French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The departure of a Tonkin draft was always the occasion for celebration. At the farewell review at Sidi-bel-Abbés, Bolis swelled with pride: “I admired with pleasure the old soldiers among us, faces bronzed by the sun, made thin by their labors, their tough, even slightly savage, exteriors . . . their worn kepis pulled down over faces sporting large beards, their foreheads furrowed from grimacing at peril.”30 Martyn marched out with the admonition of his colonel to “remember the glorious traditions of the Legion,” and the zouave band saw them off at the quay in Oran with the “Marseillaise,” “a rattling war-song” and “patriotism-reviver” that was bellowed enthusiastically by all troops on board.31

  Once out of sight of land, however, the elation of departure quickly subsided, especially in rough seas. Lionel Hart found the hold of the Canton fetid and crammed full of bunks: “There are impossible scenes when, at night, the swells provoke violent seasickness,” he wrote. “Then the groans and sometimes disputes break out among the poor unfortunates who, despite their precautions, vomit on each other.... The scene loses nothing of the picturesque.” 32 But morale and the sense of expectation usually remained intact, at least as far as the Suez Canal.

  Port Said lay simmering on a coast as white as a snowfield at the entrance to the canal. The spectacle of Egyptians surrounding the ship with a flotilla of small boats to sell fruit, trinkets or tobacco must not have appeared overly exotic to men coming from Algeria.33 However, even the dullest private could not help but notice that he was on the edge of a frontier—tropical whites appeared and, for legionnaires, the kepi was replaced by a high, rounded pith helmet. But this frontier was as much a psychological as a geographical one, for beyond lay the East, peopled not with Arabs filled with sullen pride, but by brown masses whose individualism seemed irretrievably lost in the sheer magnitude of their misery. With each port of call, the apparent subservience of these malingering multitudes, their seeming willingness to be dominated or bought, reinforced the sentiment of racial and cultural superiority among Europeans so that by the time they set foot in Indochina, they were already well on the way to acquiring a colonial mentality.

  In 1884, the Suez Canal, opened only fifteen years earlier, was a trench barely one hundred yards wide flanked on the west by a large levee that for some miles separated it from the Manzala Lake, while to the east the Sinai extended bleakly to the horizon. The ships were forced to sail very slowly, and even to tie up at night, while every five miles small settlements housing European employees of the canal company sat like emerald islands in a khaki sea. However, deserting legionnaires invariably added interest to what otherwise might have proved a rather dull interlude. After two legionnaires splashed to freedom on Martyn's ship, marines were placed around the decks to prevent further escapes. However, one night a third legionnaire crept down the rope securing the ship to the bank: “Having got so far he was taken with a severe attack of funk, and, not being able either to go forward or to come back, was constrained to call for help,” wrote Martyn. “He was evidently under the impression that we were in the River Nile, for when I and many others, ran up to the bow in response to his frenzied screams he was yelling ‘Crocodile! Crocodile!’ with all the power of his lungs.”34

  This tradition of desertion in the Suez Canal was evidently established by the first drafts sent out to Indochina. While the regimental diary of the 3rd Battalion of the Legion, which passed through Suez in 1884, makes no mention of desertion,35 Lionel Hart, a member of the 4th Battalion, whose Canton was one of a convoy of four troopships bound for the Orient, claimed that they were “sowing deserters” as they sailed through the canal, one of whom reached the shore under a hail of bullets from fifty-six guards, and who retained the presence of mind to shout back, “Je ne suis pas mort!” (“I am not dead!”) This produced two results: the first was that, “when, on the bridge, the major believes he sees something in the water, he grabs the rifle from the sentinel's hand and fires.” The second was that all legionnaires were confined below decks, which virtually produced a mutiny:

  ... a terrible uproar began—animal cries, the most bizarre singing, the most obscene insults against the officers, the bloodiest threats, the most infernal row, everything that a thousand demons can invent of shouting and noise, all the tumult that you can imagine, broke out all at once in this small hold, where a thousand men found themselves quartered. A ladder broken, the officers insulted, four men placed in irons, this was the final result of this unbelievable scene which lasted from six o'clock in the evening until one o'clock in the morning.36

  Silbermann's ship shed seventeen deserters going through the canal in 1895,37 while Lieutenant Colonel Albert Ditte reported that the governor-general of Madagascar, General Joseph Gallieni, was furious when, in 1900, as tensions with Britain over the Fashoda crisis were still running at full flood, sixty Legion reinforcements jumped ship in the canal, a fact he put down to their unwillingness to face a European opponent.38

  The tradition remained alive and well into the twentieth century. In 1913, Junger's old veteran explained to him that the canal was “the place where it's easiest for you to escape. All you have to do is to fall in the water, and you are in a neutral country. About fifteen men got through the nets, and one of them didn't know how to swim and went down for the third time. Then they lined up on the shore, saluted politely, and buggered off.”39 The English writer Evelyn Waugh discovered on a trip through the canal in 1930 that the lower decks contained a contingent of legionnaires bound for the East,

  . . . mostly Germans and Russians; in the evenings they formed into little groups and sang songs. They had a band of drums and mouth-organs which came up to play in the first-class saloon on the evening of the concert. The drum was painted, with the device “Mon Jazz”. Two of them climbed through a porthole one night in the Suez Canal and escaped. Next day a third tried to follow their example. We were all on deck drinking our morning aperitifs when we heard a splash and saw a shaven-headed figure in shirt-sleeves scrambling up the bank behind us. He had no hat and the sun was at its strongest. He ran through the sand, away from the ship, with gradually slackening speed. When he realized that no one was pursuing him he stopped and turned round. The ship went on. The last we saw of him was a figure stumbling after us and waving his arms. No one seemed the least put out by the occurrence.40

  These desertions in Suez were more of an embarrassment for the Legion than a serious reduction of strength. Silbermann was of the opinion that most of the deserters had volunteered for service in the east precisely so that they could desert. And, as in Veracruz in 1863, “the officers didn't care,” he believed. “They were even happy to get rid of them.”41

  Once out of Suez, everyone began to feel the full force of the monotony of the forty-day voyage. A fairly strict military routine was maintained— reveille, formations, inspections, guard duty. “It's not much, but at sea this produces a profound tedium and puts nerves on edge,” Lionel Hart wrote to his mother,42 especially in the oppressive heat south of Suez. There was little to do but scrub the decks, watch dolphins, play cards, tattoo each other with needles and india ink or organize national choirs. “The worst part of the voyage was while we were going through the Red Sea,” John Le Poer recorded. “There one loathed his morning coffee and growled at his evening soup. The dull, deadly, oppressive heat in that region almost killed us. We lay around, unable almost to curse, and the soldier who finds himself too weak to do that, must be in a very bad way indeed.”43

  The arrival at a landfall like Aden, Colombo, or Singapore for recoaling momentarily plucked everyone from his torpor. Here those so inclined who had missed the opportunity to desert in the canal might seize a second chance. In Singapore, a Bulgarian on Le Poer's ship stripped to his underwear, blacked his skin with coal dust, and joined a line of coolies coaling his ship. No one noticed that he was rather large for a Chinese until he walked down the gangplank, threw away his basket and sprinted down the dock.44 The diary of the 3rd Battalion records that four l
egionnaires escaped during coaling at Singapore, while three more jumped overboard as they were leaving the harbor: “They were not hit by the bullets,” the diary records laconically. “We continued on our way.”45

  Not all were so lucky. Martyn saw two German legionnaires make a dash for the gangplank at Singapore,

  ... thinking, probably, that the sentries would not shoot to hit, even if they fired at all. If the sentries had been legionnaires this belief would have been justified, for a legionary would never hit an escaping comrade if he could help it, though he would be sure to carry out his orders scrupulously by firing at him. The marine sentries, however, had no particularly kind feeling towards legionnaires, for soldiers of the ordinary French regiments appear to think that “legionary” and “pig of a Prussian” are almost convertible terms, and they obeyed their orders to the letter, killing one and seriously wounding the other.

  The incident caused such bad blood between the Legion and the marines that they had to be confined to opposite ends of the ship for the remainder of the voyage.46 Legionnaire Jean Pfirmann also reported that in Indochina, even in the hospital to which he had been confined, “the marines did not get on with the Legion, and on the slightest pretext, a quarrel began which threatened to degenerate into a fight. The legionnaires often sang in German,” he continued. “Immediately the marines protested and forbade the legionnaires to sing.”47

  Le Poer confirmed the rather ambivalent attitude of most legionnaires toward desertion. Despite a strict cordon of joyeux of the penal battalions, an Italian legionnaire managed to slip undetected into Singapore harbor. Unfortunately for him, he was plucked out of the water by the boat of the French consul, who returned him to the ship bound hand and foot. “How the commandant cursed him,” wrote Le Poer, “how the Frenchmen [joyeux] smiled and jeered; how we, his comrades, felt sad that our worthy comrade should have been caught almost on the threshold of liberty! Camaraderie overcame all other feelings, and we pitied the poor wretch, for we guessed that a court-martial would have little mercy on a soldier, especially a soldier of the Legion, captured in the act of deserting from his company while on the way to the seat of war.” According to Le Poer, the incident had two results: first, it brought the strained relations between the Bat d'Af and the Legion, who seemed to have reversed roles as jailer and jailed, to a head. “The commandant was lucky in two respects—the voyage to Saigon was short, and a French war vessel accompanied the transport. Had there been twenty days’ voyage without an escort the decks would have been washed red with blood....” Second, Le Poer claimed that the commandant (major) was killed in a skirmish soon after his arrival in Tonkin, shot in the back, Le Poer suggested, by Italians in his own battalion.

  As no Legion major in Indochina died of anything, much less a bullet in the back, between 1883 and 1887, Le Poer's story appears to be based upon rumor or wishful thinking. But even if the story of the major's execution were untrue, Le Poer's point was that the officer had deeply offended the legionnaires’ sense of dignity.

  After all, is it not bad enough for an officer to punish a man or to get him punishment? Why should he swear at the poor devil and abuse him as if he had no spirit, no sense of shame, no soul? Any man will take his punishment fairly and honestly, if he believes that he has deserved it; no man will stand abuse without paying in full for it when he gets his chance, for abuse is not fair to the man who is waiting for his court-martial. But all, or nearly all, officers are either fools or brutes.48

  Saigon, which had been in French hands since 1859, was seldom more than a brief port call for the Legion, whose ultimate destination was Tonkin. The troopships threaded their way through the Bay of Along, whose islands of weathered rock rose out of the sea like so many tortured shapes, until the engines were shut down in the midst of a muddy harbor. As Haiphong lay twenty-eight miles and two sandbars up the muddy waters of the Cua Cam estuary, some captains preferred to transfer the troops to small river boats for the six-hour trip. Otherwise, one had to take on a pilot and wait for high tide.

  Like Calcutta, Haiphong was an entirely colonial creation, and in 1884 not a particularly impressive one at that. The 1874 treaty between France and the Annamese throne had conceded a small piece of spongy ground to the French to be used as a naval revictualing station. Obviously, the Vietnamese did not think that they had given away much, and at first view they appeared to be correct. Here the French had constructed a dock, houses for the consul and the navy commissioner, a customs post, a naval magazine, and a small barracks. Once the visitor had seen these official buildings, the few whitewashed houses, two “hotels-restaurants” and a warehouse or two, and, of course, visited the cemetery, which was reached by walking along a dike and where the water table was so high that burials there appeared to strike a compromise between a service at sea and one on land, Haiphong held no further secrets. Lyautey, who saw Haiphong in 1894, called it “a town in a swamp,”49 and most people found the view over a flat, marshy countryside, broken only by distant clumps of bamboo that denoted the presence of a village, profoundly depressing, especially when the country was swept by the monsoons or lay simmering beneath a blanket of humid heat. The region was infested with Chinese pirates who derived their principal income by kidnapping women and children for sale in the ports of southern China. Of course, the town was to grow in size and sophistication with the progress of the conquest of Tonkin until it became a major port city. However, Lyautey believed that, for soldiers at least, the barracks at Haiphong—“A pile of ruins in a marsh, where like prisoners the men are stacked on camp beds, with only one blanket, without light, without air. It's unhealthy and it stinks.”50—made a poor first, and last, impression of Tonkin.

  The voyage from Haiphong to Hanoi offered a nautical challenge reserved only for experienced captains. In 1894, Lyautey made the trip up the Cua Cam, across the Bamboo Canal to the Red River and Hanoi in fifteen hours. However, the commercial service took two days, perhaps because the small river steamer towed a junk, presumably reserved for native passengers, in its wake. Perhaps, also, because any encounter with one of the numerous mudbanks required the captain to await the next tide to float free. Lyautey, typically enthusiastic about anything colonial, was transported by the spectacle of light green rice fields stretching to the horizon, the clusters of coconut palms, and the thatched villages hidden behind their bamboo hedges, “. . . busy, noisy, sweating life and fecundity.... It's a dream to slide this way on a true estuary, as sinuous as a stream, through a vast plain where thousands of beings, yellow and hunched over, swarm like insects in the light.”51

  Unlike Haiphong, Hanoi was an established town when the French obtained the right to install their cantonment there in 1874. The initial French presence consisted of a small fortress garrisoned by two hundred French marines, which was more like something out of the Wild West than the Orient—a square of pointed stakes about seven feet high built next to the Red River, which, at Hanoi, was about eight hundred yards wide. A few houses had been put up around it, together with a tiny hospital and a requisitioned Chinese house that served as the Residency. During the 1870s, the insecurity of the area was such that the first French representative hightailed it back to Saigon after a few nights in Hanoi. However, by 1881 the locals had more or less ceased to shout insults and take potshots at the French after dark, which allowed the embryo of a colonial society to develop there. Life was cheap, servants plentiful, and, if Hanoi lacked the sophistication of Saigon, at least it offered a frisson of frontier savagery that included pagodas, pirates, lepers and mandarins, whose official processions of guards, scribes and flagbearers periodically hurried through the streets, preceded by a servant beating a tambourine to shoo traffic out of the way. Bôn-Mat, who disembarked in Hanoi in 1884, declared it “une jolie ville” built around a lake whose focal point was the Pagoda of the Great Buddha, situated in an arbor of pine trees and whose marble steps led down to the water's edge. He especially enjoyed Hanoi's Chinatown, a separate walled section of narrow
paved streets, brick houses and small shops “where a demi-obscurity constantly reigns, [and where] riches are piled up, some true marvels.”52

  Hanoi quickly learned that the arrival of a boatload of legionnaires was likely to disturb the city's imperial dignity. Like most legionnaires, A.-P. Maury instantly discovered a taste for oriental cuisine: fish, shrimp, rice, crab and pork. “We quickly took to this food,” he wrote. “We bought it from the natives, or we took it by force,” when they refused to take French money.53 However, the evident zeal with which Martyn's companions set out to sample the local vintages was probably more typical: “The bulk of our party ... were ... painting the town a brilliant vermilion,” he recorded. “The men had been making a first trial of shum-shum, a potent rice spirit, and hundreds of them were riotously drunk. A fair number of them had to be carried to the barracks and tied up when they got there to prevent them committing murder.” Obviously the high command had to get them out of town, and promptly shipped them up the river for two weeks of acclimatization training, which consisted mainly of wading through rice paddies.54 Protestant pastor J. Pannier, sent to Tonkin in 1901, reported that newly arrived drafts of legionnaires were regularly confined to barracks in Hanoi after their long sea voyage lest they run amok.55

  BY MARCH 1885, the French had been remarkably successful in Tonkin (if less so in Formosa)—with hardly more than a relative handful of troops, they had driven the Chinese off the Mandarin Road and broken the siege of Tuyen Quang, thereby achieving their immediate strategic objectives. This battlefield success had apparently convinced the emperor to sign away all claims to Tonkin,56 so that rumors of imminent peace had even reached French troops in the field. Now was obviously the time for the French to adopt a defensive strategy to secure what they had won. Besides, they had other reasons to exercise caution. While the Black Flags and Yunnanese troops had been cleared from Tuyen Quang, they had retired in good order, and still held the upper reaches of the Red River in considerable force. The Kwangsi army had been driven out of Tonkin, but lurked just on the north side of the Gates of China. Négrier had been left at Lang Son with a garrison that probably numbered less than five thousand men, in part because Brière de I'Isle needed them for Tuyen Quang, but basically because that was about the maximum number that even the parsimonious French intendance could support logistically.