French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The trench work continued at a snail's pace. On the south face, the French had reached the moat that surrounded the walls. The wall was badly enough damaged to storm, but attempts to pass bricks and debris from the zaouia to hurl into the moat snagged on the accurate fire from the village, which killed several sappers. On the right, the trench crept forward only a yard or two each day, hampered by Arab countermeasures, by the difficulties of cutting palm trees to shore up parapets, and by the time taken to fabricate the gabions, portable wicker earthworks, to protect the workers in the trenches. By the 18th, Herbillon had become worried by reports of unrest in the Tell caused by the slow progress of the siege. The government even passed on a report that the Italian freedom fighter Garibaldi planned to travel to Zaatcha to lead the resistance, although why Arabs supposedly locked in a Moslem holy war would have turned to a Christian for leadership is not entirely clear.61

  Herbillon admitted that the fragile political situation in Algeria, rather than the progress of the siege, caused him to order an attack for October 20.62 He called a war council, which concluded that if the south wall were sufficiently damaged to attack, the northern sap was still twenty-two yards away from the moat, which, unfilled, offered a water obstacle nine yards wide. An enterprising captain of engineers suggested that a wagon be pushed into the moat to serve as a bridge for the attackers. Only the colonel of the 43 rd Infantry Regiment, whose soldiers would be expected to charge over this makeshift bridge, expressed reservations. The rest unanimously agreed that even if the plan failed on the north face, it would provide the diversion needed to get Carbuccia and his legionnaires safely into the town from the south.63

  At five-thirty on the morning of October 20, the artillery opened fire, gradually increasing in intensity. A battalion of tirailleurs screened Lichana to prevent surprises from that quarter, while cavalry and goumiers policed the western approaches. On the left, where the Legion was expected to carry the honors of the day, the word was given to attack. Unfortunately, the wall the sappers had constructed to protect the head of the trench refused to collapse to allow the attack to begin. When eventually it was destroyed, the rubble was so encumbering that the legionnaires could file out only one by one into a murderous fire. The light company managed to occupy the breach, but at great cost.

  Ten legionnaires climbed onto the roof of a house just inside the wall, but when it collapsed, the attackers spontaneously fled back across the moat into the sap, according to Grisot because the tower's collapse exposed them to the full force of the garrison's fire.64 “This retrograde movement resulting from natural instincts, would probably not have happened if these two companies had been supported when they arrived on the breach which they sought to hold,” Herbillon believed.65 On the other hand, Herbillon appears to be responsible in part for his lack of support, which sprang from a tactical problem he had not yet solved. He was later criticized for attempting to storm Zaatcha with what amounted to less than two under-strength battalions.66 However, his problem was that while his army was substantial, there were just so many troops he could fit in a small sap or use to attack a small breach without causing impossible chaos.

  The Legion's retreat was covered by a company of Chasseurs d'Afrique, fortunately, because the Arabs followed them to the sap itself. This, Herbillon believed, was the moment to counterattack, and he faulted Carbuccia's decision not to do so: “This unexpected news caused the greatest surprise and destroyed the confidence which we placed in the attack on the left.”67 But, in Carbuccia's defense, it is not clear that he had any troops capable of counterattacking at that moment.

  The attack on the right was equally unsuccessful. The wagon that was supposed to serve the 43rd as a bridge flipped into the moat, causing the conscripts to wade through five feet of water and then climb a wall that had been only partially destroyed. They clung to the breach for two hours and suffered 17 killed and 80 wounded before being ordered to retire. For its part, the Legion counted 13 dead and 40 wounded. In all, the failed attack had cost the French 45 killed and 147 wounded.68 Herbillon blamed Carbuccia for the failure, and the war minister concurred: “I agree with you that Colonel Carbuccia's attack on the left was not as energetic as that of the 43rd,” he wrote to the governor-general. “It had greater advantages, a better prepared path, and it got less far and held less well. However, in such a difficult operation, I have no thought of assigning from such a distance the slightest blame.” He reiterated his view expressed in September that the French should move against those things the oasis dwellers valued most— their water and their palm trees.69

  Only now did Herbillon begin, it seems, to take account of his difficulties, and they were many—too few engineers, too little siege equipment, no grenades, an artillery that was too light to breach the walls and ammunition much of which, dating from the siege of Constantine twelve years earlier, too often declined to detonate. The destruction it had caused had made problems worse, for it simply created more piles of rubble behind which the defenders could hide. Casualties and sickness were reducing his numbers. He was also forced to admit that he had underestimated his opponents, and recognized that his measures, rather than undermining their will to resist, had actually stiffened it.70 Nevertheless, all of his officers save one were for abandoning several of the gardens to reduce the extent of their front and pursue the siege. The one dissenting voice, Herbillon noted with apparent surprise, was Carbuccia's: “His insistence on this point opened my eyes and I could see in him only bad intentions, even more when I heard that, during a dinner, he was not afraid to rejoice at my failure of 20 October,” Herbillon wrote.71

  The sluggish progress of the French before Zaatcha had not gone unnoticed among the Algerians, although their restlessness was far from the brewing general revolt Herbillon feared. Its manifestations were rumors of seditious talk in tribal councils and an increase in brigandage, especially against convoys traveling between Batna and Biskra. It was one of these convoys that brought in the new commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Legion, Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte. His presence added one of the more bizarre twists to the Zaatcha episode, and would help both to strain relations between Herbillon and Carbuccia almost to the breaking point as well as draw the siege into the political debate in France. Pierre-Napoleon, son of Lucien Bonaparte, who had served his brother as president of the council of five hundred during the Directory in 1799, was born in 1815 in Italy, where his father had fled into exile. Like his first cousin Louis-Napoleon, in 1848 Pierre had returned to France from the exile imposed upon all Bonapartes after Waterloo to trade upon the prestige of his name to get elected to the Constituent Assembly as a representative for Corsica on May 7, 1848. Eager to associate himself with the military glory of his illustrious house, he was named a major in the 1st Regiment of the Foreign Legion on April 19, 1848, by virtue of the fact that he had held this rank in the army of New Granada (Colombia) in 1832 when he was seventeen years old.

  He certainly regarded this as an intermediate step to rank in a regular French regiment, for he petitioned the Assembly on May 17, 1849, to be integrated into the army as an officer à tître français. Perhaps some important people, including his cousin Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the Second Republic, suggested that his case might be strengthened if he actually bothered to appear for duty with the Legion, which he had yet to visit. Even though an officer in the 1st Regiment, he was given a command in the 2nd Regiment, which was part of Herbillon's column. Pierre-Napoleon's account is somewhat different. He claims that he solicited a posting in the Zaatcha operation, and was promised the command of an “elite unit.” However, upon arrival in Algeria, he was informed that, as he was not a French citizen but a Roman by birth, he could serve only in the Legion with a foreigner's commission. This distressed him acutely, both because his Frenchness had been called into question and because he apparently believed the Legion insufficiently elite.72

  The closer Bonaparte came to Biskra, the more the romance of Africa began to give way to the
realities of a stymied siege. As the convoy filed through the Kantara Gorge and onto the Sahara plain, it was shadowed at a respectful distance by Algerians who on occasion rushed about in a “fantasia” of galloping, shouting and firing into the air, but who otherwise kept a respectful distance. Still, it was amusing, and concentrated the minds of the muleteers who, for once, ceased complaining and worked with something approaching efficiency. Biskra was otherwise—a collection of miserable oases organized around Saint-Germain's fortress, which was filled with sick and wounded from the siege. The track from Biskra to Zaatcha followed the foot of the Saharan Atlas, which rose like a somber fortress to the north, while to the south an unending plain stretched off to the horizon, broken only by an occasional cluster of date palms that sat, scorched and bedraggled, between the folds of low dunes.

  The increasing bleakness of the land provided an appropriate introduction to the French camp, which was arranged in lines across broken terrain, the tents of the officers and the ambulance pitched on rocky out-croppings that protruded above the canvas shelters of the soldiers. About four hundred yards to the southwest was a spring that gushed abundant but virtually undrinkable water. Two hundred yards beyond that, the oasis began. Bonaparte could hardly believe that this was what had held up the army for so long: “Zaatcha is nothing, when all is said and done, but a miserable village which is hardly fortified,” he wrote. He entered the “trenches” for a closer look, and followed their meandering path along bits of wall shored up by palm trunks, past gun loops that allowed the French to reply to the harassing fire of Arab blunderbusses, until he could glimpse the breach in the south wall. It still contained a corpse, “completely naked, swollen, blackened,” lying beneath an enormous beam.73

  Since the failure of the October 20 offensive, the French had busied themselves in two activities—extending their trenches and felling date palms. The two activities were not unrelated, as the tree trunks reinforced the saps. But the felling of the date palms was also meant to bring economic pressure on the defenders, who it was hoped would surrender rather than see their livelihood irrevocably destroyed. Rulliere had suggested on September 22 that the weakness of an oasis lay in its two

  vulnerable points ... the palm trees and the water. These are the indispensable conditions of their existence. They are the only wealth of the country. The destruction of the palm trees will have more effect in an oasis than the death of a man. It is therefore in their interests that one must menace them. I do not suggest total destruction, which on the contrary one must avoid as much as possible. But it will be useful to make them fear it and even to begin to do it. .. to bring the inhabitants into submission.74

  This seemed like sensible advice. However, in this case it did not appear to work. The French maps show two principal springs—Aïn Meioub close to the French camp, to which the Arabs would have had no access, and Aïn Fouar, whose streams flowed past Zaatcha itself. There is nothing in the documents that suggests that the French ever attempted to cut off Zaatcha from its water supply. In any case, as the Zaatchans were free to come and go after dark through the west gate, presumably they could resupply at will. There is no evidence that lack of water was a factor in Zaatcha's downfall.

  As for the date palms, it is certain that the defenders did make an effort to protect them. But it is not clear whether they did so to salvage their economic livelihood, or because French palm-cutting parties proved to be tempting targets. If, as Herbillon claimed, many of the defenders were outsiders, then presumably they were indifferent to the economic pressures of palm cutting, and simply preferred to hit the French when they were out in the open and preoccupied with other things. And here the French seem to have demonstrated a remarkable lack of tactical imagination. For if the felling of date palms did not bring on surrender, at least it brought the defenders into the open where the superior discipline of the Europeans should have given them a decisive advantage. But instead of using this opportunity to lay traps and ambushes for the Arabs, the French allowed themselves to be surprised.

  The inexperienced Bonaparte learned of the lethal nature of tree cutting on October 25, when he was put in charge of a party of two hundred legionnaires and two hundred zephyrs. He marched his men out to the palm trees with the band in front, and almost immediately lost two legionnaires to snipers. He then set his men to work felling trees, guarded only by a small post of zéphyrs. The work began unhindered, the silence broken only by the hollow sounds of the axes upon the resilient tree trunks. Unseen, the Arabs crawled forward through the debris of the oasis. A sizable group suddenly rushed the guard post, and, according to Pierre-Napoleon, overwhelmed them. Bonaparte first saw Arabs, isolated or in small groups, appear here and there. Suddenly a large mass moved up a ravine to attack. A number of officers fell, and “many soldiers gathered round them, some carried them to the rear. Others, as often happens in these cases, probably to escort them.”75 He placed himself at the head of twenty-five grenadiers of the Legion and held back the attack long enough for the rest to rally, aided by another small group of legionnaires led by a sergeant, who also stood firm. The French lost six killed and twenty-two wounded.76

  The arrival of Bonaparte allowed Carbuccia to make a public display of his Bonapartist sentiments. According to Herbillon, Carbuccia “only saw in Pierre Bonaparte an instrument which could help him advance and acted toward this. . . .”77 Carbuccia welcomed Bonaparte with a dinner in the saps, where the officers ate while sitting cross-legged on rugs and the Legion band played “patriotic airs.” After the colonel toasted the president of the Republic, the band struck up the “Marseillaise.” This infuriated the Arabs, who fired their blunderbusses, bringing down a shower of lead through the date palms. Others shouted insults across the trenches at Carbuccia, whom they knew by name as head of the Batna region. The Legion was also a special target of insult by Arabs who, Bonaparte believed, must have been to Algiers, because they shouted in French: “Bataillon di juifs!” “Cochons, juifs!” (Battalion of Jews! Jewish Pigs!) They also pushed donkeys into no-man's land in the hope that the French would come out to get them and thereby offer themselves as targets. Instead, the French simply shot the donkeys themselves. These festivities were punctuated by a mortar which fired an hourly round. All in all, despite the distractions and “the execrable odor of corpses,” Bonaparte passed a capital evening's entertainment.78

  Whatever their attractions, however, the delights of Zaatcha were insufficient to hold Pierre-Napoleon, who announced to Herbillon barely five days after his arrival that pressing legislative matters in Paris required his attention. Herbillon suspected that Carbuccia had pressed him to return so that he could denounce the conduct of the siege in France. He also believed that Pierre-Napoleon lacked the stomach to sit out a siege whose end was not in sight. Herbillon tried to talk Bonaparte into staying—an extraordinary statement as he was, after all, Bonaparte's commanding officer. But the cousin of the president was not to be dissuaded, so “wanting to avoid jeers and shelter the great name of Napoleon from ridicule,” Herbillon gave Bonaparte the mission of reporting the difficulties faced by the French before Zaatcha to the governor-general and requesting reinforcements.79 However, rather than pay a visit upon the governor-general, Pierre-Napoleon avoided Algiers altogether and caught a boat for France directly from Philippeville.

  Herbillon for once had seen clearly that Bonaparte's departure was bound to cause problems. According to the war minister, the slowness of the siege, combined no doubt with news of the failure of the October 20 assault, “has agitated public opinion.”80 The enemies of President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte were too numerous and too suspicious of his intentions (and with good reason) not to exploit this golden opportunity to attack him through his cousin. A Bonaparte fleeing his army! This was a chance too good to pass up. Even before Pierre-Napoleon's boat docked in Marseille, many were saying that he had fled the final assault, which promised to be murderous, and that he feared contracting cholera. Pierre-Napoleon replied rather weakly
that there had been no cholera at Zaatcha when he was there. This did not stop General de Casteliane from noting in his diary that “War is not to his taste, or so it seems.”81 But the charge stuck. Abandoning armies in distress seemed to be a family trait—after all, Pierre-Napoleon's uncle had left two armies behind, one in Egypt and the other in Russia, nor had he exactly lingered after Waterloo to put things in order. On November 19, Pierre-Napoleon was stripped of his majority in the Legion for deserting his post. He demanded a parliamentary debate on the issue, which was held three days later. The new war minister, Count Alphonse d'Hautpoul, said that had Herbillon not given Bonaparte a letter to carry to the governor-general, then the ex-major would surely have been court-martialed. In his defense, Bonaparte moved that all representatives be allowed to be in the Assembly when voting was taking place, a motion unanimously rejected.82 Never mind! Pierre-Napoleon was to get his revenge on December 2, 1851, when cousin Louis-Napoleon ordered the army to flush out the National Assembly, and a year later to the day proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

  Bonaparte's disgrace was also bound to be that of Carbuccia, at least temporarily. On November 8, a column of 1,200 zouaves under Canrobert arrived at Zaatcha, driving before them three thousand sheep and goats gathered in razzias on the way south. At first they were a welcome morale booster in a French camp demoralized by lack of progress, inadequate food and incessant rains. But the joy soon turned to horror when it was realized what they brought with them: Two days out of Aumale, a new settlement about one hundred miles south of Algiers, severe diarrhea and vomiting, unmistakable signs of cholera brought on by infected food and water, began to appear among Canrobert's zouaves. The dry climate accelerated the dehydration that brought on kidney failure and death: “We spend our evenings burying bodies,” Canrobert wrote.83 Soon all of the horses were laden with soldiers, something that could not escape the attention of the Algerians, who began “to follow the column like jackals, looking to harass stragglers and to cut the throat of isolated soldiers.” Each day their numbers grew until one morning Canrobert discovered a compact mass obviously intent on disputing his passage through a defile. As his horses could carry no more wounded, which a battle would inevitably produce, Canrobert opted for a different stratagem: Approaching the Arabs, he shouted, “You hear me? Know that I carry the plague with me. If you block my passage, I will throw myself on you.” The Arabs scattered quickly.84