French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Porch

  The key to the success of this new tactic appears to have been the emplacement of posts within close striking distance of the pirate hideouts. Nevertheless, these methods were not invariably successful. Carpeaux, who participated in several operations in 1894-95 near Lao Kay, suggested that these smaller operations, while perhaps more rapid and less exhausting, were also less popular among legionnaires because they increased the risk of ambush and especially of capture, a fate dreaded by all legionnaires. The absence of coolies to increase mobility also appears to have revived the heavier loads.119 Furthermore, while the French columns were certainly more rapid, they seldom appear to have been very secret—the pirates were able to collect intelligence in French posts by mingling with the population on market days (indeed, Carpeaux recognized the corpse of a man from whom he had purchased a chicken after an attack on a pirate fortress), threatening or bribing guides, or simply placing sentinels or dry bamboo, which crackled underfoot, or pointed stakes along the approach paths that the French invariably took.

  The presence of congdï in the French posts, Prokos believed, invariably compromised security and made advanced planning incompatible with secrecy. The most successful operation he witnessed was carried out by eighteen legionnaires who, without warning, were awakened by their captain in the dead of night, marched for five hours and struck a pirate fortress at dawn. Nevertheless, even when surprise was complete and damage inflicted on the foe, many French officers were reluctant to pursue a fleeing enemy either because their soldiers were already exhausted or because they were content with a limited success.120 The pirates, usually operating in groups of five or six with two coolies to carry weapons, ammunition or wounded, shattered and reunited like fragments of mercury, and if seriously pressed could always find sanctuary in China.

  Indeed, operations close to the Chinese frontier always ran the risk that the local pirates might be seconded by Chinese soldiers. When on August 23,1892, the commander of the post of Phuc Hoa, near Cao Bang, fell into a formidable ambush, the only exit open to him was to lead what was left of his ninety-one-man force, which included twenty-seven legionnaires, across the frontier into China to seek the shelter of the Chinese frontier post of Bo Cup. The Chinese commander reluctantly offered the French troops asylum. Hardly had a few minutes passed than the reason for his hesitation became obvious—the gates opened to allow the return of a large number of his troops, their faces and hands black with powder, two or three of whom approached the lieutenant in charge of the legionnaires to express their surprise at seeing him alive and to compliment him upon his bravery.121

  When Colonel Galliéni, who commanded the 2nd Military Territory at Lang Son between October 1892 and the summer of 1896, complained to the Chinese commander of the military region across the frontier, the picturesque and venerable Marshal Sou, about the raids and incursions of Chinese troops into Tonkin, he was told, “I am terribly sorry, but I can do nothing. My troops are impossible, no discipline. How can I control them? Even so, if you can catch any of my soldiers causing problems, don't hesitate, I pray you. Shoot them! And shoot them without a trial!” Of course, no Chinese troops were ever caught. So Galliéni's solution was to replace the well-mannered marines in the frontier posts with legionnaires, who soon gave the Chinese a dose of their own medicine by raiding four villages in China. When Marshal Sou protested, Galliéni apologized profusely: “Those soldiers are foreigners,” he told the Marshal. “Unfortunately they have no discipline. So, how can I control them? If you catch them, don't hesitate, I pray you, and shoot. Shoot without a trial.” This response earned the highest compliment from Sou, that Galliéni was worthy of having been born a Chinese. Needless to say, Galliéni had no further problems with Chinese incursions.122

  The operations gradually applied extra pressure on the pirates at a time when the security provided by French posts for the Annamese and montagnards populations allowed them to sever their links with the pirates, with whom they had no linguistic or political ties, and remove the threat of reprisals. Carpeaux believed that the policy of offering twenty piastres for the head of a pirate enjoyed great success. So many heads were brought in that he wondered “if to earn 20 piasters, the nhaqués [peasants] didn't settle a few scores among themselves.” These heads, displayed upon posts, together with those of pirates captured and publicly decapitated before the assembled village, were hideous, but effective, propaganda for French rule. They also provided some distraction for legionnaires—one payday, Carpeaux saw one drunken legionnaire throwing rocks at a grisly head and shouting, “Come down from your bamboo, you good for nothing!”123

  By the end of 1897, a combination of French pacification techniques, the legalization of the opium trade, and improved diplomatic relations with China, which sought to cut off the flow of pirates from the north, had succeeded in ending much of the turmoil in Tonkin. Nevertheless, success could never be complete because the difficulty of controlling the vast, inaccessible reaches of Tonkin with a relatively small number of troops, because of continued turmoil in China, and because the market in China for slaves, buffalo and especially opium, which the pirates brought up from the south, often with the connivance of corrupt Chinese officials, remained buoyant. For these reasons, the peace in upper Tonkin was always fragile. 1901 witnessed a revival of Chinese incursions, as did 1914, while the pirate De Tham operated there with some success between 1908 and 1910. The relative triumph in Tonkin owed much to the stamina of legionnaires, and to a certain extent to their ability to adapt to jungle conditions. But the pirates were not a formal military opposition in the classical sense, in that they were essentially bandits who sought to live to fight again another day. After the regular Chinese troops had withdrawn in 1885, the Annamese population slumped into a political indifference shaken only by the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905, which sent a signal throughout Asia and beyond that the whites were not invincible. Political indifference in Indochina was not necessarily a condition that would last forever, however. This does not seem to have worried the confident colonialists at the turn of the century, in part because imperial wisdom considered the Vietnamese to be poor soldiers. A half-century later, however, the French would be forced to revise their opinions.

  Chapter 12

  “THEY FOUGHT LIKE UNCHAINED DEMONS” — THE LEGION IN DAHOMEY

  THE TWO MAJOR campaigns to conquer Dahomey (modern Benin, which occupies the western frontier of Nigeria on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa) and Madagascar appear to have been tailor-made for the Legion, even though, as in the case of Tonkin, they were plucked from their familiar North African setting and deposited in parts of Africa normally reserved for the French marines. For colonial commanders, the Legion provided a repository of troops eager to take up the challenge, trained to accept hardship, and whose sacrifice, if events took an unexpected turn for the worse, would raise hardly a murmur of protest in France. These campaigns also appeared to offer a challenge that the Legion was ideally equipped to handle. The relatively small numbers of legionnaires involved—a battalion plus reinforcements in each case—permitted commanders the luxury of taking the field with the cream of their soldiers.

  In perhaps one important respect, these campaigns offered a challenge unworthy of the Legion—the Dahomans, although courageous, adapted badly when challenged by a modern army, while the Malagasies were not even courageous. Yet the difficulties of terrain, disease and the inability of the French to work out suitable logistical support transformed both campaigns into tests of endurance, litanies of sacrifice, which ranked them among the most arduous of expeditions. Therefore, this chapter will remain faithful to one of the themes of this book, which has been to consider the history of the Legion not simply as a series of vigorously heroic acts, but rather to place its performance within the context of the command and logistical environment in which it operated. These campaigns also allow a better appreciation both of the role reserved for the Legion in France's imperial military system and its contribution to the succes
s of those expeditions.

  The selection process for these expeditions followed what was, by now, a fairly familiar pattern in the Legion. Since December 1884, the Legion had been comprised of two regiments, the 1er étranger with its headquarters at Sidi-bel-Abbès and the 2e éstranger at Saïda. Each regiment was asked to furnish four hundred men to make up an eight-hundred-man bataillon de marche. Frederic Martyn, repatriated to Sidi-bel-Abbés after contracting blackwater fever in Tonkin, found Algeria “pretty comfortable generally, but the monotony of the life soon began to oppress me again, and I was thinking of putting it to Petrovski that we would do well to volunteer again for Tonkin.” The two men were dining in town on one July evening in 1892 when they read in the Echo d'Oran that a Legion battalion was to be sent to Dahomey. “We made short work of the remainder of the dinner,” rushed back to the barracks, and the next morning volunteered “with nearly every man in the depot” for Dahomey. Martyn believed that they owed their selection to the fact that they had seen service in Tonkin, and that they knew the designated battalion commander, Major Marius-Paul Faurax.1

  The situation in the 2e étranger was similar. When news of the expedition arrived in Géryville, all the officers of the second battalion volunteered. To escape from his embarras du choix, the colonel designated the most senior captain, lieutenant and second lieutenant, who then proceeded to select their company: “The men chosen with extreme care form a remarkable force,” wrote Lieutenant Jacquot in his diary. “A good number of them have already seen action in Tonkin. All are robust, full of ardor, dream only of bumps and bruises, and, in a word, are delighted to give up the monotonous and too regular life of the barracks to run through the bush.”2

  In fact, this method of forming regiments or battalions “de marche” from volunteers was not uniformly praised in the Legion throughout the 1890s. A major objection might be termed a philosophical one. The practice that treated the Legion regiments as “reservoirs from which one draws men as needed, completely ignores the moral force, the esprit de corps which provides the cohesion and the unity of the company,” one officer wrote, “important factors for the leader and which one tries so hard in France to create and maintain.” It was infinitely preferable, some officers believed, to send constituted companies, using volunteers simply to replace men too young or unfit to campaign.3

  However, with the exception of the 1893 Siam crisis, when an established Legion company was sent to the Far East as part of a bataillon de marche of four companies, the Legion practice was to create new formations for each expedition, for several reasons. The most obvious advantage of this system was that it allowed a unit to campaign with its best elements: “Of all things I... consider it to be essential that the very best men in our army should alone be employed in such a war,” the commander-in-chief of the British forces from 1895 to 1901 and experienced colonial hand General Viscount Garnet Wolseley wrote of “savage warfare.”

  Call for volunteers, and take 100, or perhaps 200 men out of as many battns. as may be necessary to make up the number of men required, select the best offrs. from each battn. to command their own men, and then select from the army generally the best F.Os. and regtl. staff. With battns. formed in this manner, your loss will be much less than if so many battns. are taken because they are 1st. on the roster, and the war will be brought to an end in a much shorter space of time.4

  Wolseley's advice was easier to implement in the French army than in his own, for the regimental system was simply not as sacred there as in the British forces. While there had been an emphasis upon the development of a regimental spirit in the metropolitan French army after 1871 with the establishment of regimental histories and salles d'honneurs in each regiment, the transfer of personnel among the army's many numbered regiments gave the French forces a national flavor and discouraged the creation of “prestige” regiments of the sort that existed in Britain or Germany. In the colonies, the sense of regimental affiliation was stronger. But even there, in both the French marines and the Legion, the regiment was essentially an administrative unit that mothered numerous companies scattered over the countryside, and even over the world. The standard practice when called for a campaign was to form companies, such as those furnished by the Legion in the Western Sudan in 1892–93 and in 1894 in the Sudan and Guinea, battalions or even regiments de marche from among select volunteers.

  In many respects, this made good sense, both militarily and administratively. Militarily, it is altogether likely that a system that was desirable in other units, especially in those containing conscripts who could not be sent against their will on imperial expeditions, became virtually a requirement for the Legion in this period because it counted a greater percentage of discipline problems, alcoholics or men whose employment posed political problems than did the French marines, or even a French line regiment. This was because the Legion had become, in part, a dumping ground for problem soldiers from other corps. However, the Legion's real disadvantage in this respect was that it had fewer places to hide its problems. As will be seen, a few might be retained in the depot companies at Sidi-bel-Abbès or Saïda, or exiled to an auxiliary service in some remote garrison in the south of Algeria. Yet the Legion lacked the panoply of administrative and service units, available to regular French regiments, that could serve as repositories of reluctant or incapable warriors. Therefore, selection formed an essential component of Legion effectiveness.

  However, while the desire to go to war with the best soldiers may have motivated some commanders to retain the volunteer system, politics and the public image of the Legion also appear to have been a major concern of the war ministry, which, in 1894, argued that

  Without overlooking the disadvantages of the unités de marche, it is noticeable that the Legion companies contain a large number of men from Alsace-Lorraine. The dispatch to the colonies of constituted companies has as a consequence the serious disadvantage of furnishing a pretext for the rumors spread in Alsace-Lorraine that soldiers of the Legion are exposed to particular dangers and thus in this way to reduce one of the principal sources of Legion recruitment. For, it would be very difficult to send off a constituted unit while eliminating men from Alsace-Lorraine because of their origins.5

  In other words, the Legion may have been an “unité de sacrifice,” but some legionnaires were obviously considered more expendable than others.

  However, the debate was not simply over how the Legion was to be packaged in these colonial expeditions. Some Algerian commanders argued that they should not be sent at all, that the Legion was simply too small to hold the fort in North Africa and loan battalions to the marines for colonial expeditions. From an administrative viewpoint, it was difficult to transfer entire companies from Algeria, where commanders objected that garrisons were already dangerously overstretched. If an entire company were taken away from a garrison, it might be impossible to find another to take its place. Therefore, it was probably easier to bleed units for soldiers than to transfer them wholesale.

  Yet, according to the commander of the 19th Army Corps in Algeria on the eve of the Dahomey expedition in 1892, “bleeding” did not solve the basic problem of the lack of manpower. Requests for Legion reinforcements for Dahomey and the Western Sudan would

  more or less exhaust all their vital forces. As a result, these regiments will be unable for an undetermined period of time, not only to satisfy the demands of Tonkin but also to assure the security of our frontier in the Sud Oranais, where they are the most solid troops. Furthermore, in the event of mobilization, it will be impossible to form the two battalions of 1,000 men which the Legion must furnish to the mobilized 19th corps.6

  This advice was ignored, and Legion units continued to conquer and to provide permanent garrisons for areas outside of North Africa because colonial soldiers preferred not to count exclusively upon native troops for the conquest and maintenance of the empire. While native troops had many qualities—endurance, adaptability and few logistical needs—they were believed to lack th
e solidity of white troops. Legionnaire Henri Paul Leliévre may be accused of prejudice when he insisted that he admired the courage of the Senegalese tirailleurs in Dahomey, but that they had been recruited in haste and poorly trained. “They lacked one thing, discipline,” he wrote.

  There is no way to make a Senegalese do what he doesn't want to do. They have no respect for their leaders, whom they treat as equals. Also, during combat, [the leader] has all he can do to keep them on line, because they were mediocre. These tirailleurs always wanted to charge the enemy with the bayonet. . . . We sometimes took losses because of their errors... . They advanced and got in front of the Legion companies. This kept us from firing while they attracted the fire of the enemy.7