to fight at our ease. The General only orders a halt when the rear-guard is so fiercely attacked as to require reinforcement.” The litters were soon filled with wounded. The provisions were redistributed among the men to free more mules. “In the end, however, both men and mules are dead beat, and every one must shift for himself. It requires long habit, and much suffering, before a man can bear to see his comrades butchered before his eyes without being able to help them.”38

  By far the most successful operations were those that maintained a degree of secrecy. Dawn was the best time to attack, for after sunrise the Arabs would see the dust of the approaching column and scatter. But their camps were usually too far away to reach in a single night march, while the horses of the cavalry were often too exhausted to play their vital role in an attack.39 After days of climbing and descending mountains, fighting their way through scrub, following false trails or bursting into Arab campsites only to find them deserted, the men often could hardly walk: “We went forward with difficulty by jumping on the balls of our feet, because we could no longer put pressure on the whole foot,” Lamborelle wrote.40

  However, sometimes the signs that the enemy was close were unmistakable—an abandoned animal, thick smoke on the hillside at dawn. Then, “all tiredness disappeared as if by magic.”41 All the infantry who had managed to keep up were gathered together for the attack by officers whose hoarse orders “Serrez! Serrez!” (“Close up! Close up!”) were passed down the line. The cavalry and the goumiers, irregular native horsemen, were sent along the ridge line to block the only escape route. Two-thirds of the infantry were deployed as skirmishers, the rest held in reserve. “Strict orders had been given to kill all the men and only to take the women and children prisoners,” Lamping wrote.42 At a signal, the infantry moved forward, bursting through the hedge of prickly pear that surrounded these villages: “Cries of alarm are shouted, shots are exchanged, terror spreads through the valley,” Lamborelle recounted. “Women, men, children flee toward the only exit which the terrain offers them, but they find the chasseurs [d'Afrique] and the goums. Bullets fly in all directions, the sabers of the cavalry kill a large number of the enemy. A hundred or so bodies are stretched out on the ground. The herds, the women and children are thrown back toward the infantry, and the entire razzia is reunited in the center of the valley.”43 Lamping's legionnaires butchered every man who “reeled half awake out of their huts ... no one escaped death.”44

  The soldiers helped themselves to anything in the camp—heavy silver jewelry, knives, clothes, muskets still warm from combat—while the prisoners looked on, the men (if any had survived) proud and menacing, the women exhausted, the children confused. “That did not bother us,” Lamborelle wrote of these après razzias. “We worried little about politics. So long as the herd was gathered up, we were satisfied.”45 Indeed, food was the primary preoccupation of the raiders. Not only did the razzia deprive the natives of their livelihood and force them to submit; it also allowed the French to survive on campaign and, if successful, to have a little extra when the spoils were distributed. One French general, Louis de Lamoricière, insisted that his troops exist almost exclusively on the spoils of their campaigns, which provided an extra incentive to mobility and combativeness.

  However, the soldiers often had to move quickly, as the noise of battle inevitably alerted the countryside, which rallied to dispute the departure of the French: “We were forced to retreat in such haste that we left the greater part of the cattle behind,” Lamping wrote. “The fire of the companies we had stationed in our rear with the field pieces at last gained us time to breathe. We however had but few killed and wounded.”46 But the effort was worth the hardship, according to Lamborelle: “That evening after an extraordinary distribution of sheep had been made to all companies, we celebrated our victory with a great feast, in which quarters of mutton, plates of brains and roast lamb were devoured.”47 If the raid had been made on a village or on a semipermanent camp, the soldiers would prod the ground with their bayonets looking for the secret silos in which the Arabs hid their grain. The finder would be rewarded with ten francs, and the intendance would be able to make a supplemental distribution of wheat that evening.

  Then the long march back to base began. This was the most difficult part of the operation, for the captured herds had to be controlled, the Arabs prevented from escaping, the women guarded against “the excesses of victory” and the footsore children sometimes carried. It was not always possible to distinguish victor from vanquished in this multitude. When Lamping's battalion limped into Blidah after one such razzia, “... many a one who would long since have been given over by the physicians in Europe still crawled in our ranks. Our shoes and clothes were in rags; many even had wound pieces of ox hide about their feet in default of shoes.... All the people of the town . . . lifted up their hands in amazement at our deplorable appearance; and it was only on comparing ourselves with these sleek and well-fed citizens that we perceived how wild and wretched we looked, and that our faces were dingy yellow, and our bodies dried up like so many mummies . . . not even Shylock himself could have cut one pound of flesh out of the whole column.”48 One may well imagine that the appearance of a battalion of the 1st Regiment, which returned from an expedition in June 1841, was similar to that described by Lamborelle: “Last night at six o'clock I returned [to Douéra] with my battalion after a long and rather difficult expedition,” wrote Swedish major Westée. “The soldiers, with neither coats nor blankets, suffered horribly from an almost continual rain and the glacial cold of the Atlas and the valley of the Chéliff. We were not lucky enough to hear a shot fired in anger, but we did at least do immense damage to the emir [Abd el-Kader] by destroying his depots.”49

  Once back in garrison, the sheep were sold and the profits distributed among the soldiers according to rank—at least, that was the theory. “But the common soldiers complain, and perhaps not quite without reason, that the higher powers are apt to keep the lion's share for themselves.”50 Then, for two days, discipline relaxed: “No roll calls, no chores, no guard duty. All the men were brothers. In town one only met soldiers of every arm who embraced and who rolled under the tables after having spent on one meal the forced economies of several months.”51

  Bugeaud's methods of warfare were ultimately successful. But their brutality generated heated controversy in France, and found critics even in the Armée d'Afrique. There is no evidence that sympathy for the natives ever kept the Legion from its duty. On the contrary, there was little love spared for the North Africans, who fought “like jackals.... There is everything to fear from these barbarians who never spared the lives of their prisoners,” according to Lamborelle. “And even when they were vanquished, we had to be careful. Often, when he saw he was going to be taken, the Arab held out his musket, the barrel forward, to a soldier who grabbed it. He then pulled the trigger. The ball mortally wounded the soldier and the prisoner was free.” Even the prospect of imminent death offered no release for the soldier from the fear of their diabolical vengefulness: “... in the midst of th
e savage cries which he hears, he is pursued by the image of his mutilated body, his head a bloody trophy for the barbarians whom he is fighting.”52

  Given this attitude, how prisoners were treated depended on a number of things: the length and toughness of a campaign, how many men had been lost and whether any stragglers had died in atrocious circumstances at the hands of the Arabs or any bodies had been mutilated. Above all, the behavior of the victors depended upon the officers. In the native corps especially, where the prospect of pillage and worse was institutionalized as a recruiting pitch, excesses were regarded as almost the normal consequence of an operation, essential for the morale and self-esteem of the Moslem soldier. Lamborelle insisted that no such excesses were committed by the Legion: “I repeat, these men are as good as they are brave.” But, he continued, “It is up to their leaders to develop their sentiments of generosity.”53 Even these hardened campaigners could not be oblivious to the destruction they wrought, to the livelihoods—and lives—shattered in these razzias. Lamborelle claimed that the prisoners were the first concern of the command on the return to garrison: “Several tents were immediately put up for the prisoners. We lit fires, and distributed food. Everyone, officers and soldiers, came from everywhere or formed a silent and sympathetic circle around the captives. Pity for the vanquished is the first glory of the victor.”54 Lacretelle remembered that once during a return from a successful razzia, an Arab emerged from the undergrowth and hurled a large stone at the colonel just as a legionnaire shot him. As the wounded Arab lay on the ground, a goumier came up to ask if he wanted to die. He then shot him in the head. Lacretelle concluded that the Arab had lost his family in their raid and no longer had any desire to live: “The act of desperation of this Arab, who came voluntarily to be killed, caused us much sadness.... The colonel ordered the march to resume and each of us continued lost in his silent reflections.”55