The Mier column offers perhaps the most spectacular example of declining performance. The sack of Mier and the large number of desertions that followed were denounced as a “deplorable” lapse of discipline by Belgian colonel Alfred Louis Adolphe Graves van der Smissen. Belgian captain L. Timmerhans agreed, adding that “this troop was considered with reason in normal times to be well disciplined and courageous under fire.” Obviously, for Timmerhans, as well as for many others, one suspects, 1866 in Mexico did not qualify under any definition of “normal times.” But something had clearly snapped, because on the return trip to Monterrey, the Legion hardly bothered to chase the Mexican resistance that lined their route: “To run after these bandit chiefs,” Amiable admitted, “was a vain exercise.”100
Of course, it may be useful to place Legion indiscipline and desertion in Mexico in perspective. The Legion certainly did a better job of assimilating its heterogeneous soldiery than did that other great Foreign Legion of the period, the U.S. Army. So bad were the desertions from the U.S. Army in the Mexican War of 1845 that Santa Anna was able to form an entire brigade of renegade Irishmen who had crossed over the lines. The Union Army counted fully 201,000 desertions in the War Between the States and desertions in the postwar decades ran close to one-third of strength.101
After the tremendous frustrations of the Mexican campaign, Napoleon Ill's December 1866 order to repatriate all French troops, including the Legion, must have come as a relief. The battalions of the Legion were pulled in toward Mexico City, from which they marched to Soledad to board trains that carried them quickly through the jungles to Veracruz to avoid the vomito. At Veracruz each of the six battalions camped only one night before embarking for home. By the end of February 1867, the last troopship that would repatriate the Legion to Algeria had slipped away from the lugubrious Mexican coastline. Some 1,918 officers and legionnaires had perished in Mexico, 1,601—83 percent—victims of disease.
Chapter 8
THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE COMMUNE
THE LEGION'S ALGERIAN homecoming was not a happy one. On April 4, 1867, the government ordered the Legion reduced from six to four battalions, which resulted in the immediate disbandment of the Legion artillery and engineering units, and the transfer of 84 officers and by July 387 NCOs and corporals out of the regiment. In August, Paris ordered further reductions to slash the force from 5,000 to 3,000 men, so that French legionnaires were sent to regular units and almost 1,000 foreigners had their enlistment contracts unilaterally terminated. What remained was scattered among isolated posts in eastern Algeria, where they were set building posts and roads.
What was depressing duty at the best of times was made even more onerous as 1867 was a crisis year in Algeria, when a poor harvest pushed up the price of food beyond the means of many Arabs to pay for it. Typhus soon joined the starvation that was killing the native population by the thousands. The high price of food required legionnaires, especially in the southern posts, to survive on the hardtack and poor-quality meat provided by the French supply corps, which, when added to the exhausting labor and absence of a strongly centralized command in these isolated posts, lowered morale still further. Soon inspecting generals reported a resurgence of the Legion's “deplorable tendency toward drunkenness,” which, as in the past, was financed by the selling of equipment. And if this were not bad enough, a serious cholera epidemic soon broke out in the garrisons.
By the end of 1867, the Legion had been reduced to three thousand men, but the survivors had begun to look back upon the Mexican years with deep nostalgia, an attitude the remainder of the decade did nothing to alter. General Grisot, who lived these years with the Legion, spoke of the “lourd ennui” and “fatigue” of life in these isolated Legion posts, where conditions were primitive, where the nearest source of firewood was often eight miles distant, where a few vegetables coaxed by dint of great effort from the unyielding soil or a skeletal chicken were received in the mess with almost religious awe.
The only distractions were provided by periodic scrambles to intercept elusive bands of raiders who darted into French territory from Morocco. But these outings usually caused far more damage to the Legion than to the Moroccans: One column returning to Géryville after a demonstration of force in April 1868 was caught by bad weather in the mountains and forced to abandon most of its equipment after the camels died of fatigue. The legionnaires fashioned footwear out of animal skins and marched on. Many died of misery and fatigue. When the column reached Géryville, casualties in the Legion included nineteen suicides and a company commander who had been seized by Arabs when he wandered away from the column and had been tortured to death. An expedition to punish dissidents in the Djebel Amour north of Géryville in February 1869 collapsed when the Legion column, already on the verge of starvation because the supply corps failed to supply it with meat, was caught in a series of terrible snowstorms that forced it back to base empty-handed.1
In this context, news of the outbreak of war between France and the German states in July 1870 should have been greeted with positive joy by legionnaires. Initially, however, life for the Legion actually got worse. As the 1831 law founding the Legion also prohibited its use in metropolitan France, two battalions were sent to replace the zouaves at a place the Arabs called El-Hasaiba—The Damned—because it was malarial. Soon graves of legionnaires sprouted next to those of the zouaves in the garrison cemetery.
However, the government's reluctance to use the Legion in the war against Germany was quickly overtaken by events. The first was that large numbers of foreigners, especially Irishmen, were expected to offer their services to France. This caused Napoleon HI to order the formation of battalions of foreign volunteers separate from the Legion to serve for the duration of the war. But the expected bonanza of volunteers failed to live up to predictions, so on August 22, the one battalion of foreign volunteers that had been organized at Tours became the 5th Battalion of the régiment étranger. Nearly five hundred Germans enlisted as volunteers for the duration of the war, as did some Belgians who were sent to Algeria after the Belgian government objected to its citizens being used in the conflict.2 On September 1, a decree called into being a 2e régiment étranger, but the rapid pace of the war consigned this order to oblivion, as it did other legalistic quibbles about using the Legion in France. In October, after the main French armies had been beaten and surrendered at Sedan and Metz, Napoleon III captured and sent into an English exile, and the Third Republic had been declared on September 4, two of the four Legion battalions stationed in Algeria arrived in France, minus their Germans, who remained behind.
By that time, the 5th Battalion had already fought an honorable, and very costly, action at Orléans. At two o'clock on the morning of October 11, the battalion had been caught up in an attack by Bavarian units. The battalion commander was killed in the eight hours of bitter house-to-house fighting that ensued. Dispersed, many of the legionnaires had not received the order to disengage and withdraw across the Loire River. At the end of the day, the battalion had taken 600 casualties and left behind 250 prisoners.3
That this Legion battalion had fought so well surprised many, for its organization had been plagued by difficulties. It was a very large and unwieldy battalion of 1,350 men, and as usual for the Legion, it was a very heterogeneous crowd that included many Poles, Swiss, Belgians and even a number of deserters from the German forces.4 While this was nothing new for the Legion, the problems were compounded by the extreme shortage of regular officers to staff the raw levies being called up by the republicans to continue the war that had been so badly mismanaged by the Empire. Many of the Legion's officers were snapped up for other duties, their places often taken by foreigners whose military credentials were insufficiently scrutinized by a government fighting with its back to the wall. One of the better officers was the future Peter I of Serbia, an ex-cadet at Saint-Cyr. On the lower end of the competency scale was an Irishman named Kirwan who came to France at the head of 100 Irish volunteers to form an amb
ulance corps, but, sensing the rapidly deteriorating French position, offered to take up arms. Grisot complained that Kirwan spent most of his time writing newspaper dispatches. Other temporary Legion officers included a lieutenant who defected to the Prussians, a Spanish major who deserted with arms and baggage and a Turk who was relieved after a month after he got into several fistfights with his legionnaires.
On October 19, the two battalions sent from Algeria joined the remnants of the 5th to become part of the Army of the Loire. But by that time the French were in serious difficulties. A revolution in Paris on September 4, 1870, had overthrown the Empire. The new Third Republic struggled manfully to carry on the war amidst the utter chaos of defeat. German armies besieged Paris and had pushed south to the Loire River, where the French had organized a defense with a ragtag collection of soldiers left in Africa and volunteers, both French and foreign. Like other units, the Legion was plagued by the almost total absence of military expertise. Combat, a confusing experience at the best of times, was rendered even more difficult to control, so that even fairly minor skirmishes could prove very costly. While the newly organized 5th Battalion had fought very well at Orleans, subsequent performance was less inspiring. Discipline began to collapse as the distribution system broke down, and soldiers foraged for food and clothes in the bitterly cold winter of 1870-71, or turned to the numerous alcohol merchants who shadowed the lumbering French armies. Several legionnaires were shot after lapses of discipline, but this did little to stop the rot.
In early December a second battle was fought at Orleans. As in the earlier October encounter, a number of legionnaires scattered in houses were lost when they failed to get news of the French withdrawal. Many of the 210 men who failed to answer roll call in the 1st and 2nd Battalions on the night of December 3-4 had perished from cold, hunger and fatigue after three nights of sleeping in the snow. As the Legion fell back in the middle of a disorganized French army on the night of December 4—5, some settled into houses along the route of march, where they were captured by the advancing Germans. By the next morning, the regiment reckoned that it had lost half its strength. On the 10th, the remnants of the three battalions were formed into a single bataillon de marche.
On December 18 the Legion received a reinforcement of two thousand young soldiers, most of them Bretons who had never fired a rifle, which brought the one-thousand-man regiment to three thousand. “We reorganized the cadres with the old troopers, with anyone who could wear stripes,” wrote Grisot. “But the recruits preferred to listen to the old soldiers, rather than to the newly formed cadres.”5 Discipline was poorly maintained throughout the army, with soldiers squandering munitions on hunting expeditions—an occupation that also caused continuous alerts as units confused the execution of a rabbit with a Prussian attack—selling provisions and cutting down fruit trees. In the train stations, soldiers cut off from their units pillaged and stole from their comrades.
This laisser-aller in the army in general was bound to prove contagious. The situation in the Legion was hardly improved when on January 19, 1871, the paymaster was killed and the company chest that contained 4,341 francs captured by the enemy. And if this were not bad enough, on that very night a German reconnaissance party surrounded and captured an entire Legion company as it sat, sentinelless, calmly warming itself around a roaring fire. This occurred in part because the lack of mobility among the French obliged them to camp on their forward positions rather than retire to the rear, leaving advance posts to screen their cantonments. German campfires were almost never visible from the French lines.
The major problem was the lack of discipline: “The young soldiers, Bretons for the most part, fought among themselves rather than help each other out,” Grisot complained. But he believed that the men of the régiment étranger were less demoralized than those of other regiments. For this reason, the Legion, though inexperienced, managed to seize the heights above Sainte-Suzanne near Montbéliard in the Franche-Comté from the Germans in mid-January.6 “We advanced under a hail of shells,” one Legion officer wrote. “... The Prussians fled in all directions.” But the next day, the enemy returned in strength and the French withdrew. “Our men no longer have shoes,” the same officer reported. “Many have frozen feet and food is lacking.”7 The death rate in the aid stations was considerable.
Such was the situation when the French government threw in the towel and signed an armistice in January. However, the cessation of hostilities did not affect the armée de l'Est, to which the Legion had been transferred, which remained on a war footing until March 1. Even the scrupulous Grisot confessed that such was the confusion of this year that Legion losses were impossible to estimate. In mid-March, 415 men from the conscript “class” of 1863, and those who had enlisted “for the duration of the war”—presumably most of the foreigners enlisted in France—were released. Leave was distributed liberally which reduced numbers still further.
This was the situation on March 27, 1871, when the Legion was ordered to join the army of Versailles, which was organizing to fight the Parisian insurrection known as the Commune, ignited on March 18 when the conservative government of Adolphe Thiers had attempted to disarm the national guardsmen who had been defending the French capital against German forces. What is not clear is how many of the 66 officers and 1,003 legionnaires who entrained for Paris were foreigners. As has been seen, in December 1870 the regiment had been composed of at least two-thirds French conscripts. Furthermore, on April 20, it received a reinforcement of six officers and 370 conscripts from two French line regiments.8 Therefore, the régiment étranger that participated in the siege of Paris, after several hard months of campaigning in France when it lost twelve of its officers and received large transfusions of Frenchmen, was very different in composition from the hardened mercenaries of the Armée d'Afrique. The Foreign Legion had never been less foreign.
The legionnaires arrived at Versailles, the royal village that had become the seat of the new Republic, on April 1 and camped along the boulevards that fed into the stately Avenue de Saint-Cloud. By April 4, they had joined the troops besieging Paris, and by the 15th had begun fighting their way through Neuilly on the western fringe of the city. Sniping from the houses, from behind the stone walls of the gardens and from behind barricades thrown across the narrow streets, the Communards defended themselves tenaciously. But the legionnaires noticed that orders by Communard officers to counterattack the besiegers usually provoked bitter quarrels in the rebel ranks, so that their assaults were seldom serious. The greatest threat was that posed by the Communard artillery, which constantly pounded the besiegers. However, the effectiveness of the Communard artillery was somewhat compromised by its predictability—never opening before 9:00 A.M. and taking a prolonged lunch break. At 4:00 P.M., “the absinthe hour,” firing again ceased until after dinner, when it was only desultory. On the 19th, the Legion was pulled out of line after a dawn attack surprised and carried three Communard barricades and captured three cannon. But veteran legionnaires noted that their losses after four days in line, which included 3 officers and 15 legionnaires killed and 9 officers and 102 legionnaires wounded, were higher than during the battle of Magenta in 1859.
Despite fairly high casualties, Legion morale was maintained at a high pitch by the generous pay and ample provisions lavished upon them by the Versailles government, and by frequent periods of rest behind the lines. By the third week in May, the Versaillais were squeezing the defenders seriously. The Legion entered the city, large sections of which were on fire and masked by smoke, from the northwest through the Porte Maillot on May 25.9 The legionnaires were under strict orders not to drink at the wine merchants’ shops after a corporal died from poisoned alcohol. On May 26, a company of the Legion attacked a barricade near the Porte de la Villette, captured ten cannon, and shot four men captured there upon the order of the captain. On the 27th, the Legion seized the Buttes Chaumont after house-to-house fighting, and on the 28th descended into the working-class district of Belle
ville, where a large number of prisoners were taken on the barricades. Although neither Grisot nor any other historian mentions it, many of these prisoners were shot out of hand. The regimental diary reads: “Unfortunately, it was necessary that the punishment fit the crime, and in the afternoon a large number of executions were carried out.” On May 30, “the morning was spent burying the bodies of the fédérés [as the Communards were called] shot the 28th and 29th.”10
The Legion's participation in the brutal suppression of the Commune, in which, by conservative estimates, around twenty-five thousand Communards were killed, has formed one of the most controversial aspects of its history. Indeed, in 1976 the French Communist Party proposed the abolition of the Legion precisely because, they charged, the mercenary legionnaires had played a leading role in the bloodshed of the Commune. However, in its defense, two things must be said. The first is that passions were running very high in France in the late spring of 1871, following a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians. Even the Legion's diarist felt the need to justify the execution of Communard prisoners: “The tricolor had probably replaced forever the infamous red flag whose triumph of several days stupefied Paris and all of France by its monstrous crimes carried out in the shadow of this flag,” he wrote, citing “pillage, assassinations, horrible immolations of our most precious monuments and the pulling down of the Vendôme column.”11 Second, it would be wrong to interpret the suppression of the Commune as the importation of some sort of African barbarity into France by the mercenary soldiers of Algeria. It was a purely French affair, a civil war that had flared up periodically since 1789, of which the Commune was merely the final bloody episode. The vast majority of the executions were carried out by regiments of French conscripts, not African mercenaries.
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