The cavalry screen of the 7e Chasseurs à cheval passed through their ranks moving toward the rear, driven in by three columns of advancing Austrians. Captain Rembert of the 1er éttanger was the first to spy the white coats of the enemy across the vineyards. Impulsively he shouted a command to attack. The Austrians, momentarily taken aback, quickly recovered their composure when they realized that Rembert's Legion company was heavily outnumbered. At this moment, Colonel Louis de Chabriere, commanding the 2e étranger, ordered his men to down packs and charge, just as he pitched from his horse—dead. The line of legionnaires and zouaves heaved forward in a piecemeal fashion as each section discovered an opponent to his front. In the confusion of walls, vineyards and smoke, the Austrians began to withdraw, firing as they retreated. Zédè's company pursued, climbing over walls, stepping past the bodies of dead zouaves, until halted by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Martinez. The captain of the grenadier company that Martinez had deployed as skirmishers to cover his front returned to report Austrian troops filing out of Magenta. Martinez ordered a charge, and legionnaires and zouaves cheered, leveled their bayonets and rushed forward. “The Austrians hardly resisted but surrendered en masse” Zédé wrote, “and we were furious to see the officers ride away with their flags. Only one was captured, and that was by the zouaves.”27
As the 2nd Corps of legionnaires and zouaves stood poised to storm the town, MacMahon arrived and, as he trotted past the Legion, uttered the statement that today adorns the wall of almost every Legion bar: “Void la Légion! L'affaire est dans le sac!” (“The Legion is here! The affair is in the bag!”) But the affair was far from being in the bag. The easy part of the battle was over. Magenta remained in the hands of the Austrians, who were now represented by the Croatians, soldiers who specialized in shooting the wounded and who singlehandedly might have inspired the Geneva Convention of 1864j and by their crack Tyrolean mountain troops. As legionnaires and zouaves waited impatiently for the orders to storm the town, the Imperial Guard was ordered into line. The reaction of the hardened veterans of Africa to the arrival of the pampered Parisian household troops was predictable: “The Guard! Get them out of here! Let them go stand guard at Saint-Cloud! The chambermaids of the Tuileries [Palace] will be too sad if they get hurt!”28
The 2nd Corps was drawn up into serried ranks. To their front, the Austrians organized their artillery and infantry behind a railway embankment that formed a convenient breastwork in front of the town. “The charge was spontaneous,” Zédé wrote. “The hurrahs, the cries of En avant! were shouted, zouaves and legionnaires hurled forward. Neither cannon nor the volleys of the Austrians could stop them and this torrent rolled toward Magenta carrying all before it.” However, like a wave breaking over a sea wall, the French attack shattered as it slapped against the Austrian defenses. In fact, two attacks failed, with heavy losses, before the French finally succeeded in breaking into the town. “From this moment, all was disorder and confusion,” Zédé continued. “Everything dissolved into desperate struggles among small groups.” Several officers were killed, including General Espinasse, an ex-Legion officer, shot down as he led a charge. Martinez, his face covered with blood after a bullet took away his left eyelid, directed his troops to break down doors and charge up stairs. Fires broke out in the disputed houses, adding smoke to an atmosphere already suffocating with heat, dust and powder. Prisoners, when there were any, were gathered in the church on the square. The fighting died out only at dawn on June 5.
The officers attempted to re-form the regiment, but that proved impossible. The victorious soldiers intended to celebrate, and had lost little time in breaking into the wine cellars and smashing open the casks. The cellars soon became flooded with wine, and the men so drunk that more than one survivor of the Battle of Magenta was found in the morning floating face down, drowned in wine. The scene in the streets of Magenta was a mixture of tragedy and farce—Zédé found it impossible to distinguish the dead from those who were merely dead drunk. One could walk from one end of the town to the other without once setting foot on the ground, so thickly lay the corpses of men and horses and the inert forms of inebriated soldiers: “One heard nothing but the moans of the wounded,” Zédé remembered. Soldiers moved about stripping the dead of their boots, uniforms and ammunition, so that before long many of the bodies lay “in a state of nature.” The next day they were pitched unceremoniously into a common grave.29
Wounded soldiers wandered about searching for an ambulance. Polish legionnaire M. Kamienski, his arm shattered by a musket ball, spent the night on the ground next to three other wounded soldiers. The next morning, one of them told him to follow the railway tracks to the dressing station: “As for me,” the soldier said as he rolled a cigarette, “I'm going to die here without bothering.”30 It was probably just as well. Zédé discovered the spectacle at the dressing station to be “lamentable. The railway station, where the hospital had been established, overflowed with unfortunates laid out on the bare earth. During the entire night, the doctors had only their medical bags which they carried with them, no linen for bandages, no chloroform. . . . They could do little more than give water to the wounded.” The 2e étranger had lost four officers killed and 250 men killed or wounded.31 The Legion's casualties included Kamienski, who perished a few days later of blood poisoning.
On June 7, the Legion marched into Milan to a triumphal welcome by Italians delighted to be liberated from the Austrian yoke. “Our camp was invaded by a population drunk with joy. Our soldiers were showered with food and wine, and taken into the houses where they were feted endlessly.”32 Exuberance, even Italian exuberance, had its limits, however. The officers of the Legion succeeded in capitalizing upon the delirium of the moment to entice some Italians to enlist. However, by the time they reached Genoa for reembarkation, most of the new recruits had vanished.33 Following a final, bloody and confusing battle at Solferino, the Emperor concluded a surprise peace with Austria on July 12. Cavour was disappointed that France's rapid conclusion of hostilities denied him a full victory—he was able to seize Lombardy but not Venetia. But Louis-Napoleon had been genuinely upset by the deficiencies of the French army, had begun to glimpse the dangers a unified Italy posed for France and was further dissuaded by the mobilization of Prussian forces along the Rhine. For its part, the Legion for the first time participated in the victory parade in the French capital, a recognition of its role in the campaign.
THE VERY LEAST that one can say about the performance of the Legion at Magenta was that it fully matched that of the other French corps, like the elite zouaves. The 2e étranger was in the thick of the fight, and by all accounts acquitted itself with great courage. The obvious question to ask, especially given the fact that so many officers had gone on record as having a poor opinion of that corps, is, How did they do it? Was Magenta perhaps a fluke? The short answer is that it was not. The Legion added considerably to its battle honors in the 1850s—the elite battalion of the Legion maintained its discipline during the Battle of the Alma in 1854, when the first line of French troops rushed spontaneously at the Russian lines. The 2e étranger carried the honors of the day during the difficult Kabylia campaign of 1857. The fierce tribesmen who occupied the mountains to the east of Algiers were among the last to submit to French rule. Their stone villages, which clung to the ridges of their desiccated mountains, offered natural fortresses, which had to be taken one by one. In June 1857, a large number of Kabyles had concentrated at Ischeriden, a small village built upon the edge of a steep ravine. On the hills that dominated the village, the resistance had organized a series of defensive walls. Early on the morning of June 24, after a preliminary artillery bombardment lasting almost an hour, the French launched an attack by the zouaves and the 54th Infantry Regiment. The dissidents allowed the attackers to advance within a hundred yards before opening a heavy fire, which stopped the French dead in their tracks. While the 1st Battalion of the 2e étranger rushed to reinforce the zouaves and the 54th, the 2nd Battalion downed packs an
d marched against the right flank of the Kabyle positions. Without firing a shot, the legionnaires advanced upon the entrenchments despite heavy fire until they crossed the low stone wall and went to work with their bayonets. Taken from the flank, the Kabyle position unraveled.34
Ischeriden helped to bring the Legion to public notice because the battle was covered by the popular French magazine L'Illustration. Specialists began to consider the Legion a serious military rival to the elite zouaves, known as “the world's premier soldiers,” and a healthy competition grew up between the two units, who were often brigaded together until 1870. Likewise, Zédé recorded that military opinion at the close of the Italian campaign credited the bravery of French soldiers, including legionnaires, for salvaging some rather lackluster generalship.35 Clearly, the Legion had discovered some way to transform their apparent liabilities into assets.
The first place to look for an answer, perhaps, is in the quality of Legion recruitment. The notion that those who joined the Legion did so as absolutely the last resort when all of life's other possibilities had been closed off was the contemporary one. When William Stammer presented himself at the Legion recruitment bureau in 1854, his request to enlist was greeted with disbelief:
How was it that I, a man with money in my pocket, a good coat on my back and, it is with diffidence that I say it, an extremely good address, could voluntarily enter such a regiment was beyond their comprehension. I think that the younger and more romantic employés in the office inclined to the belief that I had been thwarted in love, and had joined the Legion in the hopes of being killed on the field of battle, whilst the older hands shrugged their shoulders and muttered, “Poor fellow, he is an Englishman, and must certainly be half-witted.”36
When Zédé boarded the ship for Mexico with his legionnaires, the captain, who knew Zédé's brother, also a naval officer, “... confessed to me his apprehension at having on board, for a long voyage, such bandits as the legionnaires, and he was surprised to see me in such company.” When the ship reached Martinique, the legionnaires were confined to the fortress under armed guard by nervous local officials who feared that they might run amok.37
But not everyone shared this view of Homo legionis. Antoine Camus argued against the belief that most recruits were driven to the Legion by hunger. Certainly, many came in need or because of a downturn in their personal circumstances, but there were far easier ways of earning a living. No, men were drawn to the Legion by the attractions of regimental life, by “the thirst for the struggle . . . [by] the secret desire to receive their baptism of fire among the world's premier soldiers.” Many of these men were “ignorant,” “rough,” “taciturn” and might even become rebellious when pressed too hard by military discipline.38 But Camus clearly believed that Legion recruits were not “the scum of the earth enlisted for drink,” but men who had professional potential.
Of course, this might not always be the case. In wartime especially, when the demand for bodies was strong, the doors of the recruitment bureaus might open rather more widely than usual. For instance, the competition for recruits was keen during the Crimean War, when both the British and French sought to entice Swiss into their armies. Although the British appeared to gain the upper hand by offering an enlistment bonus of 150 francs, compared to twenty francs held out by the parsimonious French, 1,600 men were eventually incorporated into the short-lived IIe Légion étrangère (1855—56), which was made up of two infantry regiments and a bataillon of tirailleurs. In 1856, these men became the 1er régiment étranger, which was often referred to as the “Swiss” until its dissolution in 1861. This short-lived experiment was the last time that the Swiss, so long associated with the military history of France, were incorporated into a separate unit by a French government. But the war minister complained that many of them were underage and undersized. For their part, the Swiss took offense at this unseemly competition to entice their young men abroad as mercenaries, and in 1859 passed a law forbidding Swiss to serve in foreign armies.39
However, the point to make is that, with the possible exception of the Mexican campaign, recruits to the Legion in this period may not have been as devoid of military potential as contemporary inspection reports and contemporary prejudice might suggest. Certainly the Legion formed a heterogeneous, even a motley, collection of men, most of whom were foreign, of dubious backgrounds, who spoke French badly and whose motives for enlistment were open to question. But one may concede, if merely for the sake of argument, that the potential for producing a quality unit might just exist. The next obvious question to ask is, how did the Legion attempt to do just that?
In any modern unit, the foundations for performance and esprit de corps are laid on the exercise field. In the Legion, as in other armies during this period, training consisted primarily of drill. William Stammer drilled in the morning and in the afternoon, and apart from barrack details was otherwise free to wander into town.40 Corporal Fijalkowski followed a similar routine in 1859: “To keep us occupied, we have three hours of exercises twice daily, roll call at 11 o'clock, to which we must bring a well cleaned piece of equipment, and details ...” However, the Armée d'Afrique must have been doing something right, for when he reached Italy, Fijalkowski noted that “... the regiments coming from France suffer much more than us.”41 When the Belgian Eugene Amiable reached Mexico after training at the temporary Legion depot at Aix-en-Provence, he found that he was poorly prepared to confront the first three-day march: “I was so exhausted that I could hardly feel my legs,” he wrote. But he soon got used to it. Later, when his unit was given additional training, he believed that “... three quarters of the men did not need it: many being officers of different nations.”42 But, on the whole, the Legion does not seem to have placed much emphasis on training. Louis de Massol noted that training was often neglected in barracks,43 while Zédé was frequently sent out with his company on “colonization projects” during which training was entirely neglected. In any case, Zédé believed that six shots fired in target practice was sufficient for legionnaires. And perhaps it was, for during the Battle of Magenta his men fired only nine shots each on average.44
Rigorous training does not appear to have been the source of the Legion's battlefield success. Nor could the esprit de corps described by Zédé and Diesbach de Torny have been even in part the product of the pay and conditions of service, which were desperately inadequate. Legionnaires were paid barely enough to live on: “As for the small pleasures,” wrote Fijalkowski, “we are paid 7 sous [1 franc 40 centimes] every five days, out of which we furnish our own shoe polish and soap. That is why we hardly make economies.”45 And while they might be able to earn extra money in Sidi-bel-Abbès by working in town, on campaign, especially in Mexico where the cost of food was high, soldiers might virtually starve to death— Amiable paid 15 centimes for a tortilla in Mexico, and on a very thirsty march claimed to have been charged sixty-five centimes for a glass of water.46 Not surprisingly, the commander-in-chief in Mexico, ex-Legion officer Achille Bazaine, provoked howls of protest from the Belgian and Austrian contingents serving Emperor Maximilian when he reduced them to the same pay as the French troops.47 After years of such poor treatment, it is no wonder that the Legion found the fifty centimes a day the Versailles government paid their troops during the siege of the Commune in 1871, together with the daily ration of wine and brandy (double ration when fighting), a real morale boost.48 De Massol complained that the Legion was the lowest-paid unit in the French army simply because no one took an interest in them,49 a rather curious observation as the Legion ostensibly was paid the same as French recruits.
Nor, for soldiers, did the Legion necessarily offer a stepping-stone to better things. On the contrary, Fijalkowski, who had completed his secondary education—quite rare for a common soldier—complained that the better men in the company found promotion blocked by French NCOs sent from other regiments, often as a punishment, and by favoritism: “Daily I hear my comrades complain and regret having enlisted, because t
hey are not promoted ...,” he wrote. He was told that his best hope was to become a naturalized Frenchman and transfer to a line regiment.50 But while the lack of promotion may have discouraged some of the more ambitious recruits, Camus was of the opinion that most foreign legionnaires were illiterate or spoke such poor French that they could never aspire to rank.51 De Massol painted a very bleak picture of the Legion in garrison: “Discipline, training, military spirit ebb away each day,” he wrote. “The officer vegetates, the NCO languishes, the soldier suffers and is bored.” In fact, so bored did legionnaires become that they intentionally sought admission to the discipline company where “... he never has to drill, to stand guard, to train.”52
This would seem to suggest that Legion morale was fragile in the extreme. In fact, many of these descriptions may lead one to wonder how the Legion kept from falling apart altogether. But could things really have been as bad as all that? Legionnaires admitted that they made terrible garrison troops. But even if it is fair to point out in the way of mitigating circumstances that all soldiers tend to lose their edge in barracks, one must concede that the Legion's lapses into alcoholism and indiscipline in garrison bordered on the heroic. But how reliable an indicator is this that Legion morale was necessarily fragile? Perhaps alcoholism and indiscipline might be a sign of high morale, a way of keeping one's aggressive instincts sharp when there is no fighting to do. In that case, there would not necessarily be a contradiction between the claims of Zédé and Diesbach de Torny that regimental pride based on the Legion's battle honors and the number of its officers who had achieved stellar rank was high, even “fanatically” so, and inspection reports that concluded that, based on garrison statistics, the Legion was on the verge of revolt. Or, at the very least, in the view of General Ulrich, who inspected the 1er étranger in 1861, a regiment “... that is nothing more than an amalgamation of all the nations of Europe, does not have nor can it have an esprit de corps. ”53
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