French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The Tonkin campaign of 1884–85 was to become one of the most controversial of French imperial campaigns between the Commune and the outbreak of World War I. The fact that it came perilously close to complete disaster derailed the brilliant parliamentary career of Jules Ferry, while it generated a controversy over the retreat from Lang Son in the French army that still has yet to be resolved. The Ferry government's aggressive colonialism, combined with the leadership of two of the French army's most dynamic colonial officers, Generals Louis-Alexandre Briére de I'Isle and François de Négrier, and the relative ease with which a small number of French troops had attacked and overwhelmed strongly held defensive positions like that of Bac Ninh in March 1884, was to have potentially disastrous consequences for the campaign the French fought during the winter of 1884-85. Above all, it gave the French enormous confidence in themselves, and of no corps was this more true than of the Legion.

  General de Négrier especially became something of a cult figure in the Legion after he led them against the 1881 Bou Amama rebellion in Algeria. A.-P. Maury described him as “severe especially with drunks and the undisciplined, but he was fair and he looked after us like a father. When we met, he questioned us with affability and interest.” Needless to say, Négrier's popularity paid dividends on operations—when Maury's company was dispatched to take a village, “we went and took it as he ordered, without hesitation or waiting. We were his Legion. He counted on us. We had to prove that we were worthy of his affection and of his esteem.”14 When in March 1885 Bôn-Mat's legionnaires were ordered to invade China and attack a fortified Chinese position containing an estimated twelve thousand to fifteen thousand men with only three thousand, they saw nothing strange about it: “... We were so used to winning that everything seemed possible to us,” he wrote. “Because Maulen [Vietnamese for “Quick,” the nickname given to Négrier by his soldiers and the natives] led us, whose name alone was worth several battalions, and because it flattered our ego to go on an excursion on Chinese territory.”15

  The willingness of the French to attack also was linked with the savage nature of the conflict. “The Chinese have put a price on our heads,” even the Christian Lionel Hart recounted. “They dig up our dead, cut their heads off, and put them on the end of their lances or on their flagpoles, and show them to us while laughing from their fortifications. Sometimes one recognizes the face of a friend, and, turning away from this sickening spectacle, we swear vengeance. ”16 Le Poer, too, reported that the sight of comrades who had fallen out on the march, only to be killed and mutilated by the Black Flags, drove the legionnaires into such a frenzy of vengeance that in the next action they slaughtered all their Chinese prisoners.17 A.-P. Maury agreed that his legionnaires took no pity on the Chinese after they received a basket containing heads and a letter explaining, “Voilà! This is how all French will be treated.”18

  A final factor in the audacity and vigor of the French campaign was the officer corps. Officers in this period got mixed reviews from legionnaires. Martyn and Bôn-Mat appear to have enjoyed cordial relations with their officers. Maury, too, praised his lieutenant in Indochina, who failed to break him when he was discovered asleep on guard duty during the precipitous retreat from the Gates of China, but instead listed a lesser offense on his record.19 Others, however, found them severe and disdainful. Lionel Hart believed that “Our superiors admire us as soldiers, but despise us as individuals. They make us understand this often. For them, we are just rabble and cannon fodder. They do not know us personally.”20 Charles des Ecorres, who served in the 1870s but who did not go to Tonkin, believed that officers merely saw legionnaires as stepping-stones for their own ambitions:

  The Legion has always been a formidable arm in the hands of an ambitious commander. They have nothing to fear, no criticism, no one is interested in these pariahs of all races who come to get holes in their hide for France. So, get on the road and watch out! One marches, one sweats his guts out. The plain is peopled with cadavers and the officer gets his promotion which he grandly merits.21

  The problem of arrogant, indifferent, even brutal officers was not a new one in the Legion—Le Poer complained that any officer who showed concern for his troops risked derision by his fellow officers.22 Nevertheless, logic would seem to dictate that an openly expressed disdain of officers for their troops, if widespread, must undermine efficiency: Captain G. Prokos, who studied Legion operations in Tonkin very closely, insisted that successful officers “led their men as friends, as true collaborators whom he must, above all, make interested in the success of the enterprise.” Otherwise they fell out on the march, and he was soon left with “a small core of disheartened men who only continued to follow from a spirit of discipline or pride.”23

  Obviously, as has been noted, all officers who led legionnaires did not fall into the unpopular category—even a rather sour Le Poer confessed that he became friends with his captain in Tonkin after the officer had shown great consideration for his dying friend Nicholas.24 Others may have been distant, even abrupt, but this leadership style was perhaps better accepted in an era when social distinctions and deference were assumed to be normal, especially among those of a working-class background, from which the majority of legionnaires were drawn.

  It is also possible that legionnaires took such attitudes more or less in stride because the combative qualities of their superiors far outweighed their character defects. Even if officers w, e gruff, legionnaires, even fairly cynical ones, appeared to respond well to leaders who were tough, brave and above all competent. Le Poer discovered that legionnaires were left in no doubt about “... how little he cares for their comfort” and were angered by the tendency of the officers “to swear at the sick, to sneer at the wounded, to order the dead to be thrown any way into a trench, and to abuse the burial party because they did not cover the carcasses quickly enough.” What was more, this attitude of contempt actually discouraged some of the best men from seeking promotion—his aristocratic Russian friend Nicholas, for instance, turned down a battlefield promotion to corporal because “... the idea of one who had commanded a company accepting the control of a squad and receiving curses and abuse from the company officers when a soldier got into trouble was not to be entertained for a moment.” However, he had to concede that their physical courage was beyond reproach: “Our officers fought like devils,” he wrote. “Truth to tell, though we did not like them, we could not help admiring their courage in a fight.”25

  Nor was the question of whether or not to follow an officer, popular or unpopular, one up for discussion in the Legion: “The column goes to ground, flat on the earth, awaiting the order, the supreme order,” Carpeaux recorded.

  All eyes are on the enemy, but all thoughts are on the captain! They counsel him, implore him, supplicate, order him depending on the force of their energy. Everyone feels death, there, very close. Everyone wants to avoid it, to flee it. But no one dares to run, preferring to be killed rather than be treated as a coward.... But the captain remains standing up and still undecided. This is a superb opportunity for him to get noticed, to be decorated. To turn back is to lose his cross [of the Legion of Honor].26

  Carpeaux's observation also serves to underline the further point that personal pride played a large part in the Legion's fighting prowess. And while this is true for all forces, in the Legion this personal pride was reinforced by the fact that, in addition, one wanted to disgrace neither his squad nor his nationality, much less besmirch the reputation of the Legion itself. Lastly, the effects of poor leadership, when it existed, might be minimized by the existence of a parallel hierarchy in many squads. This was a product both of the romantic reputation of the Legion as a haven for gentlemen down on their luck and of the anonymat, which allowed men to embellish, or invent, pasts of such distinction that they gained a social ascendancy in their squads. Le Poer insisted, no doubt with exaggeration, that ex-officers virtually abounded in the Legion, that the authorities realized this and were careful to assign no more tha
n one per squad. “Every one of them was a second corporal, so to speak, and really, to take the case of the man I knew best, Nicholas was far more respected amongst us than our authorized superior, and the corporal was well aware of the fact as we,” he wrote. “Well, these were the leaders.”27 They might be a force for good or evil—indeed, Le Poer claimed that Nicholas contrived a massacre of Chinese prisoners to avenge one of their mutilated comrades that their superiors were powerless to stop. But when such men existed and were well disposed, they might, on occasion, provide an element of leadership and cohesiveness to counter the effects of indifferent officership.

  In sum, these first relatively facile victories, together with the desire to avenge deaths and mutilations at the hands of a barbarous enemy and a spirited, ambitious officer corps willing, even eager, to take risks, caused the French commanders to underestimate their enemy, to fail to notice improvements in enemy forces, and ultimately to overreach themselves. The French were overconfident, and with good reason, as even Le Poer believed: “... In the first place, the generals and the other officers firmly believed that the Black Flags and their allies would never be able to stand up against either our rifle fire or our charge.... In the second place, we soldiers had learned to depend implicitly on our commanders. They had led us so well that we had as much confidence in their foresight and military skill as they had in our courage and steadfastness.”28 It was a characteristic that was to mark the fighting in Indochina even after 1885—Martyn, speaking of an unsuccessful attempt to seize a fortress despite repeated attacks (unsupported by artillery), put them down “. . . to the fact that the French officers persistently refused to recognize the military ability of these pirate commanders, and consistently under-estimated the fighting power of their men.”29

  Had the French been more attuned to the intricacies of Chinese politics, they might have noted in the early autumn of 1884 that the Chinese and Black Flags appeared prepared to take the strategic offensive. In October 1884, Liu Yung-fu's Black Flag, reinforced by a contingent of Yunnanese troops, settled in around the town of Tuyen Quang, which lay on the Clear River in the highlands northwest of Hanoi. In mid-November, a column of seven hundred legionnaires and marines under Lieutenant Colonel Duchesne made their way up the Clear River supported by three gunboats. “From a tourist point of view, the valley of the Clear River is really magnificent,” Huguet found, high wooded mountains through which a river of limpid water sometimes rushed and foamed between granite cliffs, or meandered through broad valleys planted with fields of maize. However, from a military point of view the abrupt terrain and dense jungle afforded ample opportunities for ambush.

  Six miles short of Tuyen Quang, the column fought its way through an enemy position after the Legion outflanked a Chinese line established along a fortified ridge. After a rest, the column set out again: “An absolute silence, strange, unusual settled down over this dismal landscape, and froze the hearts of the most courageous,” Huguet remembered. “In spite of ourselves, one felt impregnated with the horror which oozed from this funereal countryside . . .” Every eye was peeled for ambush. The trail disappeared into a narrow gorge, and became very muddy, and night was fast approaching. The bugler of the avant-garde blew the opening chords of the “Boudin,” the Legion march that was gaining in popularity in the corps since first being introduced during the Mexican campaign. In the distance, the call was answered. Even a marine like Huguet was relieved. Soon Vietnamese bearing torches arrived to light the way to Tuyen Quang.30 On November 23, the column departed without incident, leaving a garrison composed of two companies of legionnaires, a company of tirailleurs tonkinois (Tonkinese rifles), and other odds and ends including 32 artillerymen, a few engineers, a doctor and a Protestant pastor—a grand total of 619 men, 390 of whom were legionnaires, and thirteen officers under the command of Major Marc Edmond Dominé of the Bat d'Af. The curtain of Black Flags closed once again around Tuyen Quang.

  The French had not been idle elsewhere, however. In October, they had driven the Chinese out of the country from Bac Ninh to Bac Le, and might have pushed north to Lang Son had not the demands of Tuyen Quang, the lack of reinforcements and the insistence of the war minister in Paris that operations be restricted to the delta not prevented it. However, the replacement of the war minister, which coincided with the arrival of reinforcements including two battalions of legionnaires in January 1885, allowed the French commander, General Brière de I'Isle, to launch his forces north to clear the “Mandarin Road,” hardly more than a track running from Hanoi through Lang Son to the “Gates of China,” once and for all. On February 3, 1885, the column composed in all of twelve battalions of around nine thousand men set out under a gray drizzle. As the column filed out of the delta and entered the rather desolate-looking mountains, Bon-Mat for one had a sense of foreboding:

  “... One felt that the task would be difficult, that we marched toward the unknown, and, instinctively, we looked behind us to look once more upon this plain. . . . We only knew the delta, rich and populated, abounding with resources of all sorts, the Tonkin where one lives, where one plays. We were going to find the Tonkin where one suffers, where one dies.”31

  Barely two days into the mountains, the advancing column encountered strongly held Chinese positions—“each valley is barred by a trench; each peak is crowned by a fort; it's an inextricable jumble of fortifications,” wrote Bôn-Mat.32 At first the French stormed them head on, but the cost was substantial. One Legion company lost one-third of its force and all of its officers in this first combat, so that the command of the company fell to the sergeant-major. After this experience, it was discovered that a simple flanking maneuver often sufficed to send the Chinese scurrying to cover their line of retreat.33 After three days of fighting, Bon-Mat's legionnaires moved into the abandoned forts, ignoring the Chinese corpses lying about, collapsed onto the straw beds and barely had time to eat a biscuit before falling asleep. However, they were up early, for “if the Chinese abandoned their forts, they left their fleas .. ,”34

  On February 9, the march continued northward beneath a lowering sky. The Chinese offered only delaying actions, but the track became a quagmire, and the revictualing convoy often arrived late at night only after a difficult march by torchlight. At nine o'clock on the morning of February 12, the column came in sight of strong Chinese positions organized in depth along the heights at Bac Viay, the last stop before Lang Son. A strong artillery barrage drove the Chinese from their first lines, and the fortresses on the hilltops held long enough to permit the rest to escape. The road to Lang Son lay open, but at a cost of well over two hundred casualties, so many in fact that they could not all be evacuated. The French attempted to pursue, but without success: “The Chinese carries his rifle and cartridges,” read the battalion diary. “Our infantryman has the pack which weighs him down.”35 Only harassing fire greeted the French as they marched along the river road on February 13. The mountains fell away, the river made a sharp bend to the right, and suddenly Lang Son appeared barely a mile away.

  In 1885, Lang Son was a square walled citadel about 425 yards on each face, enclosing some brick pagodas, a few huts, a mirador and much empty space. Most of the population occupied the village of Ki Lua, which stood about three-quarters of a mile north of Lang Son. The few flags flying from the ramparts disappeared as the French approached, and within minutes a tricolor spanked the air above the battlements. On the 23rd, the French marched out to drive the Chinese from Dong Dang, a small settlement that stood ten miles north of Lang Son at the head of a narrow valley that ran to the Gates of China. After a fairly typical combat during which the Chinese were driven from their forts perched on mountain peaks, they fled up the rough track that threaded between high cliffs to the Gates of China, leaving a wake of abandoned equipment.

  Lyautey, who visited Lang Son and the Gates of China in 1894, found that it reminded him of the Kabylia in Algeria, a land of naked and savage mountains, whose cliffs and pinnacles were crowned with fortress
es. The menacing head of a tiger chiseled in the rock beside a narrow defile indicated the entrance to the gates.36 In 1885, the defile had been fortified and provided with a stone entrance, which the French proceeded to blow up, using the enormous quantities of powder abandoned by the Chinese in their retreat. General Briére de I'Isle left General de Négrier in command and marched off to look after the other pressing problem, Tuyen Quang.

  The siege of Tuyen Quang is ranked in the annals of the Legion heroics only slightly below that of Camerone, and rightly so. However, the strategic role played by Tuyen Quang in the French campaign of conquest is unclear. Grisot claimed that Tuyen Quang formed a “barrier” against the advance of the Yunnan army.37 In one sense, the prolonged resistance of Tuyen Quang tied down large numbers of Black Flags and Yunnanese regulars who might have caused the French great embarrassment elsewhere. However, the failure of the Chinese to operate against the delta while Brière de I'Isle was heavily engaged in the north probably had more to do with a lack of any coordinated Chinese strategic plan than with the resistance of the Legion at Tuyen Quang itself. For after all, Chinese who invested Tuyen Quang in December 1884 could easily have bypassed the fortress by going down the Red River, or by surrounding the garrison with a small holding force while the bulk of their army operated elsewhere, especially after February 1885 when Brière de I'Isle launched his operation toward Lang Son. In all probability, the Chinese saw Tuyen Quang as a vulnerable target and decided that there they might inflict upon the French a defeat of proportions significant enough to create at least psychological damage.